Evaluation

Evaluation 

CRITICALLY REFLECT ON YOUR FINISHED FILM AND IT'S STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES - ANALYSE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT YOU INTENDED TO DO AND WHAT YOU HAVE ACTUALLY ACHIEVED.

I am really happy with the finished project, I took on the role of director and I really enjoyed my first project in this role. In its early stages when we were coming up with the initial plan, I considered how we were going to make this subject matter a poetic documentary, we ran the risk of having too much information and too many talking heads, we wanted to find a way of making the form and content complement each other. We decided on using bright colours early on, and we practiced this technique when making our poetic sequence. I felt it worked really well and it made the subject matter more interesting to look at. One of the things that I feel really showed through in our work was the camera technique, we all practiced with different lens’s on the camera’s and found what worked best with which kind of shot we wanted to capture, we also familiarised ourselves more with how to properly change the ISO and Aperture, as we knew we would be shooting in some difficult locations such as night clubs and bars. I feel this one of our strong points and because we really utilised the time before we began shooting our 10 minute documentary to practice this. For the roles, Charlotte was the producer, Chris was in charge of sound recording and editing, and Danni was our project editor. For camera it was a combination effort from myself, Chris and Charlotte. I feel the workload was fairly distributed between us, time management was a problem as there were only three of us in the pre-production roles, and I was present for all of these shoots, while planning in my spare time. The project went through several stages in the edit, as we had decided on a format, we wanted to originally show the subject matter going from day to night, so our plan was to use the café interviews that were filmed during the day in the first half of our documentary, and then to use the evening bar and working men’s club footage to end our documentary. We were pretty set on this structure, but when we got the footage into the edit which I will go into later we struggled at first to gauge how we were going to keep it. The interviews were too long, this was my fault as the interviewer I found it difficult to keep the interviewee’s answers short and concise, managing this effectively in only one of the interviews. This proved difficult to edit and wreaked havoc with our original structure. After a tutorial we were eventually put back on track, after being initially over faced by the amount of footage. I was actually really happy with the final structure that we came up with I feel we had achieved a clear cut beginning and end and the piece flowed really well. There wasn't a vast difference in what we intended to do and what we actually did, the structure stayed much the same even though we started to doubt it in the middle of editing, we stuck to our vision of capturing, I think a lot of our skill lied in our resourcefulness, we really tried hard to get the interviews necessary and I wrote out a list of interview question’s so we didn't overlap any important information and so we could keep track of the information we had gathered, we used the locations in my opinion to their full potential, experimenting with interesting angles and composition.

 REVIEW THE PROCESS OF MAKING THE WORK AND WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNT FROM IT. 

During making our documentary, I learnt quite a few things that I think are really important, as I feel that with documentary the most important thing is to plan for things that don’t work, as you don’t often have enough time to re-shoot them as you do with drama or experimental. The interviews are one of the trickiest things to do well, as it is hard to get a realistic performance out of your subject; you have to bear in mind constantly how their answers are going to sound in the edit. One of the things that I struggled with was being quiet during one of the interviews, as one of our interviewee’s kept looking to me for reassurance and I found it difficult not to answer back to him. I have learnt to leave more time for the edit, as we left ourselves only five days, which was unintentional, as interviews kept getting rearranged and part of my group had previous commitments to other work. In retrospect it would have been better to have more time to play around with the edit more. I learnt so much more about camera work in this module as our documentary required a variety of different techniques, I feel I can now confidently use DSLR, and have a good knowledge of the different lens’s and how to work under low light. I feel that my knowledge of editing has grown also, as this is the longest duration project I have worked on, so it is has been enlightening to see how much planning needs to go into it, as admittedly you could get away with less planning on smaller projects in favour of a more experimental aesthetic, but with an informational piece it is difficult to see the fine line between what is too much or too little, I feel that we got the balance right with quite a lot of tweaking and putting a few more hours in to the edit. The documentary production has been very enjoyable, I most liked playing around with the camera, and interviewing. I would definitely opt for a directing role again as I feel I was competent and organised and we ended up with a great final product. 

DISCUSS YOUR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION TO MAKING THE WORK, YOUR APPROACH TO GROUP WORK AND ANY PROBLEMS OR CHALLENGES YOU ENCOUNTERED WORKING AS PART OF A TEAM. (APPROX 400 WORDS)

As I stated above, I was the director for this project, I have never directed properly before and i found that it was quite a challenge as it is difficult to take full responsibility for the shoots, it was hard to take full creative control, as you end up second guessing some of the footage you have captured and despite planning beforehand things inevitably change during the shoot. My main concern was to capture as much quality footage as possible for cutaways as this makes up a large percentage of our documentary as we didn't want to focus to much on the talking  heads. Another problem i faced was the structure, which didn't really get resolved until the edit, the edit for me was the most difficult part, as it was really hard for Danni to get on with the edit, i decided we should transcribe all of the interviews, there was four so we did one each, it gave me the chance to look over the script as a whole and highlight certain bits that i thought were key and that i wanted to keep in. I gave these notes to Danni and i left her to it after a while, as i think it was difficult for her to get on with the edit while i was sat there, but until we had a clear structure that worked it was hard for me to leave. I think its hard to get the balance between a director and editor because with documentary its very much about the directors vision with the piece, and due to work commitments Danni had only been able to come to one of the shoots so i think that made it more difficult for me to explain my ideas to her. But in the end we separated for a day and when i came back i was so impressed with what she had done with the piece, she had taken all the stuff from the tutorial on board and it really fit with our groups original idea. Once we had the basis structure in place it was much easier for us to edit together, rearranging and putting in more cutaways and chopping more out of the interview. For the sound i had envisioned that it would have music playing the whole way through, because i wanted to keep the piece uplifting and i wanted to keep pace, Charlotte found the music for the piece as we were obviously going for a northern soul style with the music, we got the rights to all of the tracks and they fit perfectly onto the documentary, and we began to tighten the edit around the songs. I feel this is where the piece really came into its own, i went through the finished piece and wrote sound notes up for Chris to edit, i did this by writing the exact time in the video and a description of what i wanted doing and giving it to him. We tried to be experimental with the sound, there was one part where the shot was of the exterior of the working mens club, we then tried to play around with the EQ on the sound to make the music sound like it was coming from inside the club. During the presentation of the work i was disappointed that this didn't come off as well as i had hoped, but it seems to work  better when watching the clip on vimeo at a computer. I wanted to tie the beginning and end together, as with a lot of the projects i work on i finf this is really effective giving the piece a fully formed feel. We did this by using some of the archive footage we found of a record going down onto the player in an old style dukebox. we played this at the beginning and end and i found it worked really well.

WITH REFERENCE TO THE TEXTS GIVEN IN SESSIONS AND THE MATERIALS ON THE READING LIST; REVIEW YOUR APPROACH TO MAKING THE WORK AND LOCATE YOUR PRACTICE WITHIN A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK.

I wouldn't say that our documentary was an observational documentary, as we have opted for a more stylised approach, we looked at documentaries shown to us in the seminar, and in particular we focused mainly on documentaries that don't have a main interviewer leading the documentary, as this was difficult to do as a student. I think a lot of our textual influences came from a more modern type of documentary, inspired by shorts on Vimeo, such as 'Prime' we were extremely concerned with the aesthetic of the piece, rather than the content. With regards to the original assessment guidelines i feel we strayed away from the idea of making a truly poetic documentary in favour of having something that we could show to a prospective employer, after reading some Bill Nichol's books such as representing reality and introducing the documentary, i realised that although we did indeed break the pattern of continuity up as much as possible, we weren't really true to the genre as we had main characters that we kept coming back to. The film is still quite fragmentary and we have tried to make the image and sound compliment each other and i feel that the result has a very lyrical feel to it, it seems to flow quite seamlessly. Nichols states that the 'Real world' was fragmented, and using film form was put back together. Which i feel we have actually done in our documentary, as we have taken information and image from all through the genre in Sheffield and reconstituted it into our own aesthetic and impression of the feel of the subject.

Sound

For the sound we were going to be using music throughout this was one of the first things we decided as the images just didn't work without sound, we had found the music we were using and Charlotte had painstakingly got the copyright and it was just a case of tweaking the levels for this bit accordingly for the speech. The interviews had been cut down and the pieces of interview that are being used need to be cleaned up a little although we were very fortunate with locations and we didn't really have much background sound to cut out, We have tried to be a little experimental in places such as making the sound which was music sound like it was coming from inside in one of our establishing shots. We also cut the music at the end when the record player comes up and we brought it back in for the credits, this was a little risky and i wasn't really confident in my decision until i saw it in our assessed tutorial. 

This was Chris editing the sound to the final draft of the video.

The Edit

During the edit it became clear that it wasn't going to be as simple as i had first thought, our first stage was to transcribe all of the interviews, we did this first because the idea was that if we transcribed the interviews with time markers it should be easier to look over the script and highlight good points and then go to the time and chop them out into final cut. This proved more difficult to do as there were various bits that just went on for ages with no place for them to be cut. We eventually got 4 sections on the timeline of good quality interview to work from. We knew the cafe stuff was going to be at the beginning and the Bar and evening stuff at the end but it was proving difficult to interlink them. We struggled with the initial part of the edit as it was difficult for me to give Danni clear instruction as she was watching the footage for the first time also, so it took a little bit longer for us both to get on the same wavelength. I think that's one of the main differences between editing for documentary and drama is that an editor can have a story board to work from with drama, or can get away with being a bit more experimental but the fact that we didn't have time to do that because we only had five days really wasn't helpful. Once we had got the initial structure out of the way which took two days, we began working on fine tuning it, it went from 10 minutes 30 to 8 minutes running time, we had secured the rights to the songs so we were able to start adding them in at the final cut stage. Me and Charlotte starting editing the film to the music and moving things around so they accentuated the soundtrack better. I wanted the music to interlink with the story and interact a little more as the music is a large subject in the film. I went through the edit several times and gave Charlotte the notes, to go through adding more ideas for the sound also. The editing process was easy enough after this as i was happy with all of the footage we had captured and it was just a case of colour correcting everything, we wanted everything to be bright and vibrant, the documentary had a fast pace so this fit in really well.  I feel the amount of information we conveyed in the piece was adequate to the story, there was quite of lot of debate about that but i think as a team we managed to get it right. Looking over the finished piece now i'm extremely happy with the way it turned out. I will write a blog post on our feedback from our tutor and peers in the assessment. 

Charlotte working from my notes during the edit.

Some of my note taking during the edit for sound colour
 correction and just sharpening the edit.

Colour correction.

More colour correction.

Soundtrack Pro.

Danni editing.

Sorting the sequence out during edit.

Other Interviews;


Okeh Cafe
During the interview with the owners of Okeh cafe, he told us about how he was a second generation mod, he really looked the part and looked really good on camera. That particular day it was really sunny, so we had to spend a little while adjusting the blinds in the cafe, i also had to bear in mind that the lighting would have to fit the other shots we had got from Okeh cafe, so after we had got all the preliminary continuity things out of the way we began the interview, he was really talkative but he was quite quiet on camera, he was also talking to me as if we were holding a conversation and that i would be on camera, which was not the case so i had to answer back to him at some stages. He told a few really nice stories about how he got into the scene and one of them was about when he was in hospital and his mum brought him a magazine to read and he saw loads of pictures of 60's mods, and he got his mum to take in his levi 501 jeans and started wearing fred perry and bought himself a moped. I was on camera for this and i had composed the shot and corrected the ISO, but there were some parts of the interview where the sun got really strong through the window and it made it a little bright, also the sun would vanish completely and it would leave the shot slightly grainy.

Woody's
We managed to get an interview with the owner of Woody's cafe on eccelsall road, this was one of the suggestions from the woodseats gig that we had previously dismissed that had been told to us in passing conversation. But we rang up the cafe, and we arranged to interview the owner who had previously been an mod and as we found out was the head of the Sheffield scooter club. I am so glad that we decided to follow this interview through as he ended up being the most warming character of all of our interviews. He had a genuine passion for the scene that really came across and he gave the piece a very nostalgic feel while still being about the present. He brought his scooter along and we captured some of our best scooter shots while outside the cafe. During the interview i had cobbled together some questions about an hour before as we had arranged this on really short notice after the Okeh cafe interview. But he really listened to the questions and answered back to us, for this shoot me and Charlotte shared the role of camera and this worked really well i feel this was a really small location but we used it to our full advantage. 


The Green Room
During the green room interview we were pretty rushed for time, I found it difficult to stop Dave in his tracks when he was talking, He didn't convey the same kind of warmth as the other two cafe interviews, but he was extremely knowledgeable about music. I asked him a few questions about the staple bands of the genre hoping to cut into the interview but he spoke so fast it was near impossible. The shot of the actual interview was quite interesting, it might be worth noting that i used a 4.8 mm lens for all of the interviews so they all looked similar in style. We used the green room mostly for its location, i was already building in my head which characters were going to steal the show, so we cut the interview after 10 minutes and went and filmed around the bar, Me and Charlotte were the only two present on this shoot and we used a shoulder mount to capture the shots, I found it easier to direct with just us two as we were in a large crowd and with any more of us it would have been too hard. We captured interesting shots using mirrors and using windows with the green room logo. We had to be quite stealthy to get some of our really interesting shots, it was a case of seeing a conversation between two people in fred perry shirts and finding an angle to shoot it from quickly before it stopped. I feel that we would have had no chance with a tripod so this was good to bear in mind for any others shoots i may be present on in future. 

SOUL CASINO

Inside the radio booth.

Poster for Stevlar's Soul Casino.

Chris in charge of sound.

We interviewed a guy who ran the northern soul sector of a local Sheffield radio station,. 'Stevlor'. He met us outside the showroom, and me and Chris Aitkenhead followed him up the stairs to interview him. We watched his radio show and captured some footage from that, one of the best things we captured sound and camera wise was the opening of the radio show. Watching the radio show allowed me to write down a few more relevant questions as we talked to him between breaks. During the interview 'Stevlor' was able to talk us through his own personal journey with soul after the radio show, i was concerned about getting a more personal response as i knew we were going to struggle to back up masses of factual information with appropriate cutaways. I got him to talk about how he got into the scene, hoping he would have some interesting stories to tell, I think the main struggle with this interview is that Stevlar wasn't a mod, he was extremely knowledgeable about the genre but he wasn't a mod. He talked about various nights that happen around sheffield, and because he worked on radio he had good tone and volume in his voice which is a massive plus when making a documentary. I am thinking about using the opening of the radio show as the start of our documentary as i feel it lends a certain feeling of delving into another world. One thing that happened right at the end of the interview was the camera ran out for the last question, i think this was a good reminder to bring extra batteries as it wasn't really a problem but it made us more wary for other interviews.

Woodseat's Shoot.

During the shoot for Woodseat's social club, Myself, Charlotte and Chris were present. We weren't capturing sound for this shoot so it enabled Chris to get more involved in the camera work. We were initially a little dissapointed with the turn out for the event and had to stay a bit later than we had intended to, but i'm glad we stuck it out as we got some really good shots that i think are really going to help us make up the latter part of the documentary and incorporate the sound. We used our initiative and got up on the stage and captured some full room shots of people dancing, we also shot some really good stuff with the dj using vinyl to mix and the songs, we really exhausted this location and had to be unafraid of embarrassing ourselves as we stuck out a little bit. I asked permission from one guy in particular in a 'Quadrophenia' t'shirt who was dancing in the original mod style. There were some really interesting character's there and it was really good for us to chat to people and network as we gained some really useful contacts for the interviews in our documentary.