DOCUMENTARY; PROJECT EVALUATION

After a month of pre production and another of filming and post production, our documentary, Digital Detox, is finally fully edited and finished, and it is now time to reflect on the things that went well, the things that didn't go as well, and finally the things that I have learnt from the project. Firstly, the one thing that was really different to this project, in comparison to the other 2 projects we have completed in our first year, is that it was fully cooperative group project, meaning that all of the decision making had to be made as a collective, everything had to be considered through 4 different opinions and this was something we hadn't yet experienced. Overall with this i think that we handled it quite well, between the four of us we managed to in a way divide up the roles in order to suit where our strengths lied. Myself and Laura had a lot of involvement within the pre production and other organisational work such as contacting potential characters and locations, whereas Katie and Aimee more worked on the actual production side of things such as actually filming and special effects. In terms of the actual editing we had a good experimental process by which we connected a mac to a TV  and would all edit together suggesting our own ideas and testing what worked and what didn't. Group work worked well for us because we were coherently organised and all knew what we were doing within the documentary, and that is why i think this is one of the biggest strengths within our project. 

Stylistically, i am really happy with how the project turned out. Obviously due to the nature of the topic we were looking at (social media) we wanted to convey this throughout. Firstly the use of the vlogs is something thats quite different tot normal documentaries and is a lot more personal; part of the reason we wanted to use vlogs is because it makes Jake, as the main character, a lot more closer to the audience, as they are watching they will feel a lot closer to Jake and almost like they are part of his journey, therefore i think stylistically the vlogs were a huge strength of our project. Also, the graphics we used all links in to this in terms of being quite modern, different and interesting to watch. 

Furthermore, a huge strength from our project i believe lies within the special effects that we used within the post production. Our documentary itself revolves around the use of social media, which is an extremely modern and new way of thinking; relevant only to the 21st century, therefore we wanted to include some of these iconographies within our project, such as the texts appearing on screen and screen recordings of Facebook and other sites. I think that using these within our project really made the overall videos flow better and gave a certain tone and direction to the piece itself. Something else that i think was really effective within our documentary, was the idea of getting more GVs on a larger scale. When we were editing, we had so many facts and other bits of voice overs that we needed some more, relevant GVs to show whilst these facts were playing. As a solution, i came up with the idea that we should go to London, a city of bright lights and advanced technology, to film some large scale city shots that were firstly relevant to our topic and secondly would give our documentary a more professional feel/look. We went on the emirates cable car to film and it proved to be really effective, Katie then used these shots to do some post production stuff, by which we wrote facts across the London skyline, paired with the voice over from Jake. 

Moreover, whilst their were many strengths and things that i am completely happy with, their are also some weaknesses that i can learn from in the future that could have perhaps made our documentary better. Firstly, as i said in previous blog posts, we really wanted to get an expert to take part in our documentary, just a short interview where our main character Jake would ask some questions about the usage of social media within teens. The reason we wanted this was to provide some background and context to the situation we were presenting on screen. We were making Jake give up social media for 4 days and we really wanted someone to answer why he was giving it up for 4 days and why it is such a big issue in our world today. Unfortunately, after we contacted many and many people, including experts within the field, psychologists and lecturers, we couldn't get someone to take part. We had some that were interested but due to time restrictions or travel restrictions they were unable to take part, and others such as lecturers couldn't help us due to it being a busy time of year. Overall i do not think this damaged our project, but i do think that had we have managed to obtain an expert who wanted to take part, the overall subject we were portraying would have maybe gained a bit more credibility. Whilst this was something that disappointed us, we overcame this issue by putting our own facts on screen, with our main character Jake, someone who as a character on screen our audience feel very comfortable with, reading them out with a voice over. This leads me on to something else i would have liked to have been better within our project. The sound of the voice overs was something i personally didn't think sounded right. I could hear a light buzzing behind Jake's voice and i just felt the overall quality wasn't really that great. We did two things to overcome this, firstly we put music on the first 3 minutes of the documentary, because that was the part by which the clips change a lot and the audio changes a lot, therefore the music helped up to overcome this issue by covering the audio gaps. This then lead us to using Jakes own recording of his music which again is something we were quite happy with because of the music originality. 

One thing i have definitely taken from this project, in terms of mainly documentary filmmaking, is the absolute importance of transcripts. At first we didn't do this straight away as we thought it would have been easier to just edit whilst watching, however after our workshop with Helen we soon found out that this was not the case. Myself and Laura wrote out the transcripts for Jakes main interview, whilst we all then transcribed the vlogs, i would say that there is 2 main reasons as to why the transcripts for us, turned out to be so important. Firstly, the way in which Jake speaks, sometimes didn't make sense, so having it all written down on paper meant we could go through each line and highlight what we wanted to keep - i.e. make it make sense. Secondly, it saved us a lot of time, it was far quicker to label the clips, look at the transcript and being able to find certain bits of dialogue that way, rather than the much more time consuming way of endlessly sitting there watching all the clips all over again to find what we want. For these reasons, that is why i would say the important of transcribing is one of the biggest things i have learnt from this project. 

In terms of what I would like to develop from this project, is probably my own personal involvement in the design of special effects and post production. I would say i am quite an organised person and so I've already enjoyed being involved in a lot of pre-production stuff such as organising potential characters/actors as well as scheduling and locations. However something i am not as great as, is the creation of special effects within the post production, Katie and Aimee are more into the post production side of things and so seeing what they have been able to do during this stage of our project does interest me and is defiantly something I would like to develop on in the future in my own projects. 

DOCUMENTARY; EDITING

Now that filming is mainly completed, we began the editing stages. Aimee began piecing the clips together and Katie started to do some of the post production edits; such as iMessage notifications appearing on screen when we see Jake etc. Editing in a group is a lot different to editing alone, arranging places and times to meet, and then agreeing on what to use is a lot different. However it is nice to have other peoples views when editing also.

Myself and Laura began writing up the transcript from Jakes interview, its quite a long process but defineltly helped us in editing when we wanted to take certain bits out and put others together. Also when editing the VLOGs this helped us a lot because there were so many clips that it was hard to organise, so we used the transcripts in editing to put the clips from each day together. We used a highlighter to select the bits we wanted to keep and put into our documentary, using the time codes to select each different voice.

DOCUMENTARY; FILMING

We filmed our documentary, following the schedule posted earlier, with each person in my group having a specific role. We filmed in our multiple locations, interviewing 4 teens as well as Jake, we also filmed the GVS and sequences with Jake. Katie was main camera person, setting and positioning the camera in the correct way and filming the interviews, whilst Laura was doing the sound. An idea that Katie had, was to film with another camera at a more abstract angle, to pair with the main camera footage and audio, though this was a bit more experimental and we are not entirely sure whether we will actually use this in the final documentary, this was my role throughout filming. I was using another mobile camera to film each interview from a lower angle, looking up at the interviewees, and finally Aimee's role within filming was being in interviewer, she asked everyone the correct questions and made sure we got the answers she needed.
Below is a list of the Sequences that myself and Katie created before filming, to use as a guideline so that we were prepared to film on the day, and finally we also came up with 10 main questions to ask Jake on the day.

On reflection from filming, i think it went really well. We spent roughly 2 whole days filming and i believe we were very efficient in getting what we needed with timing restrictions. For example, we only had about 3-4 hours with Jake to film both his interview and sequences, hence why we created a plan of what we wanted to film so that we efficiently got through with everything in the time we had. The only thing we need to film now is some more general GVs, i.e. videos of phones, social media sites etc.

One thing we were struggling with was what our introduction would look like, an idea i had was the idea of the 21st century; obviously social media stems from the immense advancements in technology we have, which is a result of the 21st century, so we thought about how best we could represent that. The idea that we came up with was London, big flash buildings with flashing lights all representing the amazing stuff we can do with the technology we have today. So we went up to London and went on the Emirates Cable Car to film some landscape shots to use as our introduction.