Documentary and Drama evaluation

At the start of this module we were shown an example of some documentaries, some more factual, and others that that were more fun, and were more personal. At the end of this session we had got ourselves into groups and decided on our roles. I was in a group with James Webb, Reece Ronan, Jack Roberts, Kyle Piercy, and Ant Wilson. I have worked with Ant and Kyle before and know their strengths and weaknesses. For example I know that Kyle is a great Producer and Video Editor. Our roles were James as director, Kyle as producer, Jack as cinematographer, Ant for sound recorder, and Reece as video editor, and I was sound editor and camera assistant.

We went for our first meeting and all did a brainstorm, and came up with various ideas such as the cavern club where the Beatles first played we thought that we could get some good footage in the actual club of a band playing to give good cutaways, we decided not to do this as we thought that a lot of other groups would be doing the same thing, and we were right. As well as this we looked into doing the dock and the history of the war and titanic, but then agreed it would have been too factual. Then we heard something about “A peoples path” where people could place loved ones names on a path running over 200 meters from the main cathedrals doors to the road. Our plan was to get an interview with the religious leaders of the church to ask them what love actually means to them, and what the think the public’s perception of love is. In the end we ended up going with this idea, as it was a lighthearted subject that isn’t purely factual and slightly more interesting than a history of the docks. After we agreed on this idea we planned things out such as filming permissions for locations and peoples interviews. All the filming permissions for locations came through, but nobody wanted to have an interview with us. Instead of getting planned interviews we agreed to try and get interviews from the public on the days we were there. We researched the busiest locations, and places that would look good on camera and relatively quiet for sound. We found a street full of independent shops called bond street which has some tattoo parlours and book shops and other small stores that people have time for an inside interview in a different environment than outside in the city. As well as this we went down to the docks where there were lots of families there for us to interview.

For the actual trip we had got the train to Liverpool and stayed in a hostel. Our first problem was that Reece was ill so he had to miss the trip which made our lives harder for carrying gear around and getting help with quick set ups and helping to get people to interview. On the first day we used to recce out our locations so we knew our way around. On the second day we were up at 6 in the morning to catch a sunrise we wanted for the introduction for our documentary over the cathedral. When we got on location I helped Jack set up camera as we were using my canon 550D and I had recently looked into a software update called “Magic lantern” which give the 550D the features of a 5D or the Z1’s. But this new layout was confusing to learn. So I helped teach jack how to use magic lantern and all of its features. We had no camera issues after that. On the rest of this day and the next we were getting people off the streets to interview but we underestimated how hard it was to approach total strangers to get to interview them. To help us with this we created a sign to explain what we were doing and to help us explain to people we were approaching what we were doing, and more often than not people came to us asking what we were doing.

The edit went smoothly, and we had a draft video edit by a week after the Liverpool trip. Whilst the video edit was being done I was naming each sound clip and labeling the ones that we would be using. After this was done we had a rough video edit. I took this and attempted to use soundtrack pro to clean out the sound. I had to look up tutorials on YouTube to try and learn the processors of cleaning up sound and this benefitted me massively.   But unfortunately the only part of sound design I could really do was to put a atmosphere track on. I spoke to James about what else we could do but there wasn’t anything I could do that would match the style or feel of the documentary. So after I finished replacing and cleaning all the sound we were ready to present.

At this point I was very happy with the feel of our piece, it was very uplifting and pleasant to watch, and all of our colleagues agreed with us. However the feedback we got from Dom and Debbie was surprising, as we didn’t really take into account things such as the changing pace of the film that should have been consistent and some of the shots needed reframing. We all agree with this feedback, more cutaways were needed to keep the pace of the film the same throughout the film and some shots needed changing or deleting.

After this project was finished we started looking at dramas and had a look at several short films. We then got into groups. My previous documentary group had talked about staying in the same group for the final project to try and create something we were properly proud of, with everybody in their strongest roles.

We had Reece as director, James as producer, me as cinematography, Jack as sound recorder, Kyle as video editor, and Ant as sound editor. Now that we had our roles we started brainstorming. Our very first idea was to do with mental health, we decided that was too vague so we looked into narrowing it down, we had autism, schizophrenia, split personalities. After a while I realized I had not too long ago watched a video simulation of somebody experiencing a schizophrenia panic attack from his or her point of view. After watching this we talked about how we could do something similar to that, but dramatize it. So instead of doing it from this first person we do it from the third person and in a different environment, where the main character has support from friend and how he survives in his social network during this panic. We all immediately loved this idea and Reece came up with some brilliant suggestions for how we could let the story play out. The day after we met up in the library and discussed how we wanted the story to play out and wrote a character description. After this was done we gave both of these to Reece and asked him to have a draft script written by the first week of the holidays so we could send it off with plenty of time to get actors. Unfortunately we didn’t get the script until after the holidays. which meant from this point onwards we were now a week behind everything. A week behind getting actors, storyboards, shooting, editing and everything else. This has had a massive effect on us all and completely changed the film from how it could have been. However we made the best of the situation and all got the script written together ourselves. After this I created a shot list and storyboard over the next couple of days according to the script. After reading the script I looked into the meaning of camera movement and what it means to the audience. Because of this I had decided I wanted lots of camera movement through a dolly, and physically following with a shoulder rig, in time with his footsteps as it makes the audience feel more involved than if it was done separately. Reece and James had loved what I did with the idea of movement and the storyboard, I had shown them some test shots I did with my shoulder rig I had bought and hired out a track and dolly. Everybody loved it. Everything was going smoothly, the shot planning, perfecting script; we had a location and shooting date. We had auditioned several girls for our one supporting actress role, but we had nobody available for either of our male roles. We eventually had to push shooting back another week, and even then only 2 days before the shoot we found our lead male, who we were very lucky with as now him and the actress suited the roles perfectly. Our supporting male we had confirmed only a day before shooting. We were now ready for our shoot.

We had four days planned for shooting, Friday through to Monday and we had our storyboards and shooting schedule, as well as our lighting plan for each scene. Luckily everything was transferrable from our previous location to our current one as the layout was very similar. So nothing really went wrong. However on the day we were shooting our biggest scene we had got dramatically behind and a 9-hour day soon turned into 12. This was due to lots of changing of lighting set ups as they would end up in shot, and we had to move a lot of stuff to get the lights in place. However the day after that had picked up, we actually finished 3 hours early. We did have to reshoot some parts to get new angles for the edit as well as some continuity issues, apart from those two issues the shoot went very well and everybody had a great time.

After reviewing all of the footage the first thing I realized was how useless our supporting actor was. There was no movement, no facial emotion, and no effort in his acting. We had agreed to try and cut him out as much as possible, but this meant re editing the story. Luckily Kyle had just enough different angles and shots to cover the re edit. The only thing we need now is the separate sound recording of the voices in our script, we used all the original actors but Ant is going to stick lots of reverb over them to make them unrecognizable.

I have only just recently seen our final visual edit and part of our sound edit. I feel this is going to be a very strong piece, and I hope that people will get our story and what we were trying to achieve. It has had colour grading put on to make the quality and colours better as I shot completely flat to allow maximum flexibility for Kyle in his colour grading. I am feeling good about this film being our final film of our first year. However I want to have a chance to reshoot some  parts of it as I am not happy with some of my framing, but aside from that it is a strong piece and I cant wait to share it to the world before I follow my summer project, which will be an extended version of this mental health breakdown, but up to half an hour long to give maximum flexibility for our character development as I want the audience to have a full understanding of our characters, but five minutes just isn’t enough to do that in.

Word count: 1992 

Day 4

On this day we were working with some reshooting stuff at the graveyard with all the cast, to reframe some of the shots, but after that was done they were free to go. But we had to take nick to endcliff park to shoot the scene where he is losing it in the park and running from the voices. And that took several hours because, again we had shot new footage that wasn't in the storyboard. However this all went smoothly and we got some decent shots. We had now finished our shoot. Over the past 4 days we have had a great time, bonded well with all the actors and will stay in contact for our personal projects in the summer following on from this and some of our original ideas.

Day 3

This was by far our biggest day. We had our two biggest scenes in the film to shoot - the introduction to all of the characters, and Franchesca's death scene. The first scene took us a long time to set up as we had to move alot of furniture around to make space for the camera. However this meant that when we change the angle that we would see that we moved all the furniture so we had to do this for every single angle change pretty much. This made it a massive pain and we had to delay lunch by over an hour. The second half of the day was also delayed, we did lots of different angles that weren't in the storyboard, as well as the original shots. This ended up being a 12 hour day.

Day 2

For our second day we are now working with our whole crew, we filmed the outdoors stuff as that was the day with the best weather. We got a bus to the graveyard off ecclesall road, we had alsready scouted out this location and found where we wanted to shoot. Our biggest challenge for the shoot was keeping continuity with the sunlight that kept disappearing behind clouds. And the was one shot where i have to walk backwards through an overgrown area and circle around nick with a full shoulder mount on. As i couldn't see where i was going i had to get Ant to guide me through the foliage to help direct me until i could see where i am stepping when i circle Nick. This shot was pulled off very well. However when i looked back on some of the other footage there was several wooden poles that ruined the composition of some shots that i didn't notice on the monitor of my DSLR. So we used monday for a reshoot of that.When we went back to shoot some stuff with franchesca and jody we were quite effective and manged to finish on time with no issues.

Day 1

With this being our first day of the shoot we had actors call time at 10am. But me, Jack and Kyle went to stores to pick up all the gear at 9. I did a full equipment list and sent it to James for confirmation, and i had booked everything out the previous week from friday through to tuesday morning. This was the list:

-2x Standard video tripods

-1x Portable track and dolly

-1x Dedo set

-1x 200W Kino

-2x Reflectors

-1x Clapperboard

-1x Rifle Mic

-1x Boom pole

-1x Marantz 661

We were using my camera (Canon 550D) with a shoulder rig i had recently bought, and my lens set. On top of all this i also had a portable top light to stick into small areas to balance light out if needed. 

We knew that we wanted to use 3 point light set ups throughout our film along with gels to use some colour balance. 

When we got all the gear back we immediately started setting up for our first scene. This was the first time we used a proper lighting set up in practise, but i had made some lighting plans for myself for each scene to try and make it easier. For the morning we were slightly behind, but by lunch we had caught up due to becoming more and more familiar with lighting. After lunch we only had to shoot a tracking shot in the hallway which was tricky as we needed to pull focus at the same time. We had practiced this shot in a different location to get a hang of it. But this time we had my new camera rig and follow focus set up. Once this was on it was our first use of the full rig on the dolly. This took us nearly 10 takes to get right. But we feel this is a very good shot. 

Actors Auditions

We had decided to audition each actor to see the best we could get for our characters. We decided to have a full lighting and camera set up so we could watch all the audition tapes and compare them to each actor so we can properly judge each actor for each part. For auditions we had everybody there so the actors have an opportunity to meet the whole crew and so we can also analyse how they will get on in our group. We had plenty of girl actors actually approaching us from the adverts we had put out to several societies and other acting academies. However we could't find any male actors whatsoever. For our auditions for the supporting actors we decided to write a brand knew script in a different situation where they have more dialogue as the supporting actors had barely any lines and we felt we should get them acting in a situation where they are more involved. As well as acting a scene from the main script and the scene we wrote we asked them questions about their physical portrayal of the character they would be playing and how they should react in certain situations and what they think of the script and the message we are trying to put across. This helps us to know if people are going to understand our piece and if they are going to get the right portrayal of our characters.

With us still looking for a male actor we had got to the point where we thought we might have to push filming back another week. It got to two days before the shoot when we were approached by Nick. We were so lucky as he was exactly what we were looking for, for our lead male. Our supporting male wasn't confirmed until the night before shooting. So because of this we didn't get a chance to film an audition, but we had no other choice but to go with him. Now instead of being a week ahead of schedule we were now a week behind.

After Easter meeting.

Throughout Easter me and James were waiting for a script that Reece was supposed to write. He had all the ideas and relative information such as the character profiles and a description of how the story would plan out. We were supposed to have a draft copy by the end of the first week. We didn't get anything throughout the rest of the holidays despite us asking. If i had the script i would have been able to have a draft storyboard and shot list ready by the time we came back, keeping us ahead of time and allowing more time for reshoots if needed and to be able to perfect our final edit. However because we didn't receive it until we came back after the holidays I feel what we received was very rushed and not up to standard. So me and James talked to Reece and actually rewrote, using the same structure he set out, the dialogue to make it much more realistic and consistent. over several days me and James did this and eventually came up with a good script which we got a lot of good feedback from. We did some adjustments and now had our final script, a week and a half behind when we wanted it by. This in turn delayed our rough storyboard and shot list, as well as not having any actors auditions because we weren't able to get anyone to audition without a script. We had a location and shooting date set for the week after, planned in the holidays to make sure we had it. Because of this delay we had to push it back a further week. Despite this delay we still weren't behind, we just weren't ahead anymore, which gives us less time for reshoots if needed.