18th January

MY DOCUMENTARY : LOVE OURSELVES LIKE WE LOVE OUR LIKES

Evaluation – Documentary

Overall, our documentary went better than expected. We had originally planned to film at inside and outside, including interviews using our family members, friends and the general public. We then came to realise this may seem a little out of place as each background will have to be completely different. So, after having conversations at college it became apparent that a lot of teenagers feel the same way as us and are very passionate about this topic and have also been affected by it. We noticed after speaking to the whole class many boys and girls had a lot of interesting opinions. This is the moment we realised our documentary may be more successful if we included a more balanced age group so that we could get overly passionate answers in order to create more impact for a social action documentary.

We began by going out to buy two magazines for our documentary and film some B-roll in the Christmas holidays. We attempted a shoot day on Monday the 7th of January and everything went to plan. Although, looking back on the footage we realised it wasn’t as strong as it could have been, and we decided we would re shoot because we wanted our documentary to be effective and we felt as though our idea was there but it just wasn’t creating the effect we had envisioned in the pre-production stage.

We faced a lot of problems during the filming process. One being that we weren’t actually able to film in our requested location in the end, never the less we had to make do with what we had got, by using the photography set up rather than the TV studio set up enabled us to film in a completely silent space meaning background noise would be picked up on the mic. This also meant we could not create our desired white background effect for our poetic theme as efficiently as we could have if the TV studio was available. Although, in the end we felt this happened for a reason because the photography studio allowed us to receive help from brilliant photographer Rob Simson who kindly lent us a high-quality focus lens to film with, which looks amazing on screen adding the perfect depth of field to our piece.

We interviewed a total of 7 people in total, the documentary is only short, but we thought its better to have to much footage than to little as we wanted as much raw authentic footage as possible. In the end we only ended up including 5 girls in the final cut. This is because made some last-minute changes, we realised there was still to much of an age gap between the contributors we interviewed and the answers were a little too contrasted even still and it looked slightly out of place. To be safe, we removed the interviews we thought weren’t appropriate so that all contributors were in the exact same age category.

When we came to edit our piece, we were amazed with how the quality turned out and how professional it ended up looking. The only real problem we faced was the audio. Not only did we end up loosing some important audio content which resulted in us having to ditch a whole interview completely, but there was a lot of background noise that was picked up by the mic due to us being in an open photography studio rather than a sound proof one. This meant that during the edit, if a contributor said something really key that we wanted to include but it had dodgy audio or some sort of odd sound in the background due to being surrounded by other classrooms, we were unfortunately unable to include it within the final cut. We want to ensure this documentary sticks to its purpose of social action, to do this we have to create an empathetic atmosphere. This is difficult to do when there are unusual and high pitch sounds going on in the background of our audio tracks. Despite loosing some important footage down to those issues, we still managed to retain some strong content which as a result, we are extremely proud of.

It was unfortunate that we had our light bulb moment so late in this project as it caused us to feel rushed due to this reason. In conclusion to this, if we were to repeat this social action documentary project, we definitely should have pre planned ahead so that we had plenty of extra time on our hands and so we didn’t end up wasting an entire filming day. This way we might not have had so many technical issues and audio issues due to a last minute rush on our final available filming day.

However, you could say that if we didn’t have the filming day that didn’t go to plan we may not have ever came up with our final piece. Our mistakes lead us to realising what worked and what didn’t work along with why this was. The intense pressure also motivated us to push even harder at the end to create what we had imagined all along. This project taught us the importance of not giving up, if we are not 100% happy with something, we fix it. Which is exactly what we did and it all payed off in the end.

Creating a social action documentary was probably one of our favourite projects, we loved creating content that has the power to impact change and spark conversation within such an important day to day topic. We chose such a raw sensitive topic purposely, we also chose to incorporate a poetic mode, this was because we felt as though it added to the intensity of the piece giving it a stronger meaning. The reason why we chose a poetic style documentary over any other stylistic mode is because we felt it would give our piece more of an atmosphere to allow empathy and emotion to impact and be felt the viewers in order to create change. After seeing real life reactions of different people all different ages watching our final piece showed us that what we intended to create pulled off and worked effectively in the way it was made to shock the audience. It wouldn’t be an effective social action documentary without shocking the audience in order to impact their emotions to cause some sort of possible change in the way people think, see or act. Therefore, overall the motive of our documentary has been fulfilled successfully.