Floor plan

A quick floor plan of the interview shot we plan to shoot at UCL university of Dr Laura Lewis. It clearly shows her on a chair in a science lab with artificial lighting to help set the mood. There is microscope purposely left in the shot to inform the audience of the science that is about to be explained by her.

Time lapse

After viewing countless websites and watching countless documentaries, I have noticed how a time lapse was used in some way to help tell the narrative of the documentary. Me personally, i believe that it shows a fantastic transition from scenes, so we decided to use a time lapse in or documentary , something similar to the video below.

Bokeh?

This bokeh concept has us scratching our head for hours. This bokeh concept sparked a chain reaction of ideas. At the ending of this clip we see how they use bokeh to make things thats were never considered like names. They explain clearly that the possibilities are endless and demonstrate it with such ease. They made bokeh in the shape of pacman which i personally thought would be amazing to use in our documentary. They explain its simple but require trial and error, that might prove to be a problem as time is not on our side, but we'll see.

Social Network Assistance

As part of our research for out documentary, we had to find out what our target audience are into as this will help our decisions on how we advertise and edit or documentary.

To do this Dakota went on Facebook and asked a series of questions to some of my friends. Such as:

"1. What kind of magazines do you read and why do you like them? (layout, themes)
2. Do you listen to the radio? If so what station and how regularly? 
3. Do you watch documentaries? What types have you seen? Did you like them? Why?"

However, she received no responses. As most of her friends fit our mainstream criteria for our audience this meant that a response from these people was unable to be attained. This is some ways creates a difficult situation as to what this niche would want to see. We plan to do a focus group so hopefully we can gain more information from this.

As she did not receive any responses on her own account, her Mother kindly allowed her to post the same set of questions to her friends. She received a range of responses and ideas. What she found is that she only got responses from mostly women. They all range from different ages, ethnicity, class and jobs so this in some ways does help us to see how we can advertise and edit or film. As she did not get any responses from men, like or mainstream audience it will be hard to market to them, but hopefully we can resolve this in our focus group.

From her findings she have found:

• 1. Many of the women who commented listen to the radio on the way to work - This means that when marketing our documentary, is a morning slot the best time to advertise it?
• 2. These women mostly read gossip magazines, fashion or anything educational - Can our documentary be advertised in these magazines?
• 3. These women also watch documentaries regularly and clearly go for a specific niche (mostly real life) - These different documentaries can help us to see how we can edit our own film to match our target audiences interests.

Our research has given us a strong idea of what we can do to attract our audience and apply this to our film.

Target Audience

Our target audience data

exam board vs research

The exam board are asking us to advertise in newspapers and radio ads and Tv listings where as 'documentary films' suggest we get our film on film festivals as it only costs 25 dollars per listing. They make the assumption that we have a wealthy budget and can advertise our documentary in newspapers and on TV and we will take that assumption and try to do it. 'Documentary films' also advise that we we advertise our film on banner ads to raise awareness. 'Desktop documentaries' advice to to raise awareness by using youtube and Vimio and tell us that we can make money by using google word web.

Documentary Conventions with theory

With us looking a many documentaries we can understand how a documentary documents the truth. We understand we only have a couple of minutes to capture or audience thus making the beginning the most important part. With the help of Todorov's narrative theory, the opening 5 minutes of the documentary should reveal disequilibria at some point; whether its at the very start or a couples minutes in after equilibrium. I have watched so many documentary's and they all impose disequilibria at one point:


The BBC horizon are undoubtedly my favourite documentaries to watch. Majority of them pose some form of disequilibria that has the views enticed. The documentary above presents disequlibra in the first couple mins indirectly. The voice-over of suggest the documentary has the formula that can help us increase our creativity skills suggesting us ourselves are endanger of falling into disequlirbia if we don't continue to watch. Our documentary must contain an enticing beginning as these

Tips for Video Production Editing

We found a great website that had tips on production of a documentary that we thought would help us, They are:   

Create a compelling beginning. 
Great documentaries capture the audience’s attention right away! It can be style or content, but it must be something that feels unusual to the viewer. If you don’t create intrigue and or rouse curiosity, you will lose your audience. One idea is to start with something already deep in the story, then you can back up and slowly begin to reveal answers.

[Helpful hint: Sometimes the beginning of the film is not obvious until you’ve edited the bulk of your film. So just put SOMETHING down at the beginning to get you started, then you can go back.]

Build a “Roller Coaster”
Once you have the basic story structure in place, this is where you start creating the filmmaking experience. Change up the rhythm of your story. If the story has the same rhythm, no matter if it’s all fast or all slow, it will “feel” slow and boring. There needs to be fast sections and slow sections. Take your audience on a RIDE. Mix up the pacing with high points and low points. Take viewers on a “wild ride” and then let them breath. Create chaos and then let the event “sink in”. Remember, silence can be just as powerful as a fast paced sequence.

The internet

while doing this course I started to apperciate the value of the internet. Anything/everything i need to kno i use the internet for. Learnig about html codes, Photoshop, Camtasmia, etc everyting i need i just have to google it., this is why i experiment the most complex things to push the internet to its limit or my reasearch skills to the limit. So far, everything that i wanted to know, i was able to find it on google or youtube. It is only when something really complex is broken down into simple instructions by the web you fell that sense of excitment and apperciation for it.

Planning a documentary

 I have come across an article by Tony Levelle that has i think will help us when filming our documentarty. She disscuses how to plan a unscripted documentary. At first i thought it would have no relevence as she talks about things like improvised planning. It sounded like nonsense but as i read on she spoke about having a concreat plan before hand but having some chsanges on set. This rang some bells as last year we had a strong plan but we made so many changes on set when shooting. She goes on to talk about having a feel for what your going to shoot & lacking inspiration  when getting on set even when you have a plan. I remember from last year in the main task, we had a storyboard and discussed how everything was going to look but when i got to my basement, i couldnt get the lighting to adjust to my mood. We were in my basement, cold and lacking inspiration. so i brought a manual heater down to the basement to keeop the crew warm. ironically the heater gave off a really nice orange glow that was perfect for my vision. Tony talks about once on set "open yourself to the direction suggested by what you see and hear. This is how you allow your footage to tell you where to go, instead of following a predetermined script." I told my crew and myself to have some sort of feel when the get on set instead of always sticking to a plan. I know that having a feel for what is right on set will produce a better outcome instead of sticking to a plan 100%

More research Canon EOS 550D

After getting to grips with the expose of the camera from watching hours of footage explaining it in photography, i came across dead end when trying to adjust the exposure of while recording. When changing the shutter speed, the camera becomes darker and adjusting the IOS wouldn't cut it to make it a nicely exposed shot. I did more research and found that to achieve great exposure as well as a narrow depth of field, i would need a new and more expensive lens which was not in my budget. Although i couldn't get my hands on a lens that would achieve a really good depth of field, found a way to work round it and use the default lens that came with the 550d.

Both of these videos proved very useful in helping me achieve a narrow depth of field i wanted in some expiremental shots.

A Trip to Jessops

Jessops Company Logo

After our first couple days of filming and we came across the "recording stopped automatically" problem and trying to find a solution on the internet, i decided to take a trip to Jessops Photography shop to talk to experts. They told me that When shooting movies, use a large-capacity SD card with SD Speed Class 6 "Class 6" or higher rating. If you use a slow-writing card when shooting movies, the movie might not be recorded properly. And if you playback a movie on a card having a slow reading speed, the movie might not playback properly. I checked the SD card of our memory card and it had a class 2. So I checked online the price for a class 6 or higer memory card but the prices were astonishing. Over 50 pounds for an 8GB class 6 memory card. I knew that was way out of my budget and would have to deal with the problem as much as possible.