What are you watching? / FISH TANK

After watching Fish Tank (which I thought was a great film) we was asked to write about our thoughts and present them to the class. I mostly looked at the regulation of Fish Tank and why the BBFC gave it the classification of 15. I think it deserved the classification 15 and.... well you can read more by looking at the powerpoint below :)

Audience Research

Documentary Fonts

Today, we had a basic overview and thought into what we want our documentary to look like. Victoria searched up a few font styles that we could possibly use for our main title.

I really like the style of this font as it is very clear and bold. However, for what our documentary is about I do not think it works so well and does not really reflect what we are trying to show. Even though the font is in capitals I don't feel it fully displays the seriousness of our documentary and reminds me of its actual name lol

I really like this font as it is simple and quite quirky. Again i do not think it conveys the message of our documentary very well but i do like the fact that because it is not filled in with black,  this could reflect the fact that the audience are going to look into our documentary rather than just watch it and not understand. It will be something that is clear to everyone, which is very much emphasized in this font.

This is the type of style me and my group like the best out of the three we've chosen. I like the fact that its simple but its not a basic font that you can easily find on word even though it does look like one. I find it is to the point and will easily convey the serioisness of our documentary. As we are talking about dopamine and addiction, the fact that the font is bold and in capital letters, really stresses this idea which is what we want to put across to our viewers.

Possible Documentary Titles

Whilst editing the film I had the sudden urge to start coming up with some titles for our film. Here are just a few lol

• My Kid is Addicted.
• The Curious Case of the Addicted Child
• The Kid and the Drugs
• My Kid Loves Drugs
• All Our Kids Are On Drugs
• Our Kids Love Drugs

They are all pretty subliminal making you want to know more about what the film inhales, which I find would be good in attracting different audiences. 

First Initial Outlining of Our Film

Today I drew up a quick first draft on iMovie of what our film will possibly look like. Later, I plan to create a script for a voice over. A voice over is definitely needed to help the story follow so that is very much needed. AT THE MOMENT: it sounds all jumbled and crazy but in due time it will all make sense!

This is a rough basic outline of the film. It roughly lasts 6 minutes but obviously there is still a lot to edit so this will all be cut down.

On the blank scenes I have put labels so that I know what we need to shoot and also to give me and indication of what will go next in the film.

There are still quite a lot of shots we need to take to make a very good film so hopefully we can get this done asap!

Also, the sound is not that great in some of the interview clips *sigh*.. Hopefully I can edit this.

What are you watching? / A CLOCKWORK ORANGE VS FIGHT CLUB

Today we presented our findings of 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Fight Club' in class. Here is my presentation:

What's next?

Evaluation of Shoot Day 4

Today, we shot our second interviewee and "expert" Mr McAuley who would again be talking about the social effects of dopamine. This time we set the interview in the classroom again to reflect the subject matter and their area of expertise.

Problems:
The classroom that we were in gave us really bad lighting so we found our subject was very dark. We spent ages trying to figure out a good position that would create better lighting but we had no luck. Ali then suggested we use one of the lights to see how that looked. At first it didn't help but after playing around with the postioning and using some of the filters we created the perfect lighting which looked great on camera.

Just like our Ms Lewis interview, we asked Mr McAuley a few questions to get him started on what to talk about which we will later edit out.... But then!

Strike Problem No.2:
Next, our camera memory card was too full and would cut Mr McAuley off in the middle of speech which was very annoying! After deleting footage and pictures several times we still found we had no space on the memory card to shoot.

We did manage to get as much as we wanted which was good but our interviewee did get cut off during the good parts, bummer.

Ali is filming his nephew this weekend so hopefully we get some good footage of that!

Evaluation of Shoot Day 3

Today we did the interview of our "expert" Ms Lewis. As a science teacher we wanted her to give a basic overview of dopamine and what is involved. The interview took place in a lab room as we wanted the surroundings to reflect the subject matter.

We wanted Ms Lewis just to talk about dopamine generally, asking her a few questions to help build what she would be talking about. Later we will edit out these questions so she is talking fluently.

Once again, we didn't have the microphone to record but hopefully the sound is not too bad.

Camerawoman Victoria!

Planing an Unscripted Documentary

Today we read an article by Tony Levelle who talks about how to plan an unscripted documentary. I thought that this helped a lot and showed us how to go about creating our own doucmentaries, as they are essentially also unscripted.

Levelle talks about a well known filmaker Dorothy Fadiman, who has been making successful unscripted documentaries for 30 years. She gives him useful and helpful advice as to how she goes about creating a documentary thinking about what story she plans to capture in her documentary, how she gets started, where she would like to shoot, the situations and events she would like to unfold in the document and how she wants the story to essentially evolve as we watch.

By the end of the article there are a few key points to consider:

• You can produce a documentary without a script
• shooting without a script requires thoughtful planning
• unscripted documentaries may require extensive research and prep
• when you shoot an unscripted documentary, the story is built in two stages: 1) while shooting, and 2) in the editing room. It is not built on a word processor.

From reading this article, there are a lot of things I feel I can take away from it to apply to my own documentary. By planning effectively and cautiously it will make our documentary much more effective and allow us to create a story worth watching.

Evaluation of Shoot Day 2

Yesterday we began shooting our establishing shots and 5 random people in Liverpool St. We arrived after 4 o'clock which meant we had limited time before the sun set to get some good shots.

We started by filming our establishing shots getting a few clips of the passing traffic. However, we found that our shooting time kept cutting out only allowing us to film roughly around 4secs of footage. This problem slowed us down dramatically and left us loosing out on time for filming.

Annoyed and confused we searched for answers finding this clip on YouTube:

Still not giving us any answers we asked other people who had camera's what the problem could be, but still no idea. Almost on the brink of giving up the camera FINALLY started allowing us to shoot longer footage which allowed us to get some really cool answers from passers by about dopamine. Surprisingly, lots of people we recorded knew what it was which is what I didn't expect. We also got some really funny answers which will work really well when properly edited.

(a bit of footage of us trying to get some passers by lol)

Once we viewed the footage on the computer we found that the sound wasn't too great which left us in a little bit of a predicament. The answers we had were so good but the sound really does let down the footage a little bit. This could possibly be because we did not have a microphone as well as all the background traffic. Also, we discovered that the establishing shots which we planned to speed up in editing were waaay too short to do this as there was not enough footage, which is another set back for us. Hopefully we can re-shoot this, however with the weather being very dark and dismal it may be hard to get some good footage.

Today we plan to shoots Ms Lewis who we will interview for some insight in dopamine and what it is. I shall post another evaluation of today's filming later!

NEW AND UPDATED: Shooting Schedule

After a HUGE lack of communication and planning, today we failed to film anything :(

Speaking to our teacher and looking back on our shooting schedule, this was not a good first plan and therefore we had to go back and re-schedule our shooting. This new shedule is much more detailed so hopefully we can now meet deadline and times in order to get everything filmed this week DONE AND DUSTED!

Below is our new schedules:

Permission

Shooting Schedule

We have 1 week to shoot all of our shots so we drafted up a shooting schedule of when and where each day we will be shooting.

Looking at Different Documentaries: Inspiration

We still didn't know what our documentary was going to look like so I decided to do some research on various documentaries to see how they look and whether we could incorporate any of their techniques into our own film.


KING OF KONG:


King of Kong is a documantary about two competitors fighting for the top spot of well loved game Donkey Kong. We are first introduced to the "evil" Bill Mitchell, who has been leader and owner of the Donkey Kong high score for 20 years. On the other hand we also have "goodie" Steve Wiebe determined to try to beat Mitchell and his high score. I like the editing in this film as it really highlights the competitive nature of the two characters. This element can't be applied to our documentary but i do like the fact that they use stats and bar charts to show the journey of the competition.

EVERYTHING IS INCREDIBLE:

Ali really liked the beginning of this documentary and how it starts with the amazing establishing shots and voiceover played over a shot of the mans feet. The sped up establishing shots gave us an idea for our film as it would be a good way of showing the passing of time, this we might encorporate in our own film. Also the voiceover was really good as we hear the person being interviewed before we actually see them which i think will also work very well in our documentary.

WIKILEAKS:


I liked the fact that with the wikileaks documentary the news reports talk about what is happening in the documentary which I think would be a good at the start of our film to highlight the issue of addiction.

Organising Interview Times

We got our media teacher to get permission from our two expert teachers for consent as to when we can interview them for our film. We will also get permission ourselfs just to double check days and times when we can film.

Shot List

This is out first drafted shot list. We wanted to establish exactly what we were shooting, where, how long each of the shots would be so we coudl get an idea of what our documentary is going to look like.

Unfortunately we are still unsure of how we are going to end our documentary as our teacher was abit worried about its possible ending. We plan to go back to him and discuss what we could potentially do instead.

New Updated: Storyboard

This is our new updated storyboard of what  we want our documentary to look like. This is so we can get an idea of what the documentary will possibly look like.

FIRST DRAFT: Storyboard

This is a very messy first draft of our initial ideas. We wanted to just put down our thoughts of how we wanted the documentary to look. Later I will post a better storyboard to show EXACTLY how our film will look.

What are you watching? / 'THE HUMAN MANNEQUIN'

Today I watched an interesting documentary about a young girl named Lousie who has FOP, disease that is slowly making her body stay in one position. This was a very interesting documentary which gives insight into something that someone is suffering with; essentially informing the public about it. This similarly reflects our documentary as we are researching a "drug" that we are all addicted too. Again, informing the public.(http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-human-mannequin/4od)