Documentary Unit - Reflective Analyisis

Pre - Preduction

I felt like the pre - production was probably the least challenging part of this unit's project. We all grouped together and would all give our input and ideas and the project sort of materialised from that. Callum was the main person who made decisions on whether things should be included as the homophobia in football was his idea, however even that changed along the way as his idea started by the documentary being focused solely on why there are no openly gay premiere league players in todays society. But as time went on that idea was merged with others and evolved to what it is now, which covers a broader subject but still has references to the premiere league idea. Unfortunately we had a communication breakdown  with a member of our group and we had to adapt our roles to accommodate for that persons absence however we all pulled through and the transcripting, script writing and shooting script were completed. 

Production

                                                                  

Different parts of the production were filmed by different people at different times. Callum and myself went up to London to film Ed Connell and teh East End Pheonix's training session with Carl. I also filmed Carl's interview on my own which was fun as there were lots of "interesting" ways i solved problems posed by going solo without any lighting. First of all there was a problem with the sound, i thought the sound quality wasn't great but then i realised that the camera was using the interior mic and not the boom, so i tried plugging it into another channel to see if it was just channel 1 that wasn't working. Nope that wasn't the problem. I then checked to see if the cables didn't have a problem and the boom was connected, yep all good. By this time i was really stumped, i looked under by where the cable connects to the camera and see that the little switch is on 48v which means the camera powers the mic, so now i'm having a meltdown because i have the "talent" sitting and waiting and time is going faster than Lewis Hamilton. I message the rest of the group with a desperate plea for help and Callum asks if i have switched it to 48v to which i reply yes but i check just in case, and there it was. The blatant glaring problem.  I had changed the switch to 48v, but on channel 1, and i hadn't put the cable back into channel 1 since i moved it to see if it was just channel 1 not working. so after taking the cable out of channel 2 and and back into channel 1 HEYPRESTO!! the sound was coming through nice and clear, now to the next challenge. How to hold the boom pole just at the right angle whilst operating the camera. What i did to solve this was perch the boom pole on the back of a chair and hold the bottom if it down with my leg, whilst operating camera with one hand and reading questions off a sheet with my other hand. The last challenge was lighting.

 As we hadn't managed to book any lighting out i had to use things from around the house. we cellotaped a small lamp on it's side to the fireplace, then a similar situation to the side of his face and then the fill lighting behind him was a wall light. Another problem was a shot I needed to get for coverage of Carl, the classic "Tea making shot", however the angle that would allow you to see both Carl's hands and face couldn't be achieved by tripod or me holding the camera as there wouldn't be enough room. So i took the tripod plate off and asked if Carl had anything i could stand the camera on that could sit on the side of the kitchen, we found a stool and a washing basket but it was't quite right, so i put the plate back on and the top of the camera ran flush the the cupboard and everything was in frame. Mission accomplished!

Post Production

I was also involved in post production as a co-editor alongside Melisa. She and i both worked together closely on the editing often swapping roles and trying to help each other find/ do things that the other could not. The first thing we noticed we needed to change was the colour. We needed to use colour correction as i had only been able to use very yellow light and therefore anything white had a slightly yellow tinge to it. Once that had been sorted we then sourced the other clips and over the next 3 days ran through a plethora of different structures on the timeline. After our meeting with Zoe however we came to a decision that we should point the documentary more towards the Team East End Phoenix and then revolve mostly everything around that. So we started with Carl's interview then followed him to the training session and moved onto Ed Conell's interview but whilst including the football team in both first and second half. Graphics were a big section of the project too, one of the hardest parts was synching each word (title) up with each word said when a horde of fans are changing at an exhibition in Brighton Street. One of the final steps as well as adding all the narration was a sound track. Originally we chose a piece called strings 1 but that seemed too cheery for the subject matter so i then looked into a soundtrack that used a mix of piano and artificial sound however that seemed too depressing, as though someone had died. Finally i found a piece that was a guitar playing a a continuous piece in a single chord with seemed to flow just right for the tone. Using the Pen tool i fluctuated the sound up and down depending on what was on the screen and who was talking at that time. 

Documentary Director - Documentary unit

Director

Barbera Kopple

Barbara kopple is an American through and through, born in Scarsdale New York, in 1946 she is no stranger to changing times. No doubt she has been recording landmark events on camera throughout her life however her first recognized piece of work was Harlan County, USA which was a documentary on the coal minors strike in Kentucky. Since then she has come out with works such as American Dream, Winter Soldier (my favourite) Fallen Champ: The Untold Story Of Mike Tyson, and Running From Crazy. Watching these stories you get a real sense of the style of filming Kopple likes to use when filming documentaries. It's a sort of fly on the wall cross guerrilla filming with all her crash zooms and holding shots on close ups and extreme close ups (as demonstrated in Winter Soldier) as well as using more mainstream documentary traits such as the filming locations with people on screen who are relevant to the topic. For example in the Mike Tyson documentary the journey isn't shadowing someone with a camera much like a lot of modern ones,it's sort of a following a trail of someone's past that they have left behind. One of the biggest reasons I like this director and chose her for my inspiration is that her signature style of filming is varied, she uses a large arsenal of techniques and filming methods that lead to very interesting documentaries and this is what I hope to do in mine.

Documentary 

Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story

The documentary I have chosen to draw comparisons with is the BBC Documentary Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story. Something I have drawn from this documentary was a few minutes in when the farther of the transgender son is being interviewed about a sad/ sensitive moment; when he was first told his son wants to become transgender. The farther is recounting something in the past and it is a close up shot to allow the audience to see in great detail the emotions he is experiencing. We will do something similar when our gay teenager Carl tells us about why he went off football including not involving any cut aways at this point as not to break the emotional tension. 

Another similarity between the two documentaries is the use of a sort of "master shot". In the transgender doc the camera keeps returning to her collection of makeup on the side in her bedroom. Which is relevant and keeps reinforcing what the documentary is about, which will also be used in our doc. We will keep cutting to the East End Phoenix team playing football which will remind the viewer that football is the topic of the doc.  

Throughout the documentary about this young person changing their gender, they use the method of spanning the documentary over a period of time. Granted this is over a period of months and ours was a period of days/ weeks, however the principle is the same. By shooting it at different times and making it chronological it creates the sense that the viewer has been on the journey with the presenter/ topic of the doc for a long time therefore forging a stronger emotional bond. 

Finally and most obviously this is not just a documentary about the journey of an individual, but the challenging of stereotypes within society. One documentary is about gender, and one is about sexuality, both incredibly closely bound subjects that have equally abusive stereotypes and treatment however our documentary touches on that slightly more than the transgender doc, however with that doc the main device that transports you along the narrative is the teenagers journey unlike ours which focuses more on the team East End Phoenix and the general topic of homophobia.