self-evaluation

For this task we were asked to create a documentary about something of our choosing, as I was out of college during the time deciding of what documentary to create so when I arrived back at college I was put in a group that was creating a documentary around drugs in Cambridge. I was not there during the pre-production process so when I was allocated to a group I had a look over what questions we were going to ask for interviews and what ideas of b-roll we may film.

when we were put into our final groups we decided what roles we wanted to do. I carried out the role of camera operator as I feel my most confident recording and filming footage. once we finished allocating roles we started thinking of what b-roll to film. we then booked our cameras and went out to film. we started by filming and using a Zoom mic to record interviews with people around the college and members of the general public. it was quite hard to get some people to answer the questions as there were many who didn't want to be interviewed. we managed to get a good amount of footage around the question-and-answer part of the documentary. Then on our second day of filming, we decided we wanted to film off campus to get b-roll of a fake drug deal to add effect to the documentary. we took the mic with us just in case we wanted to record any more interviews. We started by driving to a close by park to film the footage we wanted and felt as it was fairly realistic and would make sense to the documentary.

After uploading the footage we got on that day of filming we realised that we didn't have enough footage to cover enough b-roll for the documentary so we went out filming again to get some other relevant footage. After we finally finished filming we started the editing process, I started by researching some data from the internet about Cambridge drug use to create a dramatic intro to the documentary. To make it even more effective I added some music over the top. I ran into a few issues in the editing process when it came to learning color grading. I also had a few issues when it came to just using premiere pro, some of my audio files were not working and I was unable to recover them so I had to remove certain footage from the documentary. I also had a few issues when editing as I had to match the zoom mic footage to the camera footage witch took a while to match up all the different files. I also feel as some of the sound quality in some of the scenes wasn't very good even after adding sound effects to it which was not ideal as we did not have enough time to re record anything.

After adding all the clips together and putting in other clips I started editing the colours and the sound of the footage and the interviews. I used my past practice to add in different sound quality effects and editing the colours of the footage by adding the parametric equaliser, de noise effect etc. I also added in some dramatic music in the beginning of my edit to show that its a serious topic and also I decided to include the b-roll of the fake drug deal at the end as I felt is was more effective as an ending scene. I put rap music over the top of the footage at the end as I felt as it was fitting to the theme and would show the type of music they'd be listening to.

I was also absent for a few lessons so my time to edit was quite short so I had to try and not rush it to much and get it to a good finishing point. I feel as if I was in for those lessons my final edit would be more up to standard and I would've had more time to figure out the issues I ran into. I do feel as my final edit isn't as good as I wanted it to be as I feel like it does not flow as nicely as I was hoping it would and looking back I would've liked to record more b-roll and included a few more interviews to make it more effective and dramatic.

Overall I feel as my final production was not the best it could be and if we were to have another task like this id want to plan it out a bit more effectively and think out thoroughly what footage id want and what data id include. Id also want to try and make the documentary a bit longer as I feel as it was very short and didn't really get the point across of how serious the topic was.