We were given the task of making a documentary no longer the 1:30 including the following criteria:
Our production team groups were a test to see how well we worked together and if we were going to get the best out of our film crew. So my film crew for this task was:
- Tom Bentey
- Charlotte Billingham (me)
- Jack Parkes
- Lucy Smith.
Planning and Preparing to Film.
We needed to research the main features of a documentary in order to produce a successful representation of a Litter documentary.
As a group we watched a documentary that contained all the features we needed to include in our documentary to make it successful. Here is the documentary:
We were going to make it into a Mockumentary but decided it would be a much better idea to create a documentary as we could follow the criteria a lot more with a normal documentary.
After watching the documentary and getting a few ideas, we needed to decided on the layout of our documentary, where we were setting it and who we would be interviewing (one of the features of a documentary) in the filming process.
So here is our plan:
Location: Chasewater
Time of filming: Friday 19th September 2014, 8:50am-11:30am
Interviewing: Tom Bentley (Local Litter Picker), Lucy Smith and Jack Parkes (Local Bird Watchers)
Equipment: Digital DSLR Camera, Tripod, on location sound recording kit.
We decided there was going to be 3 different types of film footage to make up our documentary. Interviews, Recreations of events (dropping litter) and B-roll
What is B-Roll?
This is the footage used to show an action related to say an interview, it cuts away to the b-roll say in the interview. For example, you're interviewing a litter picker and you want to show them dropping litter (I know it's the opposite to their job but you get the picture) you'd interview them and when editing have a cut away to them dropping litter.
Voice Over
We also needed to record the overvoice for the documentary, however this needed to be done after we had filmed as the group felt we needed a rough estimation as to how long the documentary footage was going to be. Jack was going to do the voiceover and so we needed to decide on what sort of thing he was going to say for which footage.
We then recorded the voiceover in sections to then add to the footage in the editing stage.
So we planned out how the documentary was going to go and what was going to be said on the voice over. Here is the document we followed when creating our short documentary:
Music Choices
Most good documentaries have music to accompany the facts and images shown on screen. We felt the music needed to be serious yet light and interesting to watch.
In the end we used the wonders of Youtube to find documentary styled music.
This video has a wide range of different sounds used for documentaries but we opted for the music that lasts the first 40 seconds of the clip. It just has this air of mystery and adventure to accompany the disastrous issue we call....LITTER!
So all we needed to do now was film at Chasewater, do the recording, then it was onto the editing of the film using the new Final Cut Pro X software! Quiet on set, rolling, ACTION!
