Creative Media: Documentary Video

Process Book Brief

This should document your individual research and thoughts from the start of the course demonstrating your personal engagement with the project, the exercises and the documentary genre through your critical viewing, practice and reading. You should show creative thinking for your role and chart your involvement in the process of production. You should also include any documentation relevant to your role/contribution to the project:

Treatment for the film with annotations e.g. re camera, sound, edit, direction etc as appropriate

Recce notes, lighting plans, equipment lists

Consent and permission forms

Shot lists, storyboards,

Letters/emails, draft schedules/budgets,

Rushes log, paper edit.

Please note: there is no word length for this item – it should reflect your on-going work for the course, not be produced retrospectively. It must be submitted both as a hardcopy as well as a digital file (scanned images in pdf format).

Process of Project Production

My process book is laid out as a continuous summary of my involvement/engagement with the course, relative to my creative documentary project. I will start off explaining the entire journey of our production of 'A Dogumentary' throughout the twelve weeks and I will discuss my research surrounding the project and course, as well as my involvement in the production tasks, my weekly workshop notes and self-directed research. I have laid out my process book with weekly blog entries, which firstly explore my work towards and engagement towards the team's project, followed by my notes from each weeks workshop as well as the self-directed research for the whole module, then finally I discuss my weekly engagement with the production tasks.
Some weeks may not have notes for every area stated, this is because not every week there was a production task or the workshops may have entirely focussed on the edit or exhibition of the class's work, but I have compiled all my work towards this module in this blog:

http://creativemediadocumentaryvideo.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/project-book.html

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Week One - Objective for the Project:

For our group's documentary project, we decided to follow the theme set from the module guide to be the 'Human and Non-Human' brief. For this, we would have to think about how we could tell a story about a human and non-human topic through particular characters, objects and places. For example, our relationship to landscapes / places / environment / nature / other creatures / machines.

Initial Ideas form my group for the 'Human and Non-Human' brief for the production project were as follows :

·          Humans and Ventriloquism

·          Humans and Fire

·          Humans and Mental Illness

·          Humans and Pet Dogs

·          Humans and greyhound racing

·

Humans and Pet Dogs was the approach that we decided on for our final documentary. We planned another meeting in the next week to discuss how we were going to create a story and how we could construct a narrative that would meet the brief. We also needed to decide what footage we would need to acquire to produce it, the locations and the role each of us would take on.

My production group consisted of three other members: Luke, Gokul and Helen. I had not met or worked with any of them before, the only members there were acquainted were Gokul and Helen , prior our the first workshop.

I wasn't initially happy about the production group I was put in as there were other members of our documentary class I had worked with before and wanted to work with again whom I knew had acquired a strong grade in their practical modules in their first year. I had a feeling after our initial workshop together that no one felt that confident with the challenges ahead and we did not gel straight away. I felt that if there was an opportunity to change groups that I'd take it. Unfortunately when I got in contact with my tutor, Yorgos, I was told that he would be unable to adjust the production groups at this stage, so I had to be professional and make the best of the situation. I was worried that a repeat of what happened on my last production in first year was going to take place again where two of my group members contributed very little to our project and myself and one friend ended up producing the documentary almost single handedly. This was very stressful but the final film we made about ‘Punktured Piercing’ studio in the North Lanes, Brighton, and it made to a good standard, given the circumstances.

After our initial meetings I thought hard about a variety of ways we could portray the different relationships between dogs and their owners, as well how to carry out some research about this subject matter.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week One

You and your peers are working in production teams of three to four people, you will produce a 5-6 minute documentary. The documentary should address one of the two related themes below. You will be provided with some conceptual reading, which you are encouraged to use to spark off ideas.

Human and Non-Human:

For this you might think about how you could tell a story about the following through particular characters, objects and places: our relationship to landscapes / places / environment / nature / other creatures / machines

Or

Self and other:
In what ways do people live / perform their sense of national, ethnic, religious, sexual, class or gendered identity? (e.g. explored though an ethnography of aspects of British society looking at what might seem strange to people coming from elsewhere). How is our sense of self defined in relation to what we think we are not?

Assessment 1

Pre-production portfolio

30% of the course

Due week 7

Each individual student must submit a folder in duplicate (one hard copy and one on USB) containing:

·          The group project proposal (collaboratively produced) – 500 words.

·          The individual pre-production research report – 2000 words

·          The pilot material (on two USB drives as the submission has to be in duplicate)

PLEASE NOTE: Your candidate number MUST be clearly written on the folders and the USB (the stores can provide USB labels for this).

Further explanation of items required for Assessment 1:

1. Group project proposalThis should give a clear idea of what the film will do:

·          What story will it tell?

·          How will it be told?

·          What is the theme?

·          Who will be in it?

·          Where will it be filmed?

·          What material will be incorporated? (e.g still or moving image archive)

·          What kind of sound is proposed? (e.g narration, such as third person, ambient
sound, music, effects etc) .

·          Who is the proposed audience?
(Describing the subject matter is NOT enough – the proposal needs to show clear evidence of concrete research of contributors and/or locations and how these will be used to explore a theme. Above all what will we SEE AND HEAR rather than what we will be told.)
You should refer to examples of proposals on the Creative Practice Virtual Learning Environment and those provided in class to get a sense of how a proposal should describe a documentary project. The proposal may originate from an idea from one member of your team but you should all contribute ideas for its realisation.

2. Individual pre-production research report
This should be in the form of continuous prose and should reflect your personal research for the project and on the documentary genre to date. It must contain critical references to reading undertaken and films viewed. It should include:

·          Critical reflection on what you have learnt which may be useful for you project from viewing at least 3 documentaries such as for instance about approaches or techniques relevant to your proposed project as a whole or your own role on it. You should draw on your own responses to films viewed as well as your critical reading on the documentary genre.

·          Reflection on your own production research to date e.g. on practice for your role, exercises undertaken, subject research. This should include reflection on your contribution to the production of the pilot material

Some pointers on what issues you should show awareness of in relation to roles:

Camera – creative thinking on how visual approach will address story/subject/theme, key lighting challenges at proposed locations, framing, equipment requirements and limitations, subject research.

Sound – creative thinking on how sound recording/design will address subject/theme, key sound challenges at proposed locations, microphone selection, subject research.

Editor - creative thinking on how editing will address subject/theme, key challenges for structuring proposed project, scheduling and organizing the edit, subject research.

Production management (all team members) – logistical issues, permissions/consents needed, scheduling required, budgetary considerations, any copyright issues and how these could be resolved;

Director – creative thinking on how story will be told,/subject/theme explored, notes on contributors/source materials, subject research,
If you are in a team of less than 4 people one person will need to double up and take the director’s role on location as well as doing either sound or camera. The director and editor should not be the same person. You are all however expected to contribute to the creative development and research for the project.

You should also attach to your individual report:
Minutes of group meetings noting who was present, (or absent) summary of points considered and action decided. Minute keeping should be delegated to someone in the team

3. Group Pilot material (collaboratively produced)

This should be up to 2-3 mins of original video footage shot by the team towards the project. It should show either some of the proposed contributors and or locations or other material shot by you exploring the intended style/approach. It CAN include material shot for the set exercises as long as this clearly relates to the proposed subject and/or approach of the final project. It should be roughly edited but you are not required to do a sound mix at this stage. The key thing is to give a clear sense of how the material/people/places you have researched will produce a compelling visual narrative so you need to select carefully what to include. You must include credits for the roles undertaken by group members on the pilot – at least on the USB label.

Project Ideas

- Croatian living in England --> National identity

- Humans & Water -.> Fishing, Waters Sports

- Humans & Pets --> Guide dogs, RSPCA

- Humans & Technology --> Phones & Internet

- Humans & Fire --> Lewes Fireworks, Fire Brigade

WEEK 7 WILL BE OUR PRESENTATION WEEK

This is taken from my previous blog last year from the Creative Production: Video Production blog, but it is still relevant to this module as we had set reading from his book:

1.        Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press Chapter 6: What types of documentary are there? pp.99-139.

Modes of Documentary

American documentary theorist, Bill Nichols looked at the history of documentary and came up with 6 distinct modes of documentary. These were:

1. Observational Mode

Direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an obtrusive camera. By maintaining the observational mode, the director allows its subject to forget the presence of the camera and behave more naturally, thereby letting the audience get a better sense of how the person really feels about the subject matter.

Examples: Pennebaker's Don't Look Back [1967]

2. Expository Mode (Voice of God)

Verbal commentary and an argumentative logic. Assumes a logical argument and a "right" and "proper" answer using direct address and offering preferred meaning. Mostly associated with Television News programming.

Examples: Herzog's Grizzly man [2005], many nature Documentaries

3. Participatory Mode

Focuses on the interaction between filmmaker and subject. Unlike the observational mode, the participatory mode welcomes direct engagement between filmmaker and subject(s) - the filmmaker becomes part of the events being recorded. The filmmakers impact on the events being recorded is acknowledged, indeed, it is often celebrated.

Examples: Block's 51 Birch Street [2006]

4. Poetic Mode

This mode of documentary emphasises visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages and formals organisation. The poetic mode of documentary moves away from the "objective" reality of a given situation or people to grasp at an inner "truth" that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation Codes emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization favours mood, tone and texture.

Examples: Leni Riefenstahl's and Dziga Vertov's work

5. Performative Mode

Performative modes of documentary are subjective or expressive of the aspect of the filmmakers engagement with the subject and an audiences responsiveness to this engagement. This mode of documentary emphasizes the subjective nature of the documentarian as well asacknowledging the subjective reading of the audience - notions of objectivity are replaced by "evocation and affect"

This mode emphasizes the emotional and social impact on the audience.

Examples: Spurlock's Super Size Me [2004]

6. Reflexive Mode

This mode of documentary calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking. The Reflexive Mode acknowledges the constructed nature of documentary and flaunts it - conveying to people that this is not necessarily "truth" but a reconstruction of it - "a" truth, not "the" truth.

Examples: Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera [1929]

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Week Two - Deciding on Production Roles

After deciding on our documentary's theme, we chose what production roles we would each undertake for the documentary. We discussed our skills and knowledge in regards to documentary filmmaking, and any past experience on production projects, so that we could decide on whom had the most relevant skills for the specified roles.

Luke told us in the meeting that he is retaking this year's course, so he knew what this module would entail and what would happily undergo any role since he was much more familiar with the course than the rest of us.

Helen explained that she had little experience with being involved in a production process, but seemed eager to get going with this module. She felt that she'd be more confident if she was given a the sound or camera roll as she wasn't confident with her editing and directorial skills.

Gokul was the member of the team who'd thought up the core approach for our project theme (on Humans and Dogs) we all concluded that it would be suitable to make him the director of our project, which he was more than pleased about. I think this decision gave us all confidence as Gokul seemed to have a clear idea of the direction he wanted his idea for a humans and dogs to go in.

I had a lot more passion for the technical side of filmmaking so I put myself forward to be either the camera man, sound engineer or editor, as I had already had experience with these roles in previous projects.

However during the meeting this week, none of us could decide what final roles we wanted to take on for the project. So we discussed whom had the most suitable skills for the remaining roles. Luke is being given the role of cameraman since he felt more capable and comfortable with this role with the skills he had in regards to sound artist and editor. As with the role of the editor, no one else in the group apart from myself and Gokul had a good understanding of how to use the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, so I took the role of the editor. Helen with the role of sound engineer .

I believe everyone felt happy with their roles we had chosen in the meeting and were eager to get going with the course. Now we just had to get a clearer understanding of Gokul's vision for our project and get the pre-production tasks in motion.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Two

Research, Proposals & Pitching

Why Research?

·          Respect the intelligence and work of others

·          Provides stimulation for ideas and possibilities

·          Helps develop your singular voice

·          Essential to know about what is to come

How?

·          Methods - media theory

·          Contexts - history and today

·          Work already made - previous films

·          Through doing - making films

·          Through observation and experience

Context, Idea, Methodology and Outcome

The Lie of the Land - Participatory mode documentary concerning fox hunting

Lift - Mark Isaacs

Final Project Pitches

·          Humans and Churches (Christians and Church)

·          Drag Queens

·          Humans & Money

·          Humans & Online Dating

·

My Idea - Humans and their relationship with fire

How fire makes them feel and the impacts it has on their life

- Interview people who have a close relationship with fire eg someone from the fire brigade, a pyromaniac, someone who has been in a house fire. Maybe something related to the Bonfire night in Lewes, not sure what angle to take but I liked the initial idea

Initial Documentary Proposal: Group D - Humans and Pet Dogs

Documentary Title: (Working Progress) A Short Dogumentary?

Documentary Theme: Humans and dogs, looking at certain relationships between people and dogs

Documentary Mode: Participatory and Observational

Target Audience: No specific target audience, but we aim to engage and inform our audience

Style: Engaging and informative. Interviews with people who have a close relationship with a dog or dogs, focusing on the personal reasons why certain people in Brighton own and what purpose they function for them.

Research Method:

Looking at people who spend time with dogs due to their occupation or other circumstances and will focus on looking at the history between the dog and owner and the positive effects it's had on their life and to others around them. These could be such as:

·          Dog trainers/walkers in Brighton (Made contact with 2 trainers in town)

·          Dog racers, people who own and race greyhounds (Made contact with Brighton & Hove Greyhound Stadium)

·          Dog carers such as Vets and Kennel workers (Made contact with a local kennel)

·          Guide dogs for the blind (Made contact with a guide dog service in town)

·          Police dogs

·          General dog owners in Brighton

·          Role of the RSPCA

·

We will narrow down our interviewee's to 2-3 people and revolve our narrative around their relationship with a dog(s).

We will also need to compose interview questions once we decide on whom we are interview on camera, as the answers that we capture on film will dictate our entire documentary's narrative unless we resort to using a voice-over.

In order to compose the right questions, each member of our group will do research into one of our interviewees occupation and the interviewees personally.

Outline of Content:

·          Interview footage

·          Stills of dog and owner (if needed and acquirable)

·          Cutaways of dog and owner in action and of just the dog, giving balance of frame time for dog and dog owner

·          Possible use of archive footage of dogs and humans (this would only be necessary if we can find something relatable to something our audience is told by our interviewees)

Cutaways & Locations

We will try to acquire at least 2 minutes of cutaway footage per interviewee and location change but we will shape our cutaways around our interview audio. A few examples that we have thought about are:

·          Dog Trainer - dog school footage, performances, tricks, activities and walks with owner

·          Kennel Worker - On location at Kennels, showing them caring for the dog,

·          Blind person - At their house or at a guide dog meeting/event, footage of the dog functioning as a guide for the person

·          Police Dog trainer - Police kennels and shots of how they're trained

·          Shot of where dogs are taken by other owners such as Wild Park, the Levels, Seafront

·

Sound/Music:

We want to incorporate both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds respectively to engage the audience more into the narrative. Maybe some musical soundtrack to go in between transitions between interview clips and cutaways to add a more emotive response to some scenes of a close relationship between the dog and the owner. If needed, as a last resort we shall incorporate a voice over. Preferably a male voice with a soothing, authoritative tone. K6 Rode Microphones will be needed to record key audio sequence such as the interview. Each location we record and interview or cutaway will need 25 seconds of ambient noise recording

Resource Requirements:

·          HD Video Camera with Memory Card

·          Lights if interviews are going to be conduct in the evenings or inside, most shots will have natural lighting as a majority of the footage would be shot outside.

·          Microphones such as K6 or Boom mics

·          Mac and Editing Software eg. Premiere Pro, Audition.

·          Tripod and monopods

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Week 1+2 Production Task - Glastonbury Festival [Narration Exercise]

Each production group were given the same 8 minute clip of archive material of the Glastonbury Festival. It consisted of performances of bands and crowds dancing and celebrating, setting up and constructing of tents and stages, interviews with people at the festival as well as the founder, Michael Eavis. A huge montage of footage.

Our task was to reduce the footage down to 3-4 minutes and to construct and record our own voice-over for it.

List of clips

1. Interview with Insurance worker. (0.00 - 13.07)
2. Essential technical items for when at a festival. (women) (13.07 - 35.02)
3. 2 men on camp talking about wind. (35.02 - 45.11)
4. People setting up tent (45.11 - 55.15)
5. Old footage from previous festivals. (55.15 - 1.04)
6. People erecting tents /poles/ gathering wood/dancing/band performance. (1.04 - 2.29)
7. Guy in car, owner of Glasto (2.29 - 2.51)
8. 2 old men talking about festivals. (2.51 - 3.01)
9. Owner old day hippies (3.01 - 3.15)
10. Hippies at Glastonbury outside their tent (3.15 - 3.30)
11. Lovely people lovely music lovely festival Owner (3.30 - 3.46)
12. T.Rex B&W Scene (3.46 - 4.04)
13. shot B&W interview about Glastonbury being a euphoria (4.04 - 4.30 and 4.41)
14. B&W hippie band performing (4.41 - 5.03)
15. One thing that worries - gate crashed (5.03 - 5.10)
16. Long shot of campsite (5.10 - 5.21)
17. Another band performing (80s) (baby shot) (5.21 - )
18. MS of crowd (lots of heads) (6.53 -6.58)
19. Bride "The weddings off"
20. Cows walk in front of frame of LS of Glastonbury
21. Wish the festival would never end B&W
22. Please don't pollute shot

We noted down what every clip in the footage given would project. This would would make it easier to select the most relevant clips in reference to what would be said in the voice-over.
In order to think of how we would approach what we would say in our voice-over, our group shared some ideas that we could discuss within the narration.

Ideas for Narration Script - What is Glastonbury?

Establish what Glastonbury is:
- Where is it?
- How long its been going on for
- Who goes
- What happens at the festival
- People's opinion on the festival

We each assigned ourselves an area to research and script, then in next week's workshop we would share our script for our section and construct the main script which would be used for the voice-over. My section which I researched was the setting up of Glastonbury which you can see in the section below.

My Script Section: Setting up Glastonbury

With over 175 thousand people annually attending the festival, the Glastonbury Festival takes a huge amount of time and effort to set up and run. The 5-day long festival in June takes months of preparation to set up all the stages, the 8 km fence surrounding the festival and other attractions inside the festival which is this is mainly completed by a volunteer workforce. Michaels Eavis once said "People put heart and soul into the build and that's what keeps it going." With the exception of technical and security staff, the festival is mainly run by volunteers. Oxfam have been working with Glastonbury for years and provide stewards throughout the festival. They are probably the largest recruiter of stewards and helpers for Glastonbury. Most volunteers are paid in free entry, transport and food, while their charities receive the wages the volunteers earn over the event.

Script Draft for Voice-Over

When it came to creating the final version of the script, it was important that each member of our groups section would lead into the next one, and that no information was repeated. Therefore, some minor adjustments were made to certain sections of people's script when we compiled all the sections into one. Below is our final version of the script in which Luke voice would be the one we used for our group's narration:

Glastonbury Festival is a five-day music festival, it is the world’s largest greenfield music and performing arts event. After the 1970s, the festival took place almost every year and grew in size. This musical event was organised by Michael Eavis at Worthy farm near near the village of Pilton, Somerset, England.

With over 175 thousand people annually attending the festival, the Glastonbury Festival takes a huge amount of time and effort to set up and run. It takes a huge workforce and months of preparation to set up all the stages, the 8 km fence surrounding the perimeter of the festival as well as attractions inside the festival. Michaels Eavis once said "People put heart and soul into the build and that's what keeps it going." In fact, with the exception of technical and security staff, the festival is mainly run by volunteers. Oxfam have been working with Glastonbury for years and provide stewards throughout the festival. They are probably the largest recruiter of stewards and helpers for Glastonbury. Most volunteers are paid in free entry, transport and food, while their charities receive the wages the volunteers earn over the event.

Apart from contemporary music, other art forms such as dance, poetry, theatre, comedy, circus and other arts also on display. Glastonbury was greatly influenced by hippie ethics and free festival movement in the 1970s and attracted politically minded artists such as New Order and Hawkwind to play. In early 1980s, the festival was held annually. Some notable performers during this decade were Van Morrison, the Smith and Elvis Costello. The 1990 edition was the biggest festival yet with acts like Paul Oakenfold, The Cure, The Prodigy and R.E.M. Artists like Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney also took to the stage while band like Muse, U2, Radiohead and Coldplay also performed in the festival.

All sorts of people attend the Glastonbury festival. The most common type of people are hippies. These were the main kinds of people who attended in the 70s. Nowadays hippies still go but it's more indie and alternative people. People of all ages attend Glastonbury, it's popular with older people too wanting relive the Woodstock days. Glastonbury is great for all.

Conclusion

All in all, I felt this was a good task to break the ice amongst our group since it got us working in a team. It enabled us to work on our communication and decision making skills as a group. It also gave us an idea of who was more confident with the course too. I think that the end result of the voice-over sequence we made was successful as it was informative. If there could've been improvements, I would've liked more pauses between the narration and another aspect we could've worked on is matching up the sound levels from the interviews and music in the footage to the narration we had recorded. It was a positive task for our group and a good way to start the module, although I wasn't that confident with my teams overall knowledge and input and I'm hoping to be proved wrong by them.

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Week Three - Initial Ideas of Project Proposal and Approach

We now have a lot of good rapport as a team from the tasks and meetings we have had so far, we had a clearer understanding for our project theme regarding the subject surrounding the relationships between humans and dogs. However, to match the 'human and non-human' documentary brief, there is various ways in which we can approach this set brief.

We organised to another meeting in the previous week so we could share some ideas about how to approach subject. We organised to meet at the university library. Helen and I git there early and were the first to meet and we brainstormed ideas about who and what type of people have a strong connection with a dog and form a close relationship. Here are some of the suggestions noted on my mind map below:

Dog + Human Connections - MindMap

As you can tell from the mind map, there was a broad range of ways we could interpret the brief for exploring the relationship between something 'human and non-human' for the documentary. We first considered which people and what occupations involved a lot of contact with canines, we also had to take into considerations who we could realistically get in contact with, since we are situated in Brighton, thus locations in which we want to film the interviews and cutaways for the project would all need to be thought upon too. For example, if we managed to meet a police dog and officer and interviewed them, we want to do so at the local station they are attached to. Another example is a racing greyhound and their owner, we would want the use the Brighton and Hove Greyhound stadium as a location for their shoot.
Myself and Helen alone couldn't conclude what direction we wanted our documentary to go in so when our director (Gokul) arrived, he explained how he was preferring to make an emotionally educating style documentary with a dramatic arc. Gokul thought it would be a much more engaging documentary if we focussed on 2-3 characters to interview, he seemed to have a clear direction in which he wanted the documentary to go in. He wanted us to focus on interviewing the lonely people on the streets of Brighton who have a dog as as a best friend and companion. He also thought that incorporating a psychologist would give a deeper insight into human and dog relationships.

However, I believed that at this stage, we shouldn't limit our options for interviews for our documentary at such an early stage, especially since we didn't have a firm understanding of what approach Gokul really wanted to take with our documentary's narrative and how we would achieve his desired focus, so I suggested that for now, we should contact as many people as possible for the documentary who we had mind mapped and then select the candidates who were willing to be involve in our project to shoot with.
Everyone was in agreement to this idea and we concluded that we'd meet again after next week's workshop to share any feedback we would receive off any possible interviewees we had each got in contact with. We also created a Facebook chat group today which will make communication between us all a lot simpler, whether it was considering who we could interview from possible future feedback we would receive, to finding out what snacks one wanted from the co-op during the edits and more importantly, styles and approached we could take up for the documentary. Below are the people whom we aim to get in contact with:

Luke - Dog Kennels, Vets

Helen - Guide Dogs for the blind

Gokul - Family dogs, lonely dog owners, dog psychologist

Me - Greyhound Track, Police Dogs, Dog Trainers

In this week's workshop, we had to prepare and share an initial proposal with the other groups in our documentary class which we had prepared last week. We received some positive feedback from our peers, many thought we should cut it down to just two characters to focus on if we couldn't find a psychologist to be interviewed. However, our tutor also iterated that our characters needed some form of difference and coherence in order to make this narrative work, but all in all it was a good confidence boost for me as I still wasn't too settled on having to actually produce a documentary involving dogs but everyone else seemed to love the idea in the class.

After this week's workshop, myself and Helen went to Wild Park with the Sony Z7. We did this as we wanted to scout out one of the local public parks near campus and see if any dog walkers would go by. We also went out with the Marrantz Audio recording device and a Boom microphone as Helen wanted to get to grips with the technology that we'd be using further down the line of the course. This trip wasn't as beneficial as we hoped as the weather was miserable that afternoon so only saw a few commuters walk through the park. I tutored Helen with the audio recording equipment and explained the importance of direction of where you point the microphone. Using the Sony Z7 was a bit more technical that I expected, so myself and Helen just got used to operating the camera as well as the tripod and tried to get an understanding of what types of shots we could potential capture when it came to planning our projects storyline and shot sequences.

Contacting Possible Interviewees

Taken from Roy's website

As we each had been assigned a certain demographic of people regarding our documentary project, I used the Internet to research possible contacts. These were local dog trainers, the Brighton and Hove greyhound stadium and the local police force. I got in touch by either calling or emailing the contact details given on their websites. Below are the people I got in touch with for our documentary project:

Roy from Dog's Life - Dog Trainer

http://www.dogwalkingbrighton.co.uk/About-A-Dogs-Life/

I first got in contact with Roy over email which I sourced from his website. I simply googled 'Brighton Dog Training' and his website was one of the top hits. Roy Aldred is a local dog walker and trainer in Brighton and has been a qualified dog trainer for over nineteen years, I thought he would be a great character to involve with our documentary project since his job requires him to have a sound knowledge and understanding of dogs and the relationships we form with them. I also thought in terms of cutaways, dog trainers could provide poignant and visually pleasing shots and Roy may also be able to assist other dog lovers we could interview for our project. Here is are the emails I sent to Roy:

Email to Roy - Part ONE

Email to Roy - Part TWO

Brighton + Hove Greyhound Stadium - Greyhound Racing Dogs and Owners

http://www.brightonandhovegreyhoundstadium.co.uk/index.cfm/content/section.contactInfo/

Another angle we considered we could approach the brief by is to look at people who own greyhounds and race their dogs and see the differences and comparisons in this relationship between dog and owner. Since Brighton had a huge Greyhound Stadium, it was obvious that I should get in contact with them. I knew that I'd have to contact the stadium directly if we wanted to film at there as we would need location permission from them to shoot there. I emailed the stadium and left an answerphone message to the customer service line as well, explaining who I was and issues regarding location shooting permission in and outside the stadium. Here is the email below that I sent them. I thought this could be an interesting approach to the project if we found a greyhound owner who had a pet dog for competitive or financial benefits. Here is the email I sent them.

Local Police Force in Brighton

With the local police and in terms of getting in contact with them, I went to the Police Station on John Street. I went to the reception/help desk and explained I was a student at the University of Sussex doing a Media Practice degree and that I was making a documentary film on the relationships between humans and dogs. I elaborated that I used to be a Lambeth South Police Cadet for a couple years and knew that I understood there are certain officers who work closely with police dogs everyday and wondered if we could get in touch with one of these officers.
Unfortunately, my charm didn't pay off and I was told it was highly unlikely we would be able to organise an interview and filming cutaways of the dogs in training at such a short notice, but they took my contact details anyway and told me they would get an officer in touch if any seemed interested. Sadly, this approach of incorporating police dogs in our documentary wasn't looking to promising as I received no other form of contact details for approaching an officer to interview about his relationship with his police dog.

Doggy Day Clare - Dog Trainer

Doggy Day Clare was another dog training service in Brighton which I found via the internet search of 'Brighton Dog Trainers'. I personally thought any dog trainers would be the best people to interview as they would have a really insightful understanding of the canine psyche and know how people connect with their pets, which would also work with Gokul's idea of incorporating a psychologist. Below is the email I sent to Doggy Day Clare, hoping at least her or Roy would respond.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Three

Life Does Not Tell Stories

"Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random. It leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. The writer can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies."

Jonathan Coe (2004:35)

Narrative Structure

Classic Narrative structure

Todorov cycle (1977)

Inductive model

Equilibrium

Disruption

Recognition

Attempt

New Equilibrium

Deductive model

The resolution of the film is presented at the start.

All scene relate to the main question and will include and conclusion eg. Lie of the Land

Documentary occupies "a complex zone of representation in which the art of observing, responding, and listening must be combines with the art of shaping interpreting or arguing."

Bill Nichols (1997)

Sans Soleil (1983, Marker)

Unconventional image-sound relationship - no definite correspondence between narration "instance of post-modernism" with the video and sound out of sink

Narration of personal memory of events, subjective views. Puts into perspective the conventional narration of documentary with a female voice over.

Narrating human culture - Images are neither the real history or the fiction, only recording as an observer to capture every moment but narration makes it thoughtful

Using narration to show director's thinking and respect to culture and society.

Female voice and authority - Sans Soleil is an expository doc with a conventional narration.

"the authoring presence of the filmmaker is represented by the commentary and voice of authority is seen as the filmmaker." (Nichols 1991:37)

Man always decided what can be talked about, and what cannot..." (Moi 1987:78)

Male voice = authority, female voice = unreliable and week

The female narration is there to intentionally mislead the spectator, it leads them to misinterpret the images.

Questions

- To what extent does the narration impact our understanding of what we see?

- What elements impact our level of trust towards the narrator?

- Does a narration destroy the "pure image" as Kozloff states in the reading?

- Has sounds ever been detrimental to the image in your experience?

Vimeo Short Documentary - 50 years and a few puss kittens wiser

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Week 3 Production Task - 3 Shot Interview [Moving Camera Interview Exercise]

Practical Session Brief:

Moving Camera Interview Exercise (1-2min):

Interviewer and interviewee are walking on campus.

The interview topic: Is Brighton nightlife out of control?

You are expected to shoot three different camera angles ONLY:

1) Camera follows the pair from behind,

2) Camera follows the pair from the side.

3) In the last shot the pair walks towards the (static) camera, so all in all three shots. Please note you are expected to record synch sound with the K-6. Exercise will be discussed during the next practice session.

Questions/Script for Task

Before commencing the interview, the interviewer should introduce themselves and their interviewee to the spectator. They should also inform them of their location and the interview topic before questioning.

Interviewer: Hello, I'm here today with ....., a student at the University of Sussex and I'm here to find out his/her opinion on whether they believe Brighton nightlife is out of control. So....

Questions for the Interview:

·          Brighton has always been known as a musical city, with many nightclubs, pubs, bars and restaurants all around town. Have you been to these in Brighton since you enrolled as a student in Brighton?

·          Have you ever had a bad experience as any of these places or heard about any?

·          Are there any places you avoid in Brighton when you consider going out? Why?

·          An aspects of the nightlife in Brighton's nightlife that isn't considered out of control is it's picture houses. Do you know any picture houses or have you been to any in Brighton such as Komedia or Duke of York?

·          Some of Brighton's biggest clubs include Pryzm, Concorde 2, The Arch, Coalition, the list goes on. What do you know of these places? Have you been to any initiations for any Sport societies at these venues?

·          Would you say Brighton nightlife is out of control? Why? Why not?

The Production:

This task seemed relatively simple on approach, by conducting an interview with three separate shot types which we we've already been given.

Gokul suggested to use the Sony Z7 and K6 boom microphone for this task. Unfortunately, I was no present for the actual production of this task, but Gokul was holding the camera and boom pole, whilst Helen interviewed Luke outside the Silverstone building on campus. This wasn't an ideal situation that I had put the rest of my group in as there was on less set of hands when shooting, therefore it made the challenge for Gokul quite hard as he hand to be the sound grip and cameraman simultaneously. Once shot, we compiled the footage onto a Premiere Pro sequence and constructed the moving interview exercise, making sure the action and audio matched up between each shot.

Conclusion:

Overall, I don't think our group did very well on the production of this task since the other members of my group who were present during the filming of the task didn't record all three shot types required. I didn't notice this until the edit, but there was nothing we could do since the hand-in for this task was the following day. I made sure that the edit of the task was good, but it was clear we hadn't reach the criteria of the task. It made me wary that I should be present for all parts of the production of the task if our group was to carry out the tasks ahead correctly.

Another aspect this task highlighted was the strength and weaknesses members of the group had. I seemed confident with manipulating the editing software, as did Gokul. Luke wasn't chosen to be the cameraman for the task and Gokul didn't want to be the one interviewed for the task and Helen chose to use the K6 microphone for the task which I thought was the wrong decision and that a clip-on microphone should be used instead, giving a clearer sound for the dialogue.

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Week Four - Responses from Interviewees/Approach Alterations

The responses I received from each area of personnel I got in contact with are listed below:

Roy from Dog's Life - Dog Trainer

As you can see from his reply, Roy seemed interested in taking part in our documentary project so I gave him a call and he seemed like a very friendly man, and someone who had a extensive knowledge about dogs and I felt that he would be a great person to interview for our project, so I told him on the phone that I would be in touch in the near future if we decided to use Roy in our documentary. I explained to him what footage we would require off him such as the interview and cutaways and he told us we could come along to one of his training sessions if we wanted to see his training in action. I felt from this phone call that I had built a small rapport with Roy and had a really positive vibe coming from him.

Doggy Day Clare - Dog Trainer

Unfortunately, I had yet to receive a reply from Doggy Day Clare, but I informed our group that if we were going to use a dog trainer for the documentary, then Roy from Dog's Life would be the better option.

Brighton + Hove Greyhound Stadium

The Greyhound Stadium got in contact with me over the phone, in reply to my email they said that in terms of permission to film at the greyhound stadium would be fine, as long as we could tell them the date we needed as soon as possible and how long we would need to be there for as well as what we needed to shoot inside the stadium if we did chose to film there as we would have to be supervised by one of the workers of the stadium. Also, they informed me that in terms of finding a greyhound owner, we would have to do that ourselves once we were at the stadium since they aren't allowed to give out contact details of race dogs and owners to the public, which was more than understandable. I got a contact number from them and said I would be in touch with all the information they would require from use for shooting if we decided to go incorporate greyhound racing in our documentary.

A Shift in Project Proposal

Later this week, our team met up for a meeting concerning the feedback we had received from the personnel we had each got in contact with. Depressingly, none of us had actually received much in the way of positive feedback so we decided we would meet again on Tuesday of week five before our workshop to give our personnel that we’ve got in contact with more time to give us a response.

In the meeting we each explained who we had managed to get in contact with and the responses we had acquired. Helen said she had been unsuccessful in getting in contact or gaining responses from any guide dog companies and societies and that she felt unless we travelled out of Brighton, it would be very difficult to use the guide dog approach for our documentary. She also looked into getting in contact the psychology department at Brighton University, in hope to secure an interview with a doctor from the department.

Luke said he had called both the local Brighton kennels and the vets and said that the vets would just need us to book an appointment with one of the vets and the kennels seemed more than up for us filming an interview on location with a worker from there as well.

I also shared my feedback to the group about Roy, the greyhound stadium and how I was unsuccessful with the police dogs.

However, once we all shared our feedback, Gokul explained to our group that he had done a lot more planning into the narrative and structure of our documentary rather than key personnel. Since he wasn't present at the meeting until nearer the end, he informed us this over our group chat with these messages:

Gokul told us that he had managed to get a response from Sussex and Brighton universities psychologist department and been in contact with Helen in regards to the Brighton psychology department. He also informed us that he had found a lady on the levels named Mary who he managed to get her address details from who seemed more than happy to be part of our documentary. He explained to use that Mary has a dog as a companion for when he husband moves back to Ireland for six months every year.

What Gokul elaborated on in that meeting was that we needed to find a definite approach, a more simplistic approach with a 'dramatic-arc' incorporated with in the construction of the narrative. He explained that we had been having looking at the project too broadly and that he wanted the direction of this documentary to focus on the people who are lonely and are socially dependent on their dogs. I believe Gokul wanted the documentary to be emotively engaging rather than informative. I wasn't too happy about this as it meant the rest of our group had spent a lot of time researching and contacting personnel to use and by having this approach, it would be a lot harder to produce such a documentary. However, it wasn't my decision to make and I didn't want to create any tensions amongst the group so we decided we would ask Yorgos' advice on our narrative approach to see what he deemed would be most appropriate.

Yorgos told our group that he liked the approach we had decided on and that we should focus on two to three people to interview for the project and keep the talking heads to an absolute minimum. He liked the idea of having an emotionally educating film about the relationships between dog and owners, which actually gave me a lot more confidence with the approach Gokul had decided to lead our project on. For our initial hand-in, we had to collaboratively produce a proposal for our project in 500 words.
Here's our proposal:

Group D’s Documentary Project Proposal - Humans & Dogs

Our group’s observational documentary will explore the close relationships between humans and their pet dogs, focusing on two to three characters. The documentary will explore the nature of their relationship, looking at the history between the dog and owner and the positive effects it's had each other’s life.

We shall be interviewing a woman who lived with her dog as a companion since her husband has been living in Ireland for the past 7 years. We shall also interview someone who has an occupation who works closely with dogs whom we have access to a dog trainer and other dog owners we have met as a team in town and possibly the use of a psychologist to provide an analytical insight into human-canine relationships.

We will let our interviewees tell the story of their relationship with their our documentary and shall not use a voice-over narration as we want our audience to emotively engage with the judge our characters and relationship for themselves. From the questions we ask, we will want make our audience aware of what these bonds between humans and pets have fulfill and satisfying each others lives with providing unconditional love and affection, friendship and companionship for one another.

Each member of our group will do research into one of our interviewees’ personal lives and relationship with their pet and construct relevant questions surrounding it. We aim to acquire responses from the interviews that show the relationships between the dog and their owners is almost humanlike and satisfies the needs of each others lives.

The content of our documentary will consist of interview footage shot on the Sony Z7, which can be static mid-shots using a tripod or tracking shots, using a monopod. We shall shoot in our characters comfort zones by where they spend the most time with their pet dog as we want our responses from our interviews to be as natural and truthful as possible. We aim to give a balance to amount of frame for both the dog and the owner receive which visually connotes to our audience that the dog is just as important as the owner in their relationship for our documentary.

An array of cutaways of our subjects engaged in affectionate activities together such as playing in local parks together, grooming, and feeding as well as using close-ups of the just the dogs, and in particular their eyes. This will provide emotively stimulating visuals for our documentary and will deliver the balance of frame time we want to convey in our inductive narrative.

In terms of sounds, we want to integrate both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds respectively to engage the audience more into the narrative. A soft piano for the musical soundtrack can be used to go in between transitions of characters and layered over certain sections of dialogue from the interviews, making certain lines more poignant and sensitive for the audience. Boom microphones will be needed to record key ambient noises and clip-on or radio microphones will be used for interviews.

So now we had decided on our documentary's approach, we needed to start shooting footage. The first person we aimed to get in contact with was Mary, a lady that Gokul and Helen had met at the Levels park in Brighton.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Four

Divorce Iranian Style

Director: Kim Longinotto (2002)

Her films focus on issues concerning women.
The film explores five cases of five different women that are seeking divorce.
It shows the reality of how the legal system affects people's lives.
Minimal voice-over that was used to state facts (female narrator)
Showed Iranian women differently
Sometimes we hear voice of the filmmakers interacting with the participant

Observational Mode:
- Created in 1960s, "the camera freely moved to record what happened as it happened"
- The filmmaker observes what happens in front of the camera
- No voice over to address the spectator

Observation Scenes in Divorce Iranian Style
- The subjects in the film interact with each other, their discussions draws the attention of the spectator away from the film makers (camera)
- The scene represents the actual situation, it creates tension with in the topic

Reading:

"We look in on life as it is lived" - Nichols (2001)

Relating to the works of the Italian neo-realists (1944-52) the characters within the documentary are caught up in "pressing demands or crisis of their own"

How wary are the people being filmed in the observational mode of documentary are aware of the camera.

Editorial control means that there is no true observation as we have selected natural scenes to exhibit to create a specific meaning or ideology.

Types of Shots

Close or far?
Static or moving?
Camera subject to distance, angle, lens type and duration

Long Shot

Close Up

Wide Shot

Medium Close Up

Point of View Shot

Over the Shoulder Shot/Reverse Angle (180 degree arc)

Low-Angle Shot

High-Angle Shot

Pan Shot

Tilt Shot

Pedestal Shot - Camera moves up and down on a pedestal dolly

Zoom Shot

Dolly Shot

Tracking Shot

Crane Shot

A good video which shows you all the types of shot angles in practice can be found under this web link:
https://youtu.be/TuGvRu5N9v4

For a more through understanding of when and why to use certain shot types, read this document:
http://adaptation391w.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2012/08/Shot-Terminology-Reduced.pdf

Further explanation on certain types of shots:

Pan
This refers to when the camera pivots horizontally. In terms of human action, this can be use to take in the surroundings, or as a surveillance. People associate this camera movement subconsciously with discovering and revealing or assessing, escaping, fearing and also expectation.

Tilt
A tilt is a vertical pivot of the camera and holds different connotations to the pan. It can be likened to assessing depth or height and is a great way to establish power dynamics on film e.g. by looking up to or down on someone or something.

Crane
This is when the camera travels vertically in parallel with the subject. It gives the sense of traveling with the subject. It can be used when someone sits down or stands up for example.

Dolly track
You use a dolly to help your camera travel smoothly horizontally. It's allows the camera to follow the action, away from or towards someone or something without shaking the camera. It can include traveling in front of someone or following them. It can connote meanings such as being able to represent attraction or repulsion at the other end of the spectrum. By combining particular changes in direction you can change the meaning e.g. by advance towards a subject and then retreating from the same subject. Here is my favourite use of a dolly track.
Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) - Copacabana Shot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCYwcObxl78

Composition (Aspect Ratios)

4:3 (Shooting)

16:9 (Shooting)

1.85:1 (Projection)

2.39:1 (Projection)

Depth & Perspective

- Image perspective is the apparent depth of the image and the spatial position of objects in different planes.

Frame Movement

Image Qualities

Speed of Motion

- Changing by altering the film recording speed or in editing

- Long focal length often slows down the apparent motion by squashing space.

Examples of Observational Films

Grey Gardens

- People were being observed but also interacting with the camera

High School

- Non diegetic soundtrack (Sitting On the Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding)

- Lots of ECU

- No interaction with the camera

Don't Look Back

- Bob Dylan's tour

- Rockumentary

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Week Five - Recce Notes: The Levels

The Levels is a large park in Brighton, just off from Lewes Road. It's bordered by roads and has path ways cutting across the park as well as a skate park too. Things that I took notice of for shooting interviews and cutaways for the documentary here were:

Outdoors - No control over lighting and weather, we would be limited to the times we could shot our interviews at the park during the peak hours of the day for maximum sunlight
Bordering Roads - This would effect the ambient sound of our documentary since this wasn't a very rural park.
Lots of Commuters - We would have to be wary of the public and if we filmed any passersby that they wouldn't get in the way of shooting as one of our production tasks took place on the levels and a member of the public got very rude to use as we didn't have consent from here to film her and her dog in the park

I went on a walk around the park and took a few shots from various angles, so when we would film our interviews and cuts with Mary, that at least one of use would have some familiarity with the location and would have some awareness about the best spots to shoot both interviews and cutaways.

Getting in contact with Mary Alford

Name: Mary Alford

Address: Ewart Street

Phone Number: 01273 676 776

Dog's Name: Roofie

Points to Note: Mary's Irish, her husband is still in Ireland and her dog Roofie provides her with a comforting relationship and companionship as she is a reminder of Mary's husand.

Myself and Luke had to go and visit Mary Alford at her home in Brighton after she had initially agreed with Gokul and Helen on the weekend of the Observational Task to be interviewed for our documentary. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember her house phone number so visiting Mary personally at her home was the only way we could contact her! By visiting Mary, we thought it would ease her tensions more about being filmed for a documentary and we would be able to create a good rapport with her.

I prepared these notes to prior our visit with her.

Ask her for 5-10 minutes of her time.

- Explain our documentary and why she's a key figure to interview for our documentary
- What footage we will need off her (an interview and cutaways)
- Organise when she's available to film and match her requirements
- Find out a bit more about her and her dog, get her comfortable with talking about her subject by asking her similar questions we would ask in the interview and what they get up to whether she has any photos we could use of her and her dog. What activities and treats her does her dog like (maybe buy some for the day we film cut aways?)
- Inform her about the consent form and when we finish the film by and whether she would like a copy for herself when the edit is finished
- Thank her for her time and give her our contact details

Possible Questions:

Dog's name, age
Why do you have...., what does he bring into your life
What's he like, how do you find taking care of him and living with
Have you trained you're dog? If so, why or why not

Conclusion of the Initial Meeting:

We managed to arrange the interview for Monday 26th with an interview to take place at her local park. We managed to get her house phone number when we visited her but we didn't have a consent form for her to sign, so it's imperative we get that done on the 26th. Mary seemed to have a great love for Roofie saying that "She's the boss of the house" and seemed very affectionate towards her. We got a bit more of an understanding about the reasons why she is so attached to Roofie and we want to establish her story in our documentary.

In terms of archive material, Mary said her that any photos or films of her and Roofie would be back at her motherland in Ireland so we will not be able to use any archive footage as cutaways for this interviewee in our documentary. Mary seemed to be really cooperative with our needs and told us she was more than happy to re-organise and/or re-shoot as and when we needed which gave us the comfort as we knew if we needed something filmed, it would be very straight forward to organise.

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Week 4+5 Production Task - Observational Camera Exercise

[To be completed out of class for potential editing and inclusion in your pilot]:
In your teams you will choose an interesting location NOT ON CAMPUS where people are engaged in specific activities. Spend time observing what happens there, and then, using a variety of shots and camera movements, shoot there for at least an hour, taking turns on camera sound and directing. Choose a scene where a pattern or process can be observed going on over a short period of time. Be sure to record adequate and appropriate sound at the moment of shooting. Remember to obtain an atmos (buzz) sound track of the general sound on the location, as well as sound close-ups (wild tracks) of significant actions. There should be no interviews – your aim is to reveal a key idea about the location through the images and existing sound. Please note that you are to record this with sync sound, not silent.

YOU SHOULD AIM TO USE THIS EXERCISE TO SHOOT AT A LOCATION THAT YOU MAY USE IN YOUR FINAL PROJECT.

From the Recce Notes from this week, you can see that we chose the location of the public park known as 'The Levels' in Brighton to carry out this exercise. The first thing we did once we arrived with the equipment is to survey the area. We perched on a high bit of land, surrounding the park and I noticed:

- Dog Walkers

- Skateboarders

- Children playing football

- People sitting on benches, chatting, smoking, drinking beer out a can

- Workers commuting through

- Cyclists

- Friends playing frisbee

- Streets cleaner, emptying bins

There were many activities going on that we could observe in this park and since we were going to be shooting for an hour we focussed on the most relevant shots to our documentary project. Dogs and their walkers.

That day we actually captured some really good footage. We all got a better understanding of how to follow action with the camera on a tripod, since many dogs would be running around at a speed. We filmed it from a high perspective as well as a close-up and low perspective of the dogs around the park and many of their owners didn't seem to take notice that they were on camera. We also did a shoot down the pedestrian/cycle lane as this was the part of the part with the most amount of motion but it was actually quite boring as the shot was focusing on anything in particular. An interesting shot we did capture was that of two homeless sharing conversation over a beer, looking out into the park.

When I reflect on this exercise and what others thought of what we captured, I thought it was a great start to our project as it got us an understanding of how intrusive us as filmmakers would have to be in order to get the desired shots we wanted for cutaways within our project of the dog and owner in action. I realised that even though we wanted observational qualities for our documentary, we as film makers would still have to be intrusive on the 'reality' of what is being depicted as some shots would have to be instructed upon. For instance, if Mary spoke about Roofie saving her life in a certain situation, we wouldn't be able to get the actual footage from that moment, it would have to be reenacted.

Sound was down to Helen, she went around the park with a K6 boom microphone and Marrantz recorder and got sounds from various locations around the levels, such as

Skate park - wheels and metal grind noises, skaters falling and communicating

Main walk way - footsteps, bike wheels and bells, people chatting, buggies

Park ambience - wind, cars and traffic, seagulls, children playing, dog barks

When it came to matching up the ambience with footage, it was a really easy task as Helen had made sure she followed us step by step for each location we observed. I found as an editor than some of the motion we captured on the dogs running had a bit of motion blur, so if we decided to use shots of fast-moving dogs, that we would have to increase the frame rate for those shots. I found it quite fun to get to grips with using premiere pro and learning how to manipulate certain sounds and to distort them using some audio effect presets. For example, adding echo to certain sounds of the skate park to give the sound more depth. I thought this task for the module was a great benefit to the project and gave my team confidence that we would be able to find dog walkers around the Levels not to be a problem and planned to come here again to secure someone for an interview.

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Week Six - Filming with Mary at the Levels Park

Equipment List:

- Sony Z7 Camera

- Tripod

- Monopod

- Boom Mic

- Clip-On Cord Mic

Our first day shooting for our documentary was definitely a good learning curve for us all in the team. Since I was the editor for the project, and this role came into practice a lot more in post-production, I put myself forward to be the interviewer and to construct the questions for the interview, these were based from the research I had done of the human and canine relationship which can be found in a separate blog post:

Questions for Interview:
1. Can you introduce yourself
2. Tell us about your dog (name/age/breed)?
3. How long have you and Roofie known each other?
4. Could you tell us why you decided to have a pet dog?
5. By having Roofie in your life, what impacts has she had upon you? (Short or long term) 6. What do you think makes Roofie unique/special in comparison to other dogs ?
7. What kind of relationship do you feel that you have with Roofie?
8. Since you first met Roofie, how do you think you and her have changed over the years? 9. Has Roofie had any training? What for/Why not?
10. What's the best thing about owning Roofie?
11. Could you tell us more about the situation you have with your husband and how Roofie supports you?
12. What does Roofie give to you with your husband being away?

13. Do you consider Roofie to be on of the family do you think of her as human? Do you think Roofie enjoys the relationship?

We arrived at the levels with about 20 minutes to set-up the equipment for the shoot. This was very much needed as whilst setting up, the cameraman, Luke said there was an issue with recording the footage as the camera was asking for a film tape to record on. Gokul then went into panic mode by the thought that we didn't have a tape to record on and our first days shooting would be a waste of time. Luckily, since I had a familiarity with the Z7 from last years Video Production course, I realised that we just needed to change the output recording settings of the camera to go onto the memory card we had been provided and not a tape.

Another issue we had was with the recording equipment. The clip-on microphones weren't the easiest to set up, especially when our sound artist, Helen was clueless with how to set-up the equipment with the camera. However, Gokul assisted her here and we managed to set up the audio properly.

When Mary and her dog Roofie arrived, we had the camera all set up and ready for a static interview on one of the park benches. We managed to get a seat which had sunlight beaming towards it and set up the clip-on microphone to Mary's coat lapel. Before we started recording, I gave Mary an idea of what kind of responses we were looking for, to answer our question is full sentences and if she made a mistake with her words to just start of the sentence again.
A problem we encountered whilst filming the static interview with Mary were the cables from the microphone to the camera. The cables kept getting entwined and tangled with Roofie's legs which effectively gave some of the recorded audio 'scratch and click' like noises. So for our moving interview, Gokul and Helen decided to switch the audio recording device for the interview to the boom mic since the cable was much shorter and would be much less likely to get tangled with Roofie's legs.
Whilst filming the moving interview, I had to keep eye contact with Mary whilst questioning and guide Luke whilst he shot the interview so he wouldn't fall over and so he kept at a consistent pace. We asked the same questions in both the moving and static interviews.
Once we had filmed all the interviews we had needed that day from Mary, we filmed various cutaways of her at the park with Roofie and Mary.
We recorded them walking around the park, doing various types of long shots to Close-ups, shots of the two interacting with other people in the park, shots of just Roofie in the frame as I knew we would want to try and balance the amount of frame time between dog and dog owner once it came to the edit. We wanted to film as much a possible that day so that we had more than enough footage to select from for our groups pilot material.

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Week 6 Production Task – One-Shot Catalysed Event Exercise

Task Brief:

In this exercise you create an event through your presence with the camera – a performative mode of documentary. It is the opposite of classic observational cinema where the emphasis is being as unobtrusive as possible, being ‘a fly on a wall’.

 Using a mobile camera, record events in an unbroken 7 to 10 minutes take. The director (or a surrogate) must make things happen. For instance [...] a camera crew followed a woman into a male only Turkish café and shot what happened. To carry this assignment off you need a strong idea and then plans for contingencies. It requires the ability to improvise and to bring events to a conclusion in the allotted time span.

 You should aim to begin filming for final assignment. Ensure you have any necessary location permissions and access to shoot when you require. Continue editing practice using material shot in class exercises e.g lay audio interview over subject walking around university.

Process of Task Production:

As Luke had done this very task last year, he put his idea forward of having him sing Robbie William’s songs in a public place and for us to film people’s reaction. As Luke knew many of the lyrics to many hit Robbie songs, he said he could definitely last seven minutes singing.

So we set up the camera just away from the main path junction at the Levels Park as this would be where the most number of commuters would pass through. We had all the equipment listed from the shoot with Mary so I will not list out the equipment again. We set up Luke to have a clip of microphone so we could clearly hear his lyrics as well as the boom microphone so we could hear people’s reactions to Luke singing.

The task panned out pretty well, we alternated shot angles per song and we did get quite a few reactions from random members of the public. However, it wasn’t that busy so it was only about every fifteen-twenty seconds that a commuter would actually pass in front of the camera, and they wouldn’t always react. In fact, Luke had to also do physical gestures at people to make them have better reactions to his singing. From the people who did get react, they either song along with the song, nodded their head or gesture back at Luke.

Conclusion of the Final Production Task

If this task could’ve improved, I think we should’ve gone to somewhere with a lot more people to acquire a lot more reactions, such as outside Churchill Square shopping center. I also think that how close the camera is to the subject has a huge part to play in this as people will react differently if they know they’re being filmed. So if we had a radio microphone and shot Luke from the other side of the park, the reactions could’ve been a lot more natural.

When we showed our task to the class, we got some positive responses from it. A lot of people laughed at some stage and thought that we had approach the task with a strong idea and a good execution, but it could’ve been better if we just had more people around to react to Luke’s singing.

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A Change in Production Group

During our reading week where we had to compile a group proposal concerning our documentary project, pilot material and an report for hand-in, our team hit a major crisis. Helen had been switched to Friday's documentary class instead of Thursday, so Yorgos told us that she would no longer be part of our group. This did infuriate me a little as I had asked our tutor after the very first workshop if I could change production groups since I wanted to be in a group with a colleague I had worked with before [or someone that I knew had acquired a high grade in the first year's practical modules] but I was told this was not possible. Yet Helen was able to change. Then Gokul decided to drop the course entirely which was a huge blow for our production as losing the director for any documentary project can be catastrophic.

However, these things do happen and our tutor told us that it was now up to just myself and Luke to create our documentary project. I wasn't happy about this at all when I was first told as myself and Luke now had to take up and extra production role each, which essentially would give us both double the work load for the project. Our tutor did explain that when it came to marking our project, then he would definitely take this into consideration.

Although initially this seemed to be a chaotic situation, Luke seemed to be quite content about the matter and said it would give us a lot less restriction as to where we now wanted to take the project and that decision making for the documentary would be a lot simpler with less people. What I was worried about was having less hand whilst shooting for the project and we would have a lot more work to put on ourselves to make a successful project.

Since we couldn't split the roles between us, we decided that me and Luke would collaborate on the direction and the project as well as the sound role. We also concluded that Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays we were both free to meet for our project and would aim to meet up at least twice a week to discuss matters and to work on our documentary project. Gokul was naturally absent for our presentation meetings with our tutor ,and our reflective documentary presentation, that we be presenting to our class the next week.

On a good note this meant that Luke and I had a lot more flexibility on the narrative decisions as there was only two of us left in the production group so we rethought the approach to the documentary style and decided we would now create a documentary which informed its audience on the core benefits pet dogs provide to humans. We still believed that the use of a voice over could interfere with the realism and the naturalness of the documentary and thus lose the spectators engagement with the documentary. However, we though the use of a backing track in the documentary could reinforce certain messages and morals given from our subjects. We definitely thought this needed strong consideration in the edit if we are to use a non-diegetic soundtrack.

From the research report (which has already been handed-in in the first assessment of this module) you can see that I have done research into the benefits dog companionship brings to humans and the results I got from some of my research was fascinating and we would use some these benefits to help structure our questioning for our interviewees in the near future.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Six

Reading Week Presentation Notes: Project Progress

Brief:

Each group will make a 15–20 minute presentation to your tutor outlining their research to date towards the project brief. Each team member must contribute for 5 minutes, focussing on those aspects of the production for which they have assumed responsibility.
You should research possible outlets for getting your project screened (regardless of length) e.g online, broadcast, festivals, other audiences and explain why your project is suitable for you chosen outlet.
You should talk about your project in depth covering such aspects as:

How your project will address the brief:

The suggested structure, narrative – how will the subject be revealed over time to
sustain interest?

The documentary modes to be used

The aesthetic style e.g. use of static or moving camera, pace, types of footage,
colour/black and white etc)

Use of sound and music

Any particular challenges major problems you foresee with it.

You should use examples to illustrate your work and also provide visual/aural aids where necessary. The tutor will be in the role of commissioning editor/curator and must be prepared to ask searching questions about the project’s aims and realisation. The tutorial will finish with questions from the group to the tutor regarding the submission of the pre-production portfolios

Planning:

Since my role was being the editor for our creative project I would be using an editing 'bible' I was informed about when I was working as a Film & Media technician at a London secondary state school by the head of the department to assist my work towards our project. The Book was called In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch and I shall be incorporating some of his methods and editorial techniques he suggests for when we get to editing stage of our production such as:

1. Rule of Six

Here’s Murch’s list of priorities when analyzing what makes a good cut:

Emotion: 51%
Is it true to the emotion of the moment?

Story: 23%
Does it advance the story?

Rhythm: 10%
Does it occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”?

Eye-Trace: 7%Does it acknowledge eye-trace (the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame)?

Two-dimensional Plane of Screen: 5%
Does it respect “planarity” (the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two)?

Three-dimensional Space of Action: 4%
Does it respect three-dimensional continuity of the actual space of where people are in the room and in relation to one another?

Ideally, every cut will satisfy each of these six criteria. Obviously, however, this is not always an option. So, in short, this list gives priority to the subjective over the objective—that is, it challenges the me to weigh things like emotion and story significantly more than 2D and 3D spacial considerations within our footage. Murch even assigns emotion to a value of 51%, which means that cutting based on emotion is more important than the other five criteria combined.

Slides to Include

Research of Subject Matter
-Readings on Human & Dog Relationships, addressing the brief
-Readings on Editing Documentaries
-Interview Research

Aesthetic Considerations
-Colour
-Pace
-Rule of Six
-Stills, Archive footage
-Shot types & challenges

Sound Considerations for Edit
-Transcripts
-Certain Microphones for specific shots/locations
-No use of voice-over
-Instrumental Accompaniment

Screening Outlets
-Local film festivals
-Student film festivals
-Online competitions

Script

Slide 1: George's Slides; Editor

Today I will be discussing with you my research on my role and theme so far for our group's documentary project on Human and Dogs, specifically those who have a close companionship to their pet. I will be presenting you this in 3 parts, analysing my subject matter research and role research for the project, I'll be informing you about our aesthetic considerations for the project and some sound related considerations that we will need to focus on during the filming of our production to help improve the efficiency of the editing process. Finally I will discuss you possible outlets that our documentary could be exhibited at.

Slide 2: Research on Role & Subject Matter

In terms of research, I have done various readings of books, online articles and surveys concerning human and dog relationships and found the most interesting and poignant piece to our documentary topic to be this article by Michael J. Dotson and Eva. M. Wyatt concerning human and dog companionship.

It analyses how and why humans form specific relationships with their pet dogs, and explains the benefits of people keeping pet dogs and the nature and meanings of certain dog and humans relationships.

Since our documentary was going making our audience aware of bonds people have built with their pet dogs, this journal provided a strong insight into how and why humans form specific relationships with their pet dogs, and explains the benefits of people keeping pet dogs and the nature and meanings of certain dog and humans relationships. For example, in this journal it explains that in Russell Belk in 1996 did a qualitative study with high involvement pet owners and found there to be 4 main metaphors of human-dog relationships. Pets as a means of providing pleasure and problems; an extension of ones self; a replacement family member; possession. This was very similar to another research related article I found called Interrelations between humans and pets (Fox, 1981) where he also reports that there are four categories of dog and human relationships where they are:

1. Object orientated (dog as a possession)
2. Utilitarian/Exploitative (dog provides benefits to human)
3. Need dependency (dog as companion or surrogate child)
4. Actualizing (dog is a respected significant other)

He explains that dogs also have identical emotions to humans and that is why such strong bonds can be formed between humans and their dogs. We wanted to find people who did satisfy the need dependency margin and to make our spectator more aware of how powerful this type of bond between human and dog can be.

Since I'm the editor for the project, I will be using an my editing 'bible' that I was informed about when I was working as a Film & Media technician at a London secondary state school by the head of the department to assist my work towards our project. The book is called In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch and I shall be incorporating some of his methods and editorial techniques he discusses for when we get to editing stage of our production which I will touch upon later in this presentation.

Slide 3: Aesthetic Considerations

By having editorial control, I'll be able to construct narrative and meaning within the documentary just by how I construct and layer the footage together. Therefore, it's important to consider and decide upon as many aesthetic considerations as possible when it comes to the editing process of the production.

In terms of colour, we will need to make our footage more vibrant and warm to give a more natural and comforting feel to our documentary. This can be done by adding fillers to the recorded footage and we can saturate the images and play with the contrast to create our desired effect. Another reason why we will have to add colour effects is because all the footage we are going to shot will take place in the outdoors in natural light settings and there will also tend to be grass within the shots. According to Willie Fielding in his book on Film Making, he says outdoor sunlit locations will give a blue cast to the image quality when filming and if grass is in the shot, the blue cast will show even stronger." Therefore I'll have to alter footage where this applies to the footage we shot and play with the colours and add fillers to the image.

Pace is another area of the editing process which we have considered. From watching various clips on YouTube and Vimeo on human and dog related videos, I have seen an array of different cutaways used in them. The most effective being the high frame rate shots of dog's running around in an activity which reduces the motion blur but also captures and exaggerates the movement of the dog. Another technique employed in participatory documentaries with animals is to have close-up, observational shots of pet and owner. We will employ this technique as we want to give a balance to the amount of frame time our interviewees have as well as their pets

Besides that, I will ensure cutaways will be no less than 3 seconds but not longer than 10 seconds as frantic/over-long cuts losses the attention our spectator and detaches them from the narrative according to Murch.
From watching various animal and nature related documentaries such as BBC's Planet Earth and The Wonders of Dogs, they contain a vast array of extreme-close ups when there's poignant dialogue to be heard. This has influenced me to show emotive shots of extreme close-ups of dog's eyes. By focusing on the eyes of both the dog it will capture their emotional qualities which agrees with Murch's rule of 6 when we analyse what makes a good cut

As we want our audience to be emotively involved with our production, I must consider what Murch calls in his book In the Blink of an Eye as the 'Rule of Six' when editing and cutting footage. As there will be so much footage to go through, the best way of selecting sequences to analyse them as seeing if they match Murch's criteria of what makes it good cut.

[GO THROUGH SLIDE]

It's apparent that emotion is the key part to any sequences as it outweighs all the other areas of consideration in the rule of six and I aim use this technique as it limits you to having the best quality footage. Ideally, every cut will satisfy each of these six criteria. Obviously, however, this is not always an option. So, in short, this list gives priority to the subjective over the objective—that is, it challenges the me to weigh things like emotion and story significantly more than 2D and 3D spacial considerations within our footage. Murch even assigns emotion to a value of 51%, which means that cutting based on emotion is more important than the other five criteria combined.

Stills and archive footage are cutaways in which we shall only incorporate if: the dog owners possesses such footage and if it's relevant to the dialogue. If neither fits that criteria than we shall not involve archive footage or stills.

In terms of challenges we'll face that will effect the edit of our documentary, this will mainly be caused by weather and location conditions because practically all our footage is going to be shot outdoors in natural light. We will have to be wary of the weather in particular as rain and wind will serious impact not only the image quality of our footage but the sound too. Therefore, we aim to do all our filming in places where there is not a huge layers on sound in the sonic environment and to shoot during the prime time of the day to gain the brightest natural light.

Slide 4: Sound Considerations for the Editing Process

Sound is another important aspect of the edit that needs consideration. From all the production tasks and readings we have been set throughout the course, it's obvious that sound has just a big an impact upon the response from the spectator as the visuals do and is something that needs to be planned before filming to make the editing of the sound an easier task.

We've encountered many problems brought on from our locations we've filmed at and the weather when it comes to the editing stage of our tasks. Therefore, we now know to use specific microphones for certain situations when filming to avoid having to reshoot/record scenes because of the audio. For example, we know that clip-on microphones are the best for picking up dialogue as the boom microphones pick up too much other ambient noises for the dialogue to be clear.

As editor, I'll be responsible for transcribing all the interviews we record which will make the editing of filmed dialogue a less tedious task and by using Murch's technique of summarizing sequences into specific keywords mentioned in the scene, it allowed the edit to become much less time consuming process and allows the rest of the team to easily locate footage. Also when it comes to a paper edit, it become much easier to shape the narrative we want to construct by narrowing down specific shots/scenes into keywords.

Slide 5: Possible Screening Outlets

Once our documentary has been fully produced an edited, there are a number of different ways would could exhibit our documentary. We could send it in to film festivals or competitions that are available to students to enter. I wasn't to sure about who has the rights to our documentary when made so I wasn't to sure how to go about submitting our documentary but there are many festivals on the BFI website in which students in the UK can enter.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/bfi-film-academy-scheme/film-festivals-young-filmmakers
Since our films focuses on dogs and their owners and the relationship between them, our audience is to be aimed at potential dog owner's or people who want to know more about the close relationships people can build with their pet dogs. I do not think that our documentary is aimed at a specific age demographic and the theme is open to people of all ages and cultures.

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Week Seven - Pilot Material Production

This part of the production process was where my role as the editor strongly came into play. We had acquired a lot of footage from Mary and her dog Roofie that day on the levels, so there was a lot of footage to choose from. Organising all the footage was key to get right from the start, so I made footage bins for cutaways, static and walking interviews, sequences and sounds and split the footage into appropriate bins. For the cutaways, I ensured I looked through every single second of footage we had filmed as....... and kept the most poignant and emotive clips because.....

When it came to editing the interviews, Helen noticed as well as I that there was a huge difference in sound of dialogue between the walking interview and the static interview. This was because these sequences were filmed with different microphones, therefore the walking interview with Mary, the K6 boom microphone picked up a lot more ambient sound than the clip on microphone for the static interview. The difference between the sound qualities were so obvious that we knew we would have to re-shoot the interview with Mary at the Levels for our final project hand-in.
Beside this, we learnt that we should've transcribed both the interviews and selected the best pieces of dialogue this way as it was a lot more time consuming for me to go through and cut out every response from the interviews, and then listening back to them again and deciding which ones to discard.

In conclusion to our pilot material hand-in for the project, I felt the edit was rushed and had a lot of areas for improvement. We hadn't colour corrected the footage, or corrected the sound levels. I hadn't incorporated name credits for both Mary and her dog. But, the production of the pilot material was a learning curve that taught me that a paper-edit would definitely be needed to organise our project, interviews would have to be transcribed and that we would try to acquire as many cutaways as we could that we thought were relative to the interview responses.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Seven

Workshop Presentation Brief: Reflexive Documentary

With your team, analyse how the techniques associated with ‘reflexive mode’ mode (as identified in Nichols) are being used/varied in the film Derrida (Dick & Ziering- Kofman, 2002) and how the use of this mode affects your feelings for and understanding of the subject. Present your analysis in the next workshop session in Week 7 in a presentation of no more than 15 minutes, including a clip of max 5 minutes.

SLIDES

1. WHAT IS THE REFLEXIVE MODE

2. TECHNIQUES/CONVENTIONS OF THE REFLEXIVE MODE

3. OUR REFLECTION ON DERRIDA

4. READINGS REFERENCES

5. QUESTIONS FOR THE CLASS

Planning

Myself and Luke meet up a lot during our reading week and discussed that we would split the readings between us and find our own clips regarding the slides we we're going to talk about. We had set readings to refer to as well as a main film of reference all to incorporate into our short presentation. These are:

Sections on the reflexive documentary in Nichols, “What types of documentary are
there?’ and in “Representing Reality”

Nichols, B. (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Ch. 1: Why are Ethical Issues
central to Documentary Filmmakijg?

Chanan M. ( 2007) The Politics of Documentary. Ch. 13 The Space of the Subject:
the projection of personality.

Script for Presentation: George

What is the "Reflexive" Documentary

The Reflexive mode is both the most difficult to define and the least common of the six documentary modes described by Bill Nichols in his honoured taxonomy first articulated in Representing Reality (1991).

In essence, Reflexive documentaries undertake a structural critique of the documentary form itself, emphasising the constructed nature of both film and reality. The goal of a Reflexive documentary is to get audiences to think about the ways that documentaries construct their vision of reality; it exposes the various “rhetorics of authenticity” by which the documentary mode asserts its truth claim. Thus, reflexive documentaries acknowledges the constructed nature of documentary and flaunts it - conveying to people that this is not necessarily "truth" but a reconstruction of it - "a" truth, not "the" truth.

Also, in the section on 'What types of Documentary are there?' in representing reality, Nichols elaborates that reflexive documentaries "acknowledges their presence in front of the camera and provides a narrative to the documentary "...provokes our awareness of social organisation and the assumptions that support it." In this way, the reflexive mode of documentary often functions as its own regulatory board, policing ethical and technical boundaries within documentary film itself. The viewer is made aware of the process of production, and the presence of the filmmaker in the scenarios which s/he is constructing. Also the filmmaker controls in some real way the meaning of what is said in the reflexive mode.

Luke will now go onto discuss some of the codes and conventions in Derrida in reference to this week's readings.

Clip Comments

Clip 1 -

Clip 2 -

How the ‘Reflexive’ mode affects us in Derrida

Derrida incorporates and manipulates the codes and conventions of a typical reflexive documentary. At several points, Derrida shows the philosopher applying his theory of deconstruction to the film itself. Derrida often challenges the filmmaking process and argues against the capability of any film to portray him accurately. The film also includes metacinematic scenes in which Derrida analyses previously recorded footage of himself.

We are constantly reminded as audience, we are watching an act of fiction and we are told this not only by seeing visuals of the camera crew, setting up of clip-on mic and other things during the documentary.
Normally in the reflexive mode, the interviewee and audience may manipulated by the filmmaker. However, Derrida is a philosopher and has a clear way of thinking (deconstruction). The filmmakers do use a voice-over narration, but it is used in the film to quote Derrida directly so the filmmaker does not manipulate the audience with their own words, but Derrida's.

Script for Presentation: Luke

slide 1

'instead of seeing through documentaries to the world beyond them, reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is; a construct or representation' Nichols 'I don’t know who’s going to be watching this' acknowledging its a film.

Breaks down the wall.

'I want to explain the presence and ask your permission for this film crew on my left they'll be recording some images' acknowledging that it is a film. 'the reflexive mode is the most self conscious and self questioning mode of representation' Nichols 'reflexive documentaries also tackle issues of realism' Nichols 'this is what you call cinema verite? Everything is false' 'One of the things that makes Derrida the film such a playful documentary is that Derrida the man is completely aware of these processes, which he holds up and turns around in front of the camera. At the start we find him at home planning to go out, he's lost his keys, and greets the camera with a playful negation 'Forgive me for not even saying hello. It's a bit difficult. A moment later he addresses the camera again, 'So you're going to come with me' Chanan He is acknowledging it is a film and playing with the film maker.

Slide 2

'Derrida does his best to undermine things, taking nothing at face value, becoming an active participant in the deconstruction of his own documentary, and on several occasions challenging his interviewer, complaining, always with good humour, that this question is too general, and that one too complicated, to be able to give reply' Chanan Derrida is playful and interacts with the film maker breaking down the wall. He challenges the filmmaking process and argues against the capability of the film to portray him accurately. 'The camera repeatedly catches him doing what he does best, deconstructing. The film makers enter into the spirit, playfully deconstructing their own process in cahoots with their subject, and Derrida's philosophical wariness about becoming a 'subject' for the camera serves them as a spirngboard to investigate the limits of the biographical film portrait' Chanan They are playing with process of film maiking and actively acknowledging they are making a film.

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Week Eight - Reshoot with Mary (2nd Interview)

From the poor quality of sound that our initial interview with Mary, we concluded that we would have to reshoot our interview with Mary and rethink the questions we wanted to ask her to gain more informative and engaging responses. From the research I had done for the report we all had to do for hand-in, I learnt a lot more about the forms and benefits of the relationships people build between themselves and their pet. Me and Luke constructed some more relevant questions to Mary and her relationship with Roofie than the previous interview:

- Introduce yourself and your dog for us

- Why did you decide to have a dog for a pet?

- Does having a dog make you do more exercise, thus making you a healthier person?

- Can you explain what comforts your dog provides you?

- Does having a pet dog make you more social in your community?

- What do you friends and family think of your dog?

- Has your dog been to the vet besides for injections and check-ups?

- What other activities besides walking do you and your dog get up to?

- Do you consider your dog part of the family? Why? Why not?

- Does your dog provide you with protection?

- How does owning a dog support your life?

- Would you say you’re obsessed with your dog?

- Do you think owning a dog has affected your mental health?

- Does your dog provide you with unconditional love?

- Did you have to train your dog?

- What do you love about your dog?

- If you could change something about your dog, what would it be?

- What kind of people would you recommend buying a pet dog to?

- Do you take your dog to get groomed?

- Do you use a pet sitter or kennels? Why/Why not?

We knew that not all the questions would be relevant to Mary, but they could be to our next possible interviewee, so we wanted a comparison between responses from our interviews we would film in the future.

After our reading week and initial hand-ins for the module, I called Mary and told her our situation with the sound from the interviews we filmed being to poor to use for the project and re-organised a shoot with her later in this week at the Levels. We concluded we would meet at 12:30pm at the same place we meet for the first shoot on a Tuesday as that's when it was least likely to rain during the week at that time. Weather was a key component to take into consideration for our shoots as practically every shoot we would record would have no artificial lighting.

Equipment List
- Sony X70 Camera Kit
- White Balance Card
- Radio clip-on microphones
- K6 boom microphone
- Tripod

The Sony X70 Camera Kit was a new equipment set for the media stores this year, which I had learnt to get to grips with Salman and Ben, whom are in another production group. I found this camera compared to the Z7 a lot more practical and easier to use. It had much easier settings to operate, shot at a higher quality, it was easier to manipulate the gain, iris, shutter speed, zoom and focus and it was also smaller and lighter which was much more practical for Luke to hold when recording the moving interviews or cutaways. I personally couldn't wait to use it for our project. Another great benefit this kit provided was that you wouldn't need to book our the microphones and tripod separately, it all came as one set on the SISO booking site.

Setting up the Sony X70 was a lot quicker than Z7 when me and Luke arrived at the Levels. The radio microphones we're simple to set-up with the camera, we set the audio to be recorded on two separate channels, set at different levels, this way would could chose the more appropriate level in the edit. Other benefits the radio microphones provided us during our second shoot with Mary was the fact they were cordless and therefore would not have cables to get tangled up with Roofie's legs. The radio microphones also had a more practical clip in comparison to the wired clip-on microphone and also came with a wind protector, which would soften sounds of gusts of wind.

Mary was very co-operative with the second interview, and answered our questions even more thoroughly this time round. We filmed even more cutaways which related to the questions we had ask of Mary, such as Mary interacting with other people's dogs and vice versa.
The shoot actually went a lot smoother than I had thought, being as there was only myself and Luke present this time. We thanks Mary for her time, got her to sign a consent form and said we would be in contact if we needed any more from her.

Luke agreed after this shoot that the X70 was more suited to our project than Z7 set and we agreed that we would shoot the rest of our production on that camera.
After the shoot, we took the equipment back the stores once we had uploaded our footage onto the group media drive and imported it into a new premiere pro sequence. We had previously done our initial hand-in for the pilot material on a earlier version of premiere pro, so we decided to use the most up to date version of Premiere Pro which was the 2015 CS6 version.

Finding Other Interviewees: Queen's Park

As we now needed another interviewee in comparison to Mary, myself and Luke went along with some advice Mary had given us about where to find more dog walkers in Brighton. She recommended that we went to Queen's park in the late afternoon as many people in the neighbourhood take their dogs for a walk there after work and that we were bound to find someone who would be willing to be involved in our documentary. We went on a Thursday afternoon with flyers that I had prepared to hand out to people. Our plan was to approach people walking their dogs in the park, tell them that we're documentary filmmakers doing a documentary on humans and dogs and to give them this flyer so they would have something to reference and remember us by. Here is the flyer we handed out:

Flyer

When we approached the Dog Walkers in Queen's Park, we'd introduce ourselves and tell them about our project and it being part of our degree and to ask whether they would be interested in getting involved in our documentary. We told them we would need to film two interviews at Queen's Park with them and would need various cutaways of them and their pet.

Some people we approached in Queen's Park gave us their contact details straight away, others said they would be in touch in the near future as they had our contact details from the flyer. I found this approach to be a much more effective way of securing an interview compared with our previous methods of contacting possible interviewees. This is because you can build a rapport with them instantly and have a better understanding of the relationship with their dog because their pet was present at the time and form of trust is made with a face-to-face meet with ourselves and possible interviewee, which is why I felt everyone we met that afternoon gave us a positive response about wanting to be involved with the project. I feel that me and Luke were both very confident with our open approach to strangers in the park, asking them for their time and contact details as well as their possible involvement with our project.

The most hopeful of dog owners we met were Lee and Eric. Lee lived with his girlfriend and their dog Nelly not to far from Queen's Park and he said himself and more likely, his girlfriend would enjoy being part of this project. We would just have to give him a day or twos notice prior shooting. Eric was a media teacher at a local secondary school, he seemed a lot older and more mature than Lee, so we really wanted Eric to be part of the project just as much.

Recce Notes: Queen's Park

Next, we went to Queen's park to hand out flyers to find another interviewee for our documentary, I returned to the park a couple of days after during the day to look for any poignant spots we could film our interviews and cutaways. I took some photos and shared them with Luke and my ideas about locations we could use in the park for the shoot with our next interviewee.

To me, Queen's Park was a much more appealing park compared to the Levels as it was away from main roads and traffic congestion. It's a beautiful park for dog walkers, but there's sections of the park which dogs were not allowed to be in which would limit our options for spots to shot interviews/cutaways. There was a lot of nature around the park, with wonderful flowers dispersed around the park, a lovely clock tower and an gorgeous pond, surrounded with swans and seagulls. It was far away from any main roads so there was little industrial ambient sounds at the park.

In conclusion, I thought Queen's Park would be a great location to shot the other half of our documentary with many different landscapes we could chose from for moving and static interview shots (considering the mise-en-scene) as well as cutaway spots. It had a great sound for a sonic environment for our documentary project, so I felt it would be more appropriate to record our ambient soundtrack here. I just hoped the weather would be on our side the day we decided to shoot there. On the next page are some photos I gathered.

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Eight

Editing the Documentary

A brief history cinematic and documentary film editing.

First film of all time Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) by the Lumiere brothers, exhibited in Paris 28th December

Film editing did not exist yet, the films were shorter than a minute with a static camera and mostly shot in one take: the so-called tableau shots. They intended to show an event as it occurred in front of their camera.

The need for editing gradually emerged as the lack of sound hampered storytelling: it was necessary to find ways to control rhythm, mood and shifting attention in the scene.è

George Méliès discovered the first jump cut in 1896 whilst the camera jammed during filming so the bus he filmed turned into a bus cart. He then introduced editing devices like: fade in/out, overlapping dissolve and stop-motion photography. One of his most famous films being A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Edwin S. Porter is the father of the 'fictional narrative. He introduced the straight cut in his films and his contribution to editing was the arrangement of shots in a way to produce narrative continuity. Splicing together different shots not necessarily of the same time and place, could create narrative through editing, so, film practitioners understood that cinema's most basic unit was the shot and not the scene.

D.W. Griffith influenced both Hollywood and Soviet filmmakers. His techniques were developed instinctively. He introduced many elements of continuity editing: the cut-in shot, 180 degree rule, inter or cross cutting, establishing shot, the reverse shot.

Eisenstein's Theory of Montage

Montage - The french word for 'to assemble'

Sergei Eisenstein attempted to theorise about film editing as a clash of images and ideas based on the Marxist theory of dialectic (conflict producing synthesis of ideas_

He categorized these as the 5 types of montage:

Metric - According to the frame number
Rhythmic - According to the rhythm created by the action in the shot
Tonal - According to the tone of the shot (light, composition, etc.)
Overtonal - A combination of all (mostly in sequences of shots)
Intellectual - Expressing abstract ideas by creating relationships between opposing visual intellectual concepts.

Documentary Editing

A scene - This is a continuous time and space unit in your story, made of at least one shot.

--> What does the scene mean? Exposition, conflict?

--> Don't use a shot for it's own sake. Some shots may, within themselves, be superb, but may not for reasons of styles, shape or just original intention, fit into the overall film.

--> As a rule, do not use several shots when one will do. Fussy elaboration has no virtue in itself and simplicity gives clarity.

--> Find the moment of the shot.

Documentary filmmaker as a storyteller:

A story is a way we make sense of unrelated events, how we create a 'logic' or a 'link' between different events.

"Style in documentary derives partly from the director's attempt to translate her perspective on to the historical world into visual terms, but it also stems from her direct involvement with the film's actual subject" (Nichols 2001, p. 44)

Editorial Organisation

List all your material in a logging list. This will help you identify the takes that are not usable, but you'll also identify the best takes.
Write down the length of the shots. Try to identify the natural life span of the shot. the moment it becomes interesting until the moment you lose interest
Identify continuity problems and possible solutions.
Make a paper edit and makes notes as preparation for the commentary.
Write down the duration of the time.

Rough Cut

- Does it tell the story you intend to tell?

- Does every shot have the right length (life-span)?

- Does it sound right?

- Are the interviews right? Not too long or too short?

- Are all the shots acceptable?

- Do throw away shots that do not progress the narrative

- Is the film rhythm right?

Narration

Realise that a different narration can make a completely different film.
Do not describe the visuals to your audience
Do not use written language when narrating. Use simple english sentences
Keep it minimal, no one wants a whole film of narration. Give your narrator space to breathe and develop
Too much information does not come across

Walter Murch: On Editing [Video Interview]

What makes a good editor?

- Must have sense of how to tell a story

- Have a good sense of rhythm

- Editing is 70% about rhythm, its important to get it right to convey your message and information appropriately

Role of the assistant editor

- Someone who is well balanced between the big picture and the tiny details of the film.

- They shouldn't lose touch in terms of numbers. Especially with the advancements of tech

Digital cameras capture huge pixel densities nowadays, thus in the editing stages we can recompose in the frame. This is great for documentary film for manipulating footage.

ADVICE: Just edit! Get used to your tools and softwares. There's so many to chose from its good to establish a good knowledge of them. The more you 'do' the more you'll learn.

Evan Richard's Vimeo Video on Pudovkin's Five Editorial Techniques

Editing is an aspect of film art form which is completely unique from all other art forms.

It's not merely a way of structuring shots together. Relational editing, conveying an emotion without saying it

1. Contrast

2. Parallelism

3. Symbolism

4. Simultaneity

5. Leit Motiff

Production Processes

Prepare a draft schedule for production and post-production
Allocate tasks and identify further research needed e.g. locations, of relevant background material, of music, photos or archive footage
List practicalities that have to be sorted - equipment booking, transport, subsistence etc.

Basic Editing Considerations - Notes from the reading

Glynne, A. (2008) Documentaries and how to make them, Chapter 15 Preparing for the Edit

Think ahead to the key moment of the scene before starting the cut, then have a clear picture of the shape firmly in mind.
Avoid having to cut between shots on the same camera angle especially if the shot is of a single person.
Watch your eye-lines. It is all too easy to give the effect that two people are looking away from each other in separate close-ups, which obviously influences the emotional effect of the scene.
Watch the pace of the action which has to be matched in cutting. The demands of shooting may necessitate adapting your ideas to accommodate a different pace to that envisaged but you must incorporate such changes in all shots. e.g. if the hand held close-up of a person talking whilst walking has to be taken more slowly, then the intercut wide shot must be slower. Do not delude yourself into thinking that the c/u face of a walking person does not convey a sense of pace.
Remember you can only cut the material you possess. If you are cutting your own film the editor in you must control the director you thought you might be -- if you haven't shot the right footage you can't make the film you originally intended.
Pre-selected music is often very restrictive as can be pre-edited interview material. Both have a pace of their own which may drag your visuals into a form bearing no resemblance to the style of the film as a whole.
Do aim for self discipline when cutting. It's all very well to say "if it doesn't work we can stick it back together again". Experimenting is part of the learning process but, the sooner you are positive in your approach the quicker you will become confident in construction and pacing.
It's usually better to spend an hour familiarising yourself with and analysing your material rather than jumping straight in. Tape joiners are a mixed blessing. You may thing you have lost nothing if a quick first cut doesn't work but too many re-cuts result.. in everyone being more conscious of the joins of the shots.

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Week Nine - Response from flyers in Queens' Park

Unfortunately, we had received no feedback from anyone in the park that we hadn't initially taken contact details from. Just Lee and Eric. Luke had been the one whom had made contact with both of the possible interviewees, but I followed up from Luke and got in contact with both the interviewees. Since Eric had given us his house phone number, I called the number and left an answer phone message to see if any of them could film this Thursday. However, with Lee - I decided I would text him about the project and await on his response.

Initial Text to Lee

Letting down Lee

Luckily for us, later that evening Eric gave me a call and said he was available on Thursday, if the weather was on our side. As Eric was the person we thought would be most suitable to have in comparison to Mary for our project so I confirmed with him that we would be going forward with shooting with Eric. I had to let down Lee in I let him know in a text that we would no longer need him for our project.

After I had confirmed with Eric that we would be shooting on Thursday morning, I let Luke know that situation as well as booking out the X70 camera kit.

Second Interview: Eric Tyler

Prior our shoot at Queen's Park with Eric and his dog Toby, I called Eric up the day before to find out more about his dog. His name was Toby and he was a pedigree labrador that they had owned for over 7 years. I did this so I could construct more relevant questions suited to Eric and his relationship with Toby. Here were the questions that I came up with for the interview:

1. Can you introduce yourself and your dog?

2. Tell us about your dog (name/age/breed)?

3. How long have you and Toby known each other?

4. Could you tell us why you decided to have Toby? 5. By having Toby in your life, what positive impacts has he had upon you? (Short/long term)

6. What kind of relationship do you feel that you have with Toby? Would you say you treat him as a family member?

7. Since you first got Toby, how do you think you and her have changed over the years?

8. What's the best thing about owning Toby? What characteristics of his do you like?

9. Do you believe that Toby provides you with companionship and unconditional love?

10. Do you feel more safe by having Toby as a pet? Would you say he protects you? 11. By having to take Toby out for walks and activities, would you say he keeps you fit and active?

12. Has owning a pet dog made you more sociable with other dog walkers or other members of the public?

13. How do you think you life would be different without Toby?

14. What you tell someone about what its like to look after a dog if they were interested in getting their own pet dog?

Equipment List

- Sony X70 Camera Kit

- White Balance Card

- Radio clip-on microphones

- K6 boom microphone

- Tripod

On the Thursday we organised meet up with Eric, it had been raining heavily in the morning, we had to push forward our meet time with Eric to be an hour later in the morning so the skies would clear and hopefully the rain would've stopped. Luckily, the skies did clear so I knocked for Luke on my way to Queen's Park, who had taken the equipment home with him the previous afternoon. In fact, we had to gain consent from our tutor to borrow the camera from the stores for longer period, just so we could shoot in early enough in the morning that we didn't have to commute to and from university on the same dame in order to collect the equipment.

Once myself and Luke got to Queen's Park, we set up the camera by a bench for the static interview with Eric. Unfortunately, the benches were soaking wet and we had no way of wiping it down dry. This would've been really bad for Eric as we didn't want him to sit down and get his clothes wet, so I actually took off one of my own socks and wiped down the bench dry! Call me crazy, but Eric laughed and appreciated it highly when he questioned how this bench was so dry after such heavy rainfall.

Interviewing Eric was a delight. He had some great responses to our questions and told us some really interesting points about his life with his dog Toby and funny stories they had shared together. Toby was a lovely dog whom was much more tame that Roofie. Toby is fully a fully trained dog and was a natural in front of the camera. We acquired really good cutaways in between interviews and myself and Luke knew that we would have to film as many cutaways as we could to avoid having to arrange another shoot with Eric.

The walking interview was also a poignant part of the shoot as Eric seemed to have a lot more to say the second time round of questioning. One down side that I noticed about this interview was that Luke hadn't involved Toby within the frame at all for the walking shot which I knew would effect the eye-line of Eric in the shot as he would keep looking down at Toby, but our spectator would be able to see this.

Queen's Park was quite busy that day, so we managed to acquire some great cutaways with the general public and also some great expansive shots of the park too.

I felt really confident that we had got some real quality footage from Eric, who gave great responses to our questions and that we had managed to get enough related cutaways too. We went back to campus the same day to hand back the equipment in after uploading our footage onto our group media drive. Now I knew that my role as the editor would really come into practice as we where at the final stages of production.

Organising Footage/Editing

Editing for this project was a continuous aspect of the project from the when we first created our sequence for the pilot material. However, the edit of the project really came into practice after our filming with Eric.
The first thing we did for the edit was setting the hardware preferences for the project to files created in our group media drive, where the was more storage space for the files for the project. The folders we recreated the pathways for were exports, project files, audio, video, cache files and archive material.
Once those pathways for our files had been properly navigated to our group drive, we created a new project on the most recent software version of Premiere Pro. We organised bins where we would upload all the footage we had so far gained for our project. We had bins for:

- Pilot Material Cutaways
- Mary (Pilot Interview)
- Mary Interview (Static)
- Mary Interview (Moving)
- Roofie Cutaways
- Ambient Sounds
- Credentials
- Eric Interview (Static)
- Eric Interview (Moving)
- Toby Cutaways

This made it much more efficient for when we needed to pick and chose certain clips for our main sequence. Since everything was now organised, myself and Luke needed to reflect on all the footage we acquired and narrow it down to the best bits from both the interviews and cutaways. The first thing we decided to do before we even started to create our main sequence was to transcribe all our interviews and construct a narrative from the responses. We split up the transcripts, I did Mary's and Luke did Eric's. Below are the transcripts from the interviews we conducted with them both (written in purple).

First Interview with Mary

Sitting Interview Sequence

0.0 My name is Mary Alford and I’m a retired teacher… Had the dog since she was a puppy… she was abandoned… when husband is away protects her

27.0 - She was abandoned… how she got the dog… she’s great company, she’s very gentle.

57.23- House trained, not trained- doesn’t do tricks, she’s great on walks.

1.18.09- She comes everywhere with us, we couldn’t imagine leaving her in a kennel – didn’t get on with other dogs, now she’s in Brighton gets on with other dogs at the level. She’s a cross-red setter.

1.42.18- She’s a rare kind of red-setter, people crossed her with other dogs, best gun dogs, breed might die out, she’s very gentle, she was the runt, she never eats food out of her bowl.

2.23.22- My best reason for having a dog would be company, they’re a part of me, I couldn’t imagine life without a dog. Other good reason for having a dog is it makes you take exercise, also great protection when on own.

3.06.05- The children are very jealous, she gets more attention than any of them do, they love her very much as well.

3.16.24- She’s great company when husband is away, burglars less likely to enter house if there is a dog, she will bark if anyone comes near the house, she’s a great guard dog as well as company, but its mainly the company.

3.44.17- I meet lot’s of people with the dog, a friend used to borrow the dog to chat up girls, all the girls would pet the dog. At home in Ireland everyone knows the dog and call me Mary red dog. She loves being made a fuss over.

Walking Sequence

- Roofie provides companionship and protection

- Roofie makes sure she get’s plenty of exercise

- Roofie enables social activity, “Mary Red Dog”. She get’s petted a lot in the lanes.

- When we got to the lanes, children and people stop, chat and pet the dog. Roofie loves children. She pushed a child in a lock now so Roofie is now trained not to jump up on people.

- Windy Dialogue]Roofie is great company

- When my husabands away the dog provides me with comfort and company, she sleeps beside me and plays with toys.

- No health concerns about roofie, perfect condition, gentle dog

- Been to vet for vaccines and holidays jabs.

- She goes on 3 walks and different places. Walking locations in Ireland

- How Mary found Roofie – Abandoning story [Wind in sequence]

Second Interview with Mary (+ Cutaways List)

My name is Mary Alford and I'm a retired teacher and this is my dog Roofie who is a cross red setter.

My best reason for having a dog would be company, they’re a like part of me, I couldn’t imagine life without a dog. They are part of me really and part of the way I live.

The children are very jealous of her, they think she’s the fourth child in the family. She gets more attention than any of them do, they love her very much as well.

She's also great protection because when I'm on my own in the house, if I hear a noise in the house I know it's not a mad axe murderer, I know its the dog just coming down the stairs.

She's great company when my husband is away, I know nobody would come near the house when he's away. I mean, they did a survey of burglars and burglars said when there's a dog in the house, they wouldn't go near it but if there's a burglar alarm, they'd chance it because there would probably be valuables in the house. So I mean, she will bark if anyone goes near the house, so she's great guard dog as well as the company.

Yeah, I do meet lots of people and people come up and pet the dog. I used to hire out the dog a few years ago to a friend so he could chat up girls

She makes sure I get lots of exercise, she needs a few walks a day and will be chewing my toes if she doesn’t get them

When my husband is away she provides me with warmth and compassion, she cuddles up to me at night

Apart from being a good companion, I often meet people through Roofie. In Ireland I’ve met quite a few people through the dog. One road sweeper pets the dog for half an hour. Lots of old people stop and pet and have a chat. It’s a great way of meeting people, a friend of mine used to borrow the dog to take to the pub to chat up girls. When you’ve got a dog it’s a bridge between people.

Roofie is part of me, when I go to bed she comes up with me. If she feels she hasn’t had her food she’ll run around barking. She rules the roost around here.

I love all animals, but I suppose its because she loves me, she gives me unquestioning love more than any human and she’s always in a good mood. You love a dog cos you know it loves you.

CUTAWAYS

Mary and Roofie walking from behind pan

Really small dog walking fast

Mary and Roofie walking together (Bit shaky and fast)

Close up of Roofie's head from above

Man throwing ball to dog and dog chasing after it

Close up of Roofie's face

Close up of Roofie's face from the side

Roofie walking past camera

Classic shot of Roofies face close up looking up and Mary behind

Roofie sniffing other dogs arse Two small dogs walking from behind

Eric Interview Transcript (with time intervals)

0.0 - My name is Eric Tyler, this is my dog Toby. Age and what type of dog.

20.12- I was reluctant to get a dog, son persuaded. Toby has been a positive influence, calming. Good impact on health. Loving, calming. Welcomes you when come home, cant feel bad, its marvellous.

1.12- He’s cuddly, calm. Relaxes me and wife.

1.22- He provides me with unconditional love and companionship.

1.26- If a burglar broke in he’d probably lick him and welcome him.

1.30- He there is any danger he normally runs and hides. He’s a coward, but he’s a lovable coward.

1.41- We go on the downs, walk from brighton to lewes, hes getting a bit old for it. I feel I have to get out and have a good long walk with him.

2.05 - Its amazing how chatty people are in the park, young women speak to me and say hello. There’ s an amazing community of dog people here in Queen's Park.

2.46 - One of the difficulties is if we want to go away we have to arrange care, would never put him in a kennel, can’t go away on a spontaneous weekend, though he does go to France and loves it there.

3.17 - You’re never alone when you’ve got a dog, if my wife's away he’s always there to keep me company and to cuddle up with on the sofa. When I'm away he gets in bed with my wife.

3.41- He’s more than a dog and a pet he’s a member of the family. My wife is very keep to ensure he’s treated as a member of the family and an equal.

3.54 - Introduces himself and dog and what breed.

4.06 - we looked at a few breeds, we decided on a Labrador, we went to see the litter and fell in love with him because he was the runt of the litter.

4.35- I think he’s benefited my health, it means I get out every day. He’s very calming and relaxing. He welcomes you when you get home. He’s just a joy to be with.

5.08- We’ve both aged, we’ve both got white beards.

5.13- He provides us with unconditional love and companionship. Me and my family adore him and he adores us, particularly anyone who gives him food.

5.28- He’s not a guard dog, he’s a coward. If there’s any dangerous situation he hides behind us.

5.47- he keeps me very fit and active, it doesn’t matter what the weathers like you have to take him outside.

6.01- Lot’s of people around the park know me as Toby’s dad.

6.30- Lot’s of people think by getting a smaller dog you’re going to have an easier life but often smaller dogs are more demanding. He doesn’t need much exercise and sleep a lot, you must be prepared to do a few little walks.

Now that we had all dialogue from the interviews and cutaways listed, it was time to condense down all the footage that we had. Me and Luke did this all together, going through each transcript and separating each piece of dialogue into categories of the subject matters they were conferred. These categories were: companionship, protection, health and exercise, socialising, family and personal benefits. We soon realised that a lot of the dialogue from Mary's sections were filmed in windy conditions, which interfered and muffled the sound in comparison to Eric's dialogue. Since neither myself or Luke were that confident with using the audio editing software, Adobe Audition, we decided that we would have to conduct one more interview with Mary so the sound would be crisp and clear. We knew that once we had reshoot some of Mary's responses, we would be able to go forward with constructing the narrative through a paper edit.

When editing the interviews, I ensure that I cut out all the questions from the interviewer and also noted if there was any words repeated or where in-audible. Since we used the radio microphone with Eric's interview, there was very little I could find wrong with the audio. All that there was to do for his interviews was to chose the clearer audio channel for his dialogue. On the other hand with Mary's interviews, we had recorded her dialogue with a clip-on wired mic which was most susceptible to the sounds of wind, the scuffing on clothes and the clanging of the wire itself. This meant there was interference with vital parts of dialogue from the interviews with Mary, but I knew if we re-recorded the interview and layered a cutaway over the interview, the spectator would no notice that the interview had been re-recorded, especially with the park ambience layered over it.

Editing the cutaways down wasn't that much of a challenge, but it was more time consuming. I took Walter Murch's approach of focusing of the five main criteria you should look for in a shot when editing.......
This is how I approached finding the most relevant cuts for our documentary, by focusing on these areas Murch says to recognise from within our own footage. It took hours to go through all the cutaways we had recorded, but it would mean that there would be no clip that hadn't been considered for the project.
Now that we had the final edits of the cutaways and all dialogue sectioned, we needed to organise on final shoot with Mary for some final touches. I noted down at the end of the editing session on Tuesday of week 10 what footage would still would want to acquire from our next meeting with Mary.

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Week Ten - Another Shoot with Mary at her Home

Luke got in contact with Mary on Tuesday afternoon this week and arranged that we meet her at her home for an interview tomorrow afternoon. This was mainly due to weather circumstances as the forecast for this week was horrendous, plus it would mean Mary's recorded voice would be picked up by the microphones better in an indoor ambience. We went there on Wednesday after our workshop, armed with:

Equipment List
- Sony X70 Camera Kit
- White Balance Card
- Radio clip-on microphones
- K6 boom microphone
- Tripod

When we arrived at Mary's home, her husband and friend where outside doing construction work and a lot of her lounge and main room was filled with their tools and equipment. Luckily, Mary had a dining table next to a window facing her garden. I knew that since we hadn't brought any lights with us, the household lights and the natural light from outside was all that we had to illuminate Mary's face. We sat her with face and window side by side so the sunlight from outdoors covered half her face and we carried out the interview. We only asked her a few questions this time that we just needed repeating such as:

- Can you tell us the story about why your friends in Ireland used to borrow Roofie?
- What social impacts do you think Roofie has brought to your life in Brighton/Ireland?
- Why do you love Roofie?

The final question I put forward to Mary had a real impact on her and she gave a beautiful response which myself and Luke instantly knew would be a perfect way to end the documentary.

A key thing I was also sure to take notice of was the positioning of myself whilst interviewing Mary as well as the positioning of the camera. It was crucial to have a good eye-line level for this shot and I think we executed this perfectly.
Whilst interviewing Mary, I was sure to hold eye contact throughout the interview, to nod my head at things she was saying and to listen and respond to what she had to say. Another interviewing technique I used was to copy Mary's body language during the interview which would give Mary a psychological comfort whilst she was talking. The fact I carried out all these techniques is why I believe Mary opened up about the love and strong bond she has with her dog and how she knows Roofie gives her "unconditional love" and provide her with love "more than any human would."
After the interview, we filmed cutaways of Mary and Roofie such as:

- Roofie playing with her toy
- Close-ups of Roofies face [breaking the fourth wall]
- Mary and Roofie hugging on the sofa
- Mary and Roofie playing in the lounge together
----> Sadly, Roofie had just been fed before we arrived so we couldn't get a shot of Roofie eating from her bowl.

After we conducted the interview at Mary's house, we decided to shoot the cutaways that we thought we been more relevant to the interviews we had filmed. Shots that we managed to get whilst we walked with Mary and Roofie from the house down to the Levels park were:

- Mary and Roofie walking along their road,
- Another shot of them walking on their road from another angle (match-on-action)
- Worms-eye view shots of them walking down Elm Grove towards the Levels
- Both walking past 'The Levels' park sign (park entrance)
- Long shots of them walking in the park together
- Mary interacting with other dogs in the park
- Roofie having fun with other dogs and people in the park

We were very lucky to get these outdoor cutaways shot since it had been raining the whole morning, but the weather had cleared and the sky was clear. I then realised once we had said thank you and good bye to Mary that we had no shot to close our documentary, so before we headed back to uni, me and Luke went back to Queen's Park to film an upwards panning shot from dog walkers in the park up into the sky. This was a shot I had learnt from my workshop I had done during my A-levels with a production company known as Chocolate Films and I thought it was a nice way to round off the documentary.

Re-Organising Footage

Finally, finally, finally we had finished with the production side of the project and now we could get on with the whole editing process of the documentary. We imported the new interview and cutaway footage to the appropriate bins to the project and swiftly condensed the interviews and cutaways into sections and categorised them too.

We transcribed and listed out the new interview and compiled all our sections of dialogue and printed them out ready to construct a paper edit in next week's workshop. Myself and Luke had been really pushing ourselves this week, so we gave ourselves the rest of the week off to catch up with our other studies as well as the process journal for this. It would be next week that we would construct our documentary's storyline and ask the peers in our class and tutor for their thoughts and input for the narrative structuring of our project.

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Week Eleven - Paper Edit

Week eleven's workshop was a significant one for mine and Luke's project. It took us around an hour or so with the help from peers in the class, but we came up with a narrative structure for our documentary with a paper edit, which listed out which pieces of dialogue we would use and what cutaway would follow. Below is the only copy of the paper edit that I managed to take a photo of:

Now that we had a complete structure from the paper edit for we wanted our story for our documentary to pan out, it was simply a matter of piecing the sections together on a time line.

The first thing we did was put our 5-minute ambient soundtrack onto our core sequence timeline. What followed was simply adding the sections of dialogue and appropriately placing the relevant cutaways with them. This was quite a tedious challenge to complete, but once we had done it, it was a great feeling of relief.

Now that we had all the footage we needed on the timeline, the next step was making sure that the pauses were correct and if we could add in any extra cutaways to narrow down the amount of 'talking heads' that we had within the documentary. We managed to get some really effective cutaways from our final shoot with Mary so it was really good that we filmed extra shots that day as many were incorporated in the final sequence.
We structured our documentary in way that we found the most engaging, we had the obvious areas in which dogs benefit everyone dog owners life such as the health benefits and as means of protection and then we would. We then continued into the more personal aspect of the effects of having a dog in their own family. We alternated between general and personal benefits throughout the narrative of the documentary, and ended it on the strongest effects having a dog has had for both our owners...the unconditional love and companionship that they provided.
It was import to have minor pauses in between each subject so that the spectator had time to digest the audio and the visuals projects to them. Having the right pace was a crucial aspect of the edit to get right in order to keep the spectators engagement, so myself and Luke spent the most time on deciding the best places to have pauses and for how long they should be.

Once we were happy with the structuring and timings between the cuts for our sequences, we could then lock our picture and tweak the sound levels and correct the colour for each shot.

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Week Twelve - Colour/Sound

Correcting The Project

Correcting The Project

This week was one of the longest weeks as I went in every other day and worked for at least six hours a day editing the project. The first major part of the editing this week was correcting all the sound levels so the whole documentary's levels matched up.

The first thing I did was boost the audio levels decibels output and correct the channels for each interview clip. I ensured that I noted the increase level and channel for each interview we shot on a different location so there would be consistency in their levels, making sure that they reach up to the levels between -12 to -8 on the output. In order to do this concisely, I expanded the waveforms of all the dialogues and audio tracks used, so I knew the peaks, didn’t go into the red zone and I also cut out any length pauses in audio and any repeated words, but only for parts of the dialogue when their was a cutaway on top of the dialogue, so it would be invisible to the spectator that the audio has been manipulated (these words were noted in the transcripts).

After doing the editing on all the dialogue audio, I then altered the backing track audio by enhancing the park ambient track. This had to be done as it masked the background noises and interference that the microphones picked up in the interviews, as these sounds became more clear after enhancing their volume output. I then had to be careful to make sure that I changed the volume path for certain areas of the ambient tracks because some of the screen time was in film took place in Mary's house and therefore wouldn't need the park ambience. Since it was filmed in a room and I literally stole a lengthy section of silence from the home interviews with Mary, and lopped it to create the ambience of indoors and this actually worked really well.

Another element of the editing of the audio I had to wary of was enhancing the audio heard between pauses so that the transitions between the interviews seemed clean when I cut between the different dialogue audios as both had a different sound-frequency of interference that was fractionally audible.
This task took a lot of time to get right since I should've corrected all the sound levels before cutting out sections of dialogue from the interviews and placing them onto a separate sequence’s timeline.

Once we were both happy with the shaping of how our documentary was structured and sounded, now came the part of correcting the visuals. The first part having to colour correct footage is to calibrate the monitors we edited on correctly, without doing this it would be pointless trying to colour correct as you wouldn't be seeing the 'pureness' of the image, so when it came to projecting the film on the big screen, the colour would appear different to how they would've on your monitor. Our colour correction workshop with Kevin pointed out some major elements to use for the project such as using the three-way colour wheel, changing the input and output levels of blacks and whites and altering the mid-tones.
I found colour correcting to be my favourite part of the edit as there was a lot of freedom behind what you could do and the effects you could make just by changing the colour.

The way I planned to approach colour correcting was to do all the static and moving interviews with Mary and Eric corrected first and then I would simply copy and paste the attributes from the edited clip onto the next relevant part of the same footage, then I would have to correct each cutaway individually. I would have to be wary of skin tones the most for a majority of the footage so I made sure I referenced my notes from Kevin’s lighting workshop in week four on what to look out for when playing with light.
The way I approached colour correcting was to first alter the exposure, sharpness and variance within image. This would affect the input and output levels of the blacks and whites and the RBG colour range, then I would alter the output levels of the whites and blacks followed by adjusting the mid-tone. It was important to see that RGB colour graphs when doing this so you wouldn't go off the scale with you colour correcting.
Luke wasn't that confident with using the colour correcting tools on Premiere Pro, but I made sure that every correction that I did that he would see the original image and then the edited image and make constructive feedback on each one. Once we had corrected all the footage clips it was now just a matter of thinking of how to open and close the documentary.

CREDITS

Credits are a very important aspect to consider, since they tend to be the first thing shown to the spectator, they connote a lot of meaning for what is to be shown. Since we had no shot to have an opening, we used a blank screen with our park ambience audio from Queen's Park, but we ensured we selected a section from the five minutes of ambience that had dog barks in them. I found this opening very effective as it makes the spectator into the sonic diegesis of our film before they are shown the visuals of our documentary's world.
For our closing credits, we had filmed our upwards tilt shot from the park to the sky. Once the shot titled up to the sky, I used a screenshot image from the sky to layer on all the singular credits to. We decided to go with the Helvetica font for our documentary as this font is the most widely used font for professional branding and advertising all over the world. We didn't want to anything funky of fancy so we kept to the simple colours of black and white for our credits too.
By using the BBC's structuring for closing credits, I wrote out these credits which we transferred into our closing credits sequence:

Concept
Gokul Rajan

Camera
Luke Sandifer

Editor
George Whale

Story Consultant
Yorgos Karagiannakis

Music/Sound Mix
George Whale
Luke Sandifer

Special Thanks To
Mary and John Alford
Eric Tyler
Roofie & Toby
University of Sussex MFM Stores

Directors
George Whale
Luke Sandifer

We concluded once we looked back at the film when we screened it to the class that the use of a voice-over or additional music score would not be needed for our documentary as it would draw the spectator away from the naturalness of the world we had created in our 'Dogumentary'. We did plan to use a track from www.mobygratis.com but when we layered it onto our project, it just didn't seem to work so we kept the natural soundtrack of the park ambience.

Family and Friends Feedback

Before our group exported our final version of our documentary, I uploaded a draft version which we had screened in class onto DropBox and showed my family and friends and posted it on my social media page.

The feedback I received was all really positive, most people said the documentary was really engaging, especially amongst my friends who had a pet dog in their family. One of my flat mates even cried as she got so emotional gripped by the narrative! Yet, some people I know who didn't really like it didn't think the plot for documentary was that interesting a topic, so they didn't interact or immerse themselves into the characters story.

I did ask a lot of them if they thought an additional soundtrack should be added and no one seemed to think that was a good idea. So all in all I was really happy with the feedback myself and Luke had received so we exported our project into the appropriate custom settings for hand-in:

EXPORT SETTINGS FOR SUBMISSION FORMAT: H.264 Custom Preset

VIDEO: 1920x1080, 25fps, progressive, square pixels, VBR 2-pass, Target: 8Mbps, Max: 10Mbps.

AUDIO: AAC, 320kbps, 48kHz, 16-bit, Stereo

Project Conclusion

Overall, I think myself and Luke can be proud of the documentary we produced in less than 3 months. As a production group, we had major issues happen throughout the course. The main dilemma being the loss of two key members, leaving just two of us less than half way through the course with doing double the work. We both struggled to keep up with the workload of taking on an extra role each for our project. Although, myself and Luke didn't initially like the idea of our documentary to be about human and dog relationships, I think we both learnt a lot about not just dogs and how they impact the lives of people. We also learnt how to work and cooperate as a partnership in production and both developed our time management and practical, social and technical skills with this module and got a good understanding of producing a documentary and the modes you can produce them into.

If I could improve our project I would have asked for more people in the group to make the workload more manageable. I think we needed more meetings and more time to plan and research the narrative and style of the documentary to save precious time during the production and post-production stages. Planning is a crucial part of any production and needs serious consideration before you start the production and I think that’s where are main issue lay with our project as well lost it’s direction half way through the course.

I did find it quite challenging to work with people whose points of view and practical skills were very different areas to mine and I would definitely have preferred it if we got to choose who we worked with. There are other people on the course who I believe have better skills than Luke and I needed to make a better quality documentary all round.

On reflection, this module helped me develop my team working skills and being able to make crucial decisions about working on a production and my understanding of the documentary genre on the whole.

I loved using the industry-standard equipment and software for the project and this documentary has given me a solid base of understanding of how to manipulate these technologies, which should only benefit my future work within the media industry.

It was a great experience to work on this project and I have taken lots of positives away from it.

Consent Forms For Documentary Project:

ERIC TYLER CONSENT FORM

MARY ALFORD CONSENT FORM

Monday, 4 January 2016

*Title & Project Description [250 words]

Wednesday, 30 December 2015

*Publicity Blurb [50 words + 2 stills]

Monday, 28 December 2015

*Project Book

Process Book Brief

Process of Project Production

Week One - Objective for the Project:

__________________________________________

Week Two - Deciding on Production Roles

__________________________________________

Week Three - Initial Ideas of Project Proposal and Approach

Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Three

__________________________________________

Week Four - Responses from Interviewees/Approach Alterations

A Shift in Project Proposal

Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Four

__________________________________________

Week Five - Recce Notes: The Levels

Getting in contact with Mary Alford

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Week 4+5 Production Task - Observational Camera Exercise

YOU SHOULD AIM TO USE THIS EXERCISE TO SHOOT AT A LOCATION THAT YOU MAY USE IN YOUR FINAL PROJECT.

__________________________________________

Week Six - Filming with Mary at the Levels Park

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A Change in Production Group

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Six

Reading Week Presentation Notes: Project Progress

Brief:

Planning:

1. Rule of Six

Here’s Murch’s list of priorities when analyzing what makes a good cut:

Slides to Include

Script

__________________________________________

Week Seven - Pilot Material Production

Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Seven

Workshop Presentation Brief: Reflexive Documentary

Planning

Script for Presentation: George

Script for Presentation: Luke

__________________________________________

Week Eight - Reshoot with Mary (2nd Interview)

Finding Other Interviewees: Queen's Park

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Workshop/Research/Reading Notes: Week Eight

Editing the Documentary

__________________________________________

Week Nine - Response from flyers in Queens' Park

Second Interview: Eric Tyler

Organising Footage/Editing

Eric Interview Transcript (with time intervals)

__________________________________________

Week Ten - Another Shoot with Mary at her Home

Re-Organising Footage

__________________________________________

Week Eleven - Paper Edit

__________________________________________

Family and Friends Feedback

Consent Forms For Documentary Project:

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Week 4+5 Production Task - Observational Camera Exercise