Evaluation of Documentary

Evaluation

My 3 minute documentary was produced through using a story of one person’s life, and creating an interview style video. I came through a few different ideas to decide on my final idea. Some of these where mockumentary’s, as I was going to base an idea around family life, and compare this to animals in the wild, but as I became more familiar with the expectations, I decided that this may be quite difficult, although it would have been fun to produce and edit. My other idea was to do a documentary quite similar to my final piece, although it would have been about places, rather than a person themselves. This I thought would have worked, and I would have also had many opportunities for good General views, and cutaways. After some advice, I decided to go with an interview style, with the interview taking place in the person’s own home, to set a background of the person and where they live, and also make the person more comfortable.

After watching some videos on interview project, I had some inspiration of how to story the video, to set a scene, and create an impression using audio. I took some videos from the top of the Humber Bridge, as this is a high Viewpoint in Hull, and I wanted to try and gain some good views of the whole of Hull. This was more difficult than I expected. I had a tripod, and video camera, but unfortunately, I did not pick the best of days whether wise to film on top of the Humber Bridge, as it was quite windy. This I feel affected the quality of the videos, and also made it difficult to keep the tripod still and get a good video that was clear and with all the views I wanted to get. To aid the video, when in editing, I changed the tone of the scene to Sepia, as this gave the video a more colourful and old fashioned feel which I wanted to create. This along with the music of ‘We’ll meet again’ over the top of this I feel set a mood for the type of video it was going to be. Without seeing the rest of the video, the interpretation of it would have been about wartime in Hull, and this is the impression I tried to create.

I also shot some videos for cutaways at one of the places mentioned in the video, again to set a sense of place and how it would have changed from the interviewee talking to how it is now.

When it came to editing the video itself, I encountered quite a few difficulties. I wanted to Adobe premier pro to edit the video, as this is something I was getting use to using in the sessions. The file type the video recorded in was a MP4 format, and this would not play with audio using Adobe PP. So after attempting to use Windows live movie maker, I again saw faults with trying to use this, as I could not create the video as well as I would have liked using this. After seeking some help, I managed to convert the files into avi. format. Again, I tried to use Adobe PP, but this time the audio was fine, but the video had increased in speed which caused it to be out of sync. I again tried to change the file type, and I tried using a piece of software called Sony Vegas, but this made the quality of the video very poor, and blurred. After trying many other file type’s including Mpeg, avi. vop. DV. And then also WMV, this one finally worked and would let me edit without any problems. The video files would all play in the other formats, but when it came to editing, they would not work.

When finally editing my video, I decided to try and keep with the beginning theme to the video of old wartime Hull, and I tried to pick the parts of the interview that I feel gave insight to the interviewee as a person. I wanted to try and keep the video as direct and real as possible, without losing any sentiment or true feeling in the words of the interviewee.

Overall, although coming across many obstacles, I thoroughly enjoyed creating the video, and I learned some important aspects when filming, editing and trying to create an impression and mood with a film.