P4

Documentary evaluation

a) The production process

My overall production went very well. I organised and planned everything well, and managed to interview my snooker coach which was the biggest challenge, as this was a last minute decision. Originally, I was going to interview the club owner, but he couldn't make the planned date. The theme of my snooker documentary started being based on why snooker isn't as popular as it used to be, but as I started filming, I changed the theme to more of a relaxed view inside the snooker club, and what makes a great snooker player. Overall, all planning went well as I resolved most issues quickly.

b) The decisions you made during production and post-production

I changed the theme of my documentary later on in production. I did this because it felt like the right thing to do, as I felt that the new theme would fit the documentary better. I decided that my documentary would consist of three main parts - introduction, interview and b-roll. By following this, I knew what I needed to film. I decided the dates to film, and who would feature in my documentary. During post-production, I felt that my decision on the style of my edit went well, as I stuck to a set goal and felt that I achieved this through some tweaking. When looking over the footage, I realized that there was a lot of noise in the darker scenes, so I decided to remove that.

c) The revisions that you made during production and post-production

During production, when filming my interview, the camera unfortunately cut out half way through, missing 5 minutes of interview. To resolve this, I looked at the 4 minutes I had already, and luckily as the documentary was only 5 minutes long, I didn't have to film again. In post-production, my original plan was to have the interview carry out through the whole documentary, however, after my first edit this was difficult to get the documentary to that length without some scenes being too long. By my final edit, I managed to fix this by including 3rd party clips, and using as much of what I had as possible.

d) The technical qualities of your production

During filming, I had a few issues with the camera supplied for me. Firstly, on the first shoot, the battery was not charged fully, but I solved this by turning the camera off frequently to preserve the battery in between shots, and resulted in not being an issue. All the other shoots had a fully charged battery. However, during the interview, the camera had an issue half way through which stopped the recording. Luckily, I noticed this and quickly restarted the camera. I had unfortunately missed 5-6 minutes of good footage, which I thought would be a major issue, however, after looking at what I had, I had just enough. When editing, I edited either on the Mac's at college or my home computer. I edited with Premiere Pro, which had no issues. The camera recorded at a high bitrate with full 1080p quality at 25 frames per second, which gave great results.

e) The aesthetic qualities of your production

Aesthetically, in my opinion, my documentary looks good, with lots of shots in focus and stable. I focused on cinematic shots for the b-roll footage, which gives the documentary much more emotion to it. I feel that when watching it gives a clear story and has a unique theme to it. I like how the interviewer tells his story passionately, which boosts the documentary in terms of character. 

f) Proposed scheduling time (based on the content and your target audience as well as legal and network restrictions)

I felt that I scheduled the timings for my filming sessions well. I got roughly 100 shots of b-roll, which was plenty enough for my use. The interview, although having issues with the footage, was enough and I planned and scheduled that well. I feel that my documentary fits with my target audience well being 30-40 year olds. I aimed to create a slow cut, slow paced relaxed documentary and I have achieved that goal. As for the legal restrictions, I managed to get permission from the club owner to film inside. I got all my talent release forms for the main two characters, and all the background characters agreed that they wouldn't mind being in my documentary. I found the music track online, which is copyright free.

g) Areas of improvement
I felt that my documentary could have had a few more stable shots, as I noticed that a lot of the handheld shots were quite shaky. I also feel that if I got the whole interview, I could have changed the story a bit, for example, I missed out a big list of snooker tips from the snooker coach, which would have been a good theme and would have made the documentary longer. I could have included more 3rd party footage of other snooker players possibly to make the documentary have a more in depth story.