MAY 7th 2021- 1st Day of filming

The video above was filmed slap bang in the middle of the first day of production as I felt I needed to do an update regarding filming and whether it was going along smoothly or not... I was not one of the lucky ones!

I chose to do my own interview on the first day of recording as I knew I would feel much more comfortable  knowing that my personal toughest part of filming is now out of the way.

Below are some behind the scenes pictures I took while filming my own interview.

MAY 12th 2021- 2nd day of filming/sound recording

Time is 11:21 in the morning and I have just got done recording my first Voice over for my FMP... It was pretty straight forward as I have done voice overs before but today luck wasn't on my side yet again! The air conditioning in the recording room was really noisy today and you can hear it just slightly in the background of my recording but obviously I can use music and techniques to minimise the background sound as much as possible. If the footage is deemed unusable then my last option is re-recording the Voice over which wouldn't take too much time to do.

Lastly my teacher suggested that I take a picture of the AC to include onto my blog as I knew I had to talk about the uncomfortably loud air conditioning!

Making my own censor

The image that you can see above is a screengrab of me creating my own "Bleep" type censor to block out some bad language that is in my documentary, after doing the lesson on censorship as-well I thought it would be a great way to show off what I had learned and to incorporate censorship into my own documentary! I created my own bleep censorship effect by using Adobe Audition and with some help from my tutor.

Editing stage

The video above is basically me explaining what stage Im on with my documentary FMP at the time of the recording! It was the 17th of may and I just go over my plan for the next few days and how my FMP is shaping up!

Uploading My Documentary!

This video shows me finishing up encoding my documentary in Premier Pro and getting ready to upload it to YouTube!

FIRST DRAFT & FEEDBACK

Making a first draft can be really beneficial to making your work that much better in the end as a draft allows you to send out your work and get feedback on what I can change to reach the grade I'm striving for!

Being able to take feedback and criticism and turn it into a huge positive and motivation boost really makes me feel good about myself, Obviously no one can get their project to be perfect first time of trying but me being able to have people around me to give me pointers and advice on how to make it better makes me feel really privileged and gives me the drive to make it the best I can...

And that's exactly what I've done! I've taken the feedback that you see above and I spend my last few days of the project making the mentioned tweaks and changes a reality and just experimenting really on making the changes that my teacher said would make the final product better. 

If you take the time to view the first draft and the final edit straight after, you will be able to notice a bunch of little changes that really help enhance the experience.

COMPARING MY FIRST DRAFT TO MY FINAL VIDEO!

Left: My final Edit that will be handed in as my finished piece. Right: First draft that I used to gain feedback.

It is clear to see that if you watch my first draft and then my final video, you can see a few minor changes as-well as some huge tweaks.

The ginormous black and white elephant in the room is how I changed my entire look of the documentary just by using monochrome to my advantage! After I showed Paul my first draft he mentioned the idea of making my documentary black and white... I paused for a second and realised how much of an impact that change could possibly have on my documentary so I took off and began editing again but this time with monochrome throughout. I feel like the black and white really helps enhance the serious tone of the documentary and it compliments itself visually as-well. The black and white helped with focusing as with the normal colour it was very easy to point out when some characters were out of focus but the black and white really helped with that.

Next, I knew I needed to add a title sequence, so thats what I did... with the help of Paul of course, he helped me pick out a suitable text font and colour scheme that would flow well with my documentary and I actually ended up using the title font as the font for the captions when a new character is introduced just to give it that extra bit more of professionalism.

Lastly, I just made some general small tweaks here and there just to make sure the flow and pace stays consistent and not confusing to the audience. And yes I need to mention my choice of not including end credits as personally I feel there is no need for end credits, everyone who took part in my documentary are the reason for it turning out as good as it did and I just didn't want to include the end credits with my name for majority of stages, I just felt there was no need.

Overall I feel making a first draft is extremely useful and critical to making your final product that much better as I was able to get feedback that would help push me over the line to create the best documentary I possibly can.