Use of Social Media

In order to get in contact with some of those featuring in my documentary I decided to use social media, it's the quickest way to get in touch with someone of my generation. They are more likely to respond to it than they are a text or phone call! 

Reply to Feedback

I decided to take the comments that had been made on my blog and look at how I can use these to improve my work.

The first comment is on my general documentary research, it says that I need to narrow it down. I need to look into other documentary styles like the one I hope to achieve and see how I can use the camera angles or general conventions to create my own documentary.





The above two comments are feedback on my practice establishing shots. It is positive feedback but as I have never filmed anything like this before there is definitely room for improvement. I need to think about the angle at which I film my scenes and the steadiness of the camera. Although the rest of my documentary is handheld and this can be told from the way I am shooting, it is still quite steady. I plan to re-shoot the outside scenes again with a tripod and try the technique that has been suggested to me.

The above problem and or comment I have addressed on the post by adding critque of the work and videos myself so that I know how I plan to change what I am doing, as well as explaining it fully. (Post is entitled First Interview Clips) 

Again I have listened back to the voki on this post and added a description and evaluation to the post itself in order to show how I have understood my thought process and how I plan to act on it.  (Post is entitled Further Suggestions and Brainstorming)

The final comment I received is for me to show clearly the distinction between how I changed my style of questioning, I shall upload an early video and a later video when I changed my questioning technique to the post and make sure I state how I changed it and why I decided to do so. 

Ancillary Tasks - Photo Editing

This shows the process of how I tried to make a picture of the front of school look worn out and old. This was in order to try and portray that they may not be helping the students as well with their post 16 education choices. A few ideas I am looking at how to portray my documentary in the double page newspaper spread and advert. Below are a few photographs of different colours and layers that I chose to edit the photo with in order to change the perception and portrayal of the school, simply through the colour of the photograph. It took several goes for me to achieve this and I followed an online tutorial.

 

I have had some feedback from these photographs and I think that it doesn't give a gritty view or look of the school. Despite the editing I have made the photograph crisper. I also think it may be due to the way in which I shot the picture and what part of the school that I took pictures off. I need to have a complete reshoot in order to capture the ideal photograpgh. I need to think about the positioning at which I take the picture, for example if there is enough of a plain area for writing and text to be positioned properly. So in the photograph above I could think about exposing more sky so that I had somewhere to add text, especially if this was for the newspaper advert.



Ancillary Task - General Research for Double Page Spread

I have started to look at my ancillary tasks that go alongside my documentary. By taking pictures of current newspaper double page spreads in order to understand the conventions and customs of what a reader would usually expect to see.

Above is a screenshot from the search engine 'Google' when I typed in newspaper advert/double page spread. After just scrolling I have started to notice similar layouts and items that appear in different newspaper articles.



After looking at the conventions above I have realised there are several things I need to think about, such as what I will need to achieve an authentic piece of work. Such as; photographs to accompany the text. Perhaps quotes from an interview with someone from the cast/directing (I could include quotes from myself and what I wanted to portray or achieve through creating the documentary). Look into specific layouts, such as spacing, appropriate title and or font choices as well as colour schemes. I maybe need to think about keeping things similar between the advert and double page in order to create consistency and something that they can link the two with.