Portfolio Production I

The contributor had been chosen, so me (the director) and the editor met up in the 10 Stockwell Street library to discuss the kind of shots we would include to create the finished project. One of our ideas for the opening came from a scene from Hot Fuzz where the main character travels to Sandfor d  (Hot Fuzz,   2007) a montage effect is used to make time flow very quickly while also giving the audience sufficient information about what the character is doing. This time condensing effect would be ideal for our project as it can only be a maximum of 3 minutes.  For additional effect we talked about adding an animation of our  contributor staring at a book and question marks around him showing the viewer that he is confused, we got this idea from both the film Limitless (2011) and Night School (2018). While creating the shot list, the idea was put forward by myself to use close-up shots of the contributor. Putting the audience physically closer to the c...

For our group roles I was chosen to be Director as well as Sound Designer, straight away I decided to learn more about my role as a director, as I thought this important to make the shoot day go as smoothly as possible and also create the best film that we could. I decided to read "Directing the  Documentary"  by Micheal Rabiger  (2009)  I found this particular quote from part one "The Director's Role" very interesting " All successful stories seem to centre on some aspect of human development, no matter how minimal and symbolic, and they do this in order to leave us with some degree of hope." became one the ideas that  I  wanted to achieve, as moving  country  is an emotional experience due to leaving friends and family behind and then coming to a place where it is hard to even  communicate with people etc. I wanted to be able to give the audience hope by the latter part of the film and show where the contributor is ...

The documentary has been shot and edited, and now reflecting on the process as a whole it is clear to see what went wrong, why, as well as how it could have been avoided.  A big set back early in pre-production was that our contributor had to drop out because of the fact that he had to start part time work and he wouldn't have the time to shoot with us, firstly this meant we had to find a new contributor as quickly as possible as the shoot day was not far in the future. We found a second contributor, with a very similar story, but less than a week after we had secured her it was announced that there would be a month long national lockdown. This hindered our progress, as the director I had to alter the second script to suit our new restrictions which meant we could not film outside of University grounds, this changed our whole idea although meant that we could complete filming in less time as we now had much less shots to capture. As our shoot day was upon us the 15/11/20 our contri...

 To conclude, the production as a whole played out quite well and as a group we ended up with a documentary that shows the struggles of a brave young man who has made a drastic change to better his life and pursue his passion. Even-though there were issues securing a contributor, problems with equipment and most notably a national lockdown we were still able to adapt and produce a piece that fits the brief and tells an emotive story. Upon reflection I would say that I have contributed in every stage of the production in the form of writing scripts in pre production along with creating a shot list. As well as this taking photographs while on the location recce. Furthering this to the production stage where I was responsible for sound even with minimal training and then also advising different shot types to capture the correct mood. Lastly in post reviewing footage and giving notes on the order of shots and how they could be best used to tell our story.

Rabiger.  M. (2009)  Directing the Documentary . Waltham, MA: Focal Press. Hot Fuzz  (2007) Directed by E. Wright. [Feature film]. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures. Limitless  (2011) Directed by N. Burger. [Feature film]. United Kingdom: Paramount Pictures. Night School  (2018) Directed by M. Lee. [Feature film]. USA: Universal Pictures. Scottish Documentary Institute (2015)  Bridging the Gap - Resilience . 13 October. Available at: https://vimeo.com/131406587 (Accessed: 3 December 2020 ).