3. Professional Practice

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 now and what his aspirations are for the future. This would also show more a character arc as he will start off happy in Spain but have to move to the UK for greater opportunities but struggle with the new challenges that he faces, then finally have made it to the other-side where he has made a new life for himself after persevering and succeeding in his endeavours. 

As I was the Director of the production I had work to do in the pre-production phase but, because I was sound designer as well I needed to obtain the skills required to be able to capture good quality audio on set as efficiently and confidently as possible. To do this I first needed to learn how to use basic sound equipment, I did this far in advance of our shoot date and attended a sound recording class. This taught me how to use a boom pole with a Sennheiser ME66 (Shotgun mic) connected via XLR to a Canon C100, I 
also learnt most importantly that when using a shotgun mic the direction of the microphone can be 
detrimental to the sound quality and being just slightly of centre can make the largest of differences.
this is something that I kept in mind all the way up to shoot day as I knew that the story of the whole 
documentary rested on whether or not the contributor could be heard in each take.

Pre-production Documents:



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