Planning & Process

Audience Feedback - A2 Feedback

The Media Centre at Frome College hosted an evening for parents, teachers and a producer for Somerset Film who also works for the BFI at the school on 22nd January to showcase our final products to them and have them rate and comment their thoughts.

Once we received our results, we were pleased with them as I didn't see criticisms that surprised me that had conflicting views that I would disagree with because they can not be easily dealt with by adjusting if we felt differently about it. As expected, the results were average and did have some honest responses regarding some minor issues. To round up all those comments in a summary can be condensed into a couple of points:

• The audio for the interviews could have been louder. 
• Use more cutaways (emphasising more on establishing shots and bikes). 
• To not get carried away with the credits.

The day after, we had a talk with the teacher about the current level the film is working at. It was the second time she watched it and the only time she's seen it finished and a lot of improvement has been put in since her first viewing, but she believes it's currently working at a low level due to its lack of the resemblance to a Channel 4 documentary.Rather than rush to trying to continue with another edit, she advised to step away from the film for a bit to think.

Ancillary #1 - Radio Trailer

We tested out some of the audio from the film that were mostly similar to the original intentions of the film. The film was supposed to expose a positive view of the biker community and I had to think about the audience's expectations of the documentary upon hearing the radio trailer before approaching production, as they are teased by the features presented in the trailer. The music will most likely be an unforgettable feature from the trailer and will probably be expected from the film, even if it's at least from within the same genre.

Audacity: I managed to keep to the maximum length for
most standard adverts of around 30 seconds.

We picked out two samples from interviews as we felt the trailer needed to fulfil the film's synopsis, the synopsis is important to provide a summary. With the advert's purpose in mind, one interview with one fellow member of the club described the club as "something you don't see everyday", that being so, it became a part of the trailer because it sells to an audience as something exclusively different and like no other. If people were not able to understand the purpose, we added rock music from a website called Audionatix to lead the listener to recognise the biker stereotype (rock is closely associated with the stereotype) and to be sold to a film featuring real-life bikers because of the notoriety they get from the typecast.

The software, on the other hand, was Audacity. An easy to use program for audio editing, or so it seemed to be. For me as a first-time user, I coped with some minor issues consisting of trying to move clips where I want them to go, which was solved by having to go online for tutorials on the program. I was also disappointed to not find a crossfade tool to use for in-between these clips, which ideally, would 'mix' all the audio up conveniently.

Ancillary #2 - Newspaper Advert

The image below is the first draft for our newspaper advert or one of the supporting ancillaries for the documentary. The production process began on Photoshop starting with a couple of images of the logo and various images of the club and its members. As discussed before in the research task for what platform it will be on for its first showing, we will go ahead with using stylised elements from Channel 4's newspaper adverts as a favourable approach. It definitely needs much more development and we'll constantly change it over time.

The initial idea for the advert started with a
basic layout of just two images.

Upon discovering other newspaper advertisements, I've decided not to use the club's logo because the film is not for promotion purposes, therefore, there was eager awareness for genre purposes. it wouldn't fall under a typical documentary. We want to concentrate on advertising the documentary itself by sticking with the photo option and the Channel 4 conventions like the ancillary analysis on 'The Mind Detectives' on my Research page. The image below is the 2nd phase of the editing process and what's noticeable about this is that the Channel 4 logo and the bars of text suggests from the codes & conventions that I've displayed all the scheduling details, whilst retaining it's simplicity. As a result, the audience take in all the information more promptly from reading the media languages associated with mediums such as magazines and newspapers. This is why adverts made by Channel 4 are simplistic, because the more simplistic it is, means its marketing strategy is put into effect.

As a side note, Liam was delighted with the finished product. He also observed past C4 adverts and noticed shadows were a critical aspect that could be improved, they're a compelling detail used for Channel 4's photos and wanted to complete it himself by providing his own take through adding these effects.



Image Source: Weekly Bike Nights on Burnham Seafront Raises Cash for Charity

My edit of the newspaper advert.  Liam will provide his own edit to this.
Credit for the photo goes to Burnham-On-Sea.com



The Advert was finished on PhotoShop

Finally, After much focus of Liam's idea, I put it into use through finishing the final image using Photoshop. I went onto using the Shadows/Highlights tool to amplify the image whilst looking at other aspirational Channel 4 advertisements to make it easier to determine the right levels needed.

Consequently, the aims of the advert for being persuasive was achieved through placing more emphasis, allowing it to be more expected from the audiences' taste of looking at previous Channel 4 projects and television shows.

Channel 4 is renowned for paying attention to detail by altering the balance of brightness and darkness to concentrate more or so on the depth of the image. Their adverts connote more meaning to the image through this technique and we've taken this as an enhancement to attract the central viewpoint of the image. In this case, the connotations we wanted the audience to draw was a satisfying feeling of the people featured in the film are good Samaritans; we have confidence in that the lighting and increase of shadow will resemble this.

The picture of some of the club's members was very genuine and echoed the documentary's content entirely. It suited the main viewpoint for this ancillary task. In any case, it should actually be credited by the photographer working for Burnham-On-Sea.com. I emailed them about our documentary and asked them for their permission before I engaged in using the image for our own work. They were perfectly fine with it as long as they were credited as the source.

Email evidence of me contacting the website asking for their permission.




Editing: Cropping Frames 

We've come across something that may come as a possible concern for our documentary. The interviews with members were recorded with a microphone and so this meant the hand holding this would be in shot. Mrs Millard spotted this and said it should be dealt with by cutting it out of the frame.
 



The red circle shows the hand and microphone in shot.
We allowed this to remain a part of our film.

Originally, we thought this wouldn't be a concern for us since we perceived it as our own touch to the film. As expected from trying to crop this, cropping would make the quality of the image incredibly low and would exclude The Rule of Thirds, shutting out the background and the position of the interviewee and overall, ruin the entire image.

Editing: Go-Pro Footage

The drive to Burnham from where we live in Frome took around 40 minutes, which relates to how much footage we received from the Go-Pro because it filmed the entire trip there. We looked through the entire clip to see if looked seemingly composed of the sun's light, trees or buildings. It was not until we found an unintentional success with a small section of the  clip showing the camera gradually falling back, which created this promising shot of the camera panning up in a graceful manner.



The Go-Pro panning upwards.


Editing: Sound

Recording audio straight from the camera is a risky decision we weren't willing to take. So using the H1 Zoom Microphone means editing wasn't an issue with syncing both audio and video, it's simply solved by clapping so the video and audio device record it and it becomes much easier to compose and sync the two together.

Music

I'm interested in particular music that is used commonly in the forms and conventions of a TV documentary. I believe using ambient music with an abundance of instruments distracts the viewers attention, focusing more on the music than the film.

Besides that, we'll look into ambient sound that would rather be fitting to the overall mood and atmosphere we want to interpret in the film and also fit to the codes and conventions for the type of background music playing in a documentary. We had one source of content in mind to use for ambient music. 'MrSuicideSheep', a YouTube channel with ambient/electronica music as our choice for musical content, and what's brilliant about it is that some of the music available allows anyone to use it as long as it's credited in the work.

We're came across a variety of choices for 
both the radio trailer and the film itself:

The YouTube channel 'MrSuicideSheep' dedicates
to uploading ambient music.

Sound

Sound is a more complicated asset to a documentary because if the audio isn't up to par in the film, there is a case of placing non-diegetic, or edited sounds. This isn't an issue with professional documentary film-makers as they can produce sounds and edit them into the video like it's actually sourced from the video itself. Yet, this will be a challenge to us when this comes to play. 

I was inspired by a behind-the-scenes video in a media lesson on the topic of sound motifs, the video focused on a man responsible for creating these authentic sound edits and placing them to clips from a nature documentary with horrendous background noise, improving them immensely. Of course beforehand, I was referring to the type of effects that sound too obvious to a usual fictional film and using this in a standard documentary wouldn't make sense.

The Media Teacher's Response to my Research/ Process & Planning Presentation - Mr Freeman

I presented a PowerPoint recounting the progress of my blog and the three projects.

The only criticism he had with this was he wanted this information to reflect the information on the blog because he believed the presentation had A-grade effort. Later on, I got the idea of keeping the sheet of notes I made for the presentation to the blog. Surprisingly, the advice enabled me to add key bits of information that I never reminded myself to put on the blog during production.

My PowerPoint was useful for me to gain essential feedback of any fundamental things I've missed from any of the tasks.

The Media Teacher's First Response to the Documentary - Mrs Millard

Our media Teacher, Mrs Millard, provided her take on the early edit of the documentary. It was her first viewing. 

Her response: 

• There were clips placed in obscure positions throughout the film that had no particular sense of direction, and as an audience member, she wouldn't receive the information greatly. For instance, there's a clip of John's bike leaving his garage after the shot of him riding around the bend of a road in Cheddar Gorge. This was easily dealt with by rearranging shots to other positions without the need to delete any of them if they were moved or no longer had any relevance.
• She also recommended for us to crop our shots for the interviews because she saw a problem with Liam's arm and microphone to record the interviewees with. This is proven to be difficult for us considering the shots were using The Rule of Thirds, the composition of the shots were perfectly fitting to the codes of conventions. I think the shots are too valuable to be meddled with and could cost an extended amount of marks when it comes to describing the use of this in the evaluation
• She also gave me advice about assigning the role of constantly giving Liam critical reception over the film and how it could be improved. Making sure there is input from both of us ensures we can improve the quality.

Peer Assessment 

I've recently assessed someone's blog, which is rather different to mine in terms of the content being displayed. From this, I am fully aware of what needs to be prepared to be uploaded into the blog, considering I missed some bare essentials to improve my blog immensely. 

• I need to be more attentive towards my 'Planning & Process' page when it comes to detail. It lacks the detail of the journey I've been on for the past couple of months or so.
• To try and finish the research section, as it's near to completion. (Institutional platforms and audience research)
• Finish organisational aspects from the time I was filming. (Actors and Costumes etc.)

Actors (Intentions)

I believe there is the importance of clothes, props etc. and how useful it is by enabling the audience to read media texts such as our own and be immediately aware of the type of people we want to represent in the film. Plus, what posture they use and what props surround them suggest character. for example; one interviewee has a motorcycle beside him to show his passion for it and in addition, if they're wearing their 'BBK' clothing, it would imply they're pledging themselves to the club's aims of raising money to benefit the community.

Appearance Release Form 

The appearance release forms were given to the three members after the shooting of the film without their authorisation. Of course, all three members in the film needed a release form to authorise their appearance in the film. At first, they were interested in our explanation on our plan-of-action. We had to explain the documentary film convincingly to them because it's important that they know the film focuses only on them and their work.

However, on the days of shooting, some of them were hesitant but were willing to take part. We decided we would we only ask them one question each and they were allowed to speak for as long as they wanted. We had a back-up plan to ask people who visit the events often to share they're thoughts and opinions. In hindsight, we should of given the forms beforehand since it felt like they were forced to contribute to our main priority of the film, which is the interviews; largely considered the single most important element to a documentary film.

Location 

Burnham as a location for the film is a perfect place to explore several areas of the town that it's most recognisable for. The conventional features of documentary is very complex with how atmosphere should be portrayed. This means we would take the time to venture around town to capture anything visually spectacular that best described The Burnham Bike Knights and the surrounding area.

We explored much of Burnham-On-Sea to record scenes
for setting purposes. We looked at iconic buildings best resembling the town as a whole




I also had the plan of uploading some of the photos on to a photo-sharing application called Instagram for a couple of reasons. 

The app allows you to apply digital effects to heighten the appeal of the photo used. To change the photo with effects means I can experiment with and measure the visual appeal it has from a cinematographer's perspective, this was to see if the photos taken would have any effect on the film and if they prove to be have the perceptive value designed for our film.

Sunset Shot



Pier Shot



The rating and comments system allows other people to give feedback on the list of shots. Then again, I didn't receive any comments to gain feedback, by happy chance, the 'likes' for the photos enabled me to choose shots

I took this photo during a shot filmed at Cheddar Gorge. To use up my time as a cinematographer,
I used different heights as a way of testing out different angles.

Equipment 

The planning of equipment was not a big concern at any point of the film making. we used Liam's HD camcorder with a variety of features that we used for greater effect. For instance, the slow motion effect was an excellent addition to visually orientated shots of the environment, specifically, the Bike Club hangout. 

Our first failure was on the first day of shooting. The first day of shooting was planned to be a day for shooting everything other than the interviews (filmed on another occasion). Unfortunately, we left our tripod. Our only piece of equipment needed to record quality footage for cutaways during interviews. To make do of time, we recorded without it and managed to gather what we believe to be satisfactory clips. This was during the end of the summer, this meant we had to wait another week to finish filming, so time was precious. Eventually, we checked thoroughly for all the essentials for the reason that the final touch to the film was to complete interviews and the tripod is one of the main aspects from our schedule. 

Moreover, as having problems in the past with other productions, sound is best recorded with a sound recording device to increase the condition of the film's audio. This is important since we're aware of the background noise to come from the obvious motorcycles and other ambient sounds from the scenery.

The H1 Zoom Microphone ended up producing outstanding results 

Another piece of equipment that came into amazing use was the Go-Pro camera, we initially thought of an idea of attach the camera to the side of the Trike owned by one of the members (Liam's Dad), John. We wanted to produce at the start of the film a collection of clips describing 'The Journey' to Burnham, so the Go-Pro footage would make this collection more impressionable. Fortunately, we were impressed with the outcome, especially where it was positioned.

Marking Criteria 

Based on the current state of affairs, our documentary is heading towards a high level 2. the film has starting to piece together clip by clip, paying close attention and concern for sound and overall quality for every clip. 

To achieve level 4 will involve me climbing to my fullest potential on what needs to be dealt with. In terms of sound, we need to consider foleys to replace to what can be described as inappropriate to the marking criteria. For instance, some shots have terrible audio feedback with the likes of motorcycles and irrelevant background sound with no direction to the film. During this editing process, I want to find ways of recording my own sound effects for to make the meaning 'apparent' and the mood becomes clearly portrayed well. I also want to search and use ambient music to suit certain scenes with different approaches to emotion. This is one of the conventional features of a documentary and it will be important as a reminder to concentrate on every asset of film-making. 

To complete a wide variety of shots, we will use our editing abilities to collect as many clips and cut them as close to the 5 second mark. 

Storyboards

We started with storyboarding our documentary and began visualising the rest when we got to the location to get a feel of the environment. 

This is a shot of Liam describing what the BBK is and where they're situated. The audience are immediately introduced with useful information rather than leaving it to shots later on of the event. 

An idea of shooting the car wheel as a cutaway for Liam's speech, so there is more depth and interest in the documentary instead of one continuous shot.

A Shot of John driving out of his garage on his Trike would make a good introduction. It's effective for the reason that the shot of him starting his Trike and turning the lights on introduces the topic and a lot of character.

A shot of the the journey to the club, especially when you cross areas of interest from Frome to Burnham-On-Sea. Places such as Cheddar Gorge should be filmed to entice the audience with natural and urban scenery.

Although it might be hard trying to get a shot like this, we figured we could film the sign of the location to set the scene whilst in the car to suggest the journey has been reached.

A shot of outside the car showing off a bit more of the scenery similar to the shot of Cheddar Gorge. 

A shot of one of the interviews with a member. We've considered the use of the Rule of Thirds convention used in documentaries since quality is quite important when it comes to thinking about the response the audience would feedback to us.

Another interview with a member of the BBK still using the Rule of Thirds accordingly like the previous one.

A shot of the flag for the BBK they use to put up for their events could come as another cutaway shot or at the start of the video with the title. A slow motion effect along with this shot will make this a potential title sequence. 

A shot of another BBK member we know very well. This shot of the interview will come about eventually because we knew he'd have his Trike with him, so we can use it as object within the Rule of Thirds for this particular interview.

Of course, they're will be a variety of these types of shots. This shot of the event is an example of one them. These shots are mostly to do with filming bikers, bikes and things they've set up.

The boxes in this storyboard means a variety of shots. We want to use these as a back-up plan for editing out the video aspect of the interviews. This was an idea of mine in case the interviews were too uninterestingly long.

Synopsis

The film centres on the BBK Organisation organised and founded by three friends; John, Dennis and Phil. These members set up the Burnham Bike Knights club for one reason, to raise money for good causes and to rid the stereotype that bikers are a bunch of evil, twisted, trouble-causing low-lives. 

The idea and theme of the documentary is diversity and community. It's a large group consisting of people of all types & age groups who get along with their shared interest; they are proud to show off their pride and joy to the public. 

Website

Influences from the Preliminary Task

The prelimary task was a documentary about John' a disabled Bike enthusiast that sheds light on his life as a paraplegic. We pursued the idea of making a follow up to the film's positive feedback it received regarding the topic of disability. 

• Themes: Disability & Passion.
• Shot Types/Ideas: Medium Shots for interviews (Rule of Thirds), overlaying cutaways over audio (for relevance and interest). Using the Go-Pro feature again for additional interest.
• Audio Recording: Concentrate on both the sound and video separately. This means we should use the microphone again to perfect the quality of the sound to use for syncing with the video.

Initial Ideas for the Documentary