Preparations for Mini-Documentary Interview

This morning we learned a few key-points to take into consideration when preparing our documentary.

A lot of emphasis was put onto what kind of key points we want covered during the interview.
This was summarised into 4 main categories:

1. People
2. Places
3. Plot
4. Purpose

This strongly resembles the emphasis placed onto the Who, Where, What, When, Why and How basis for common questioning in journalism. We watched two videos in this class to get us thinking about how we can go about preparing our assignment.

Three main considerations when deciding on a setting for the interview were:

Is the setting relevant to the topic being discussed?

Is the setting comfortable for the interview subject to be in?

Is the setting 'Production-Friendly'?

Production friendly in this case could refer to places with a good natural lighting source, minimal outside sound that could get into the recordings and no administrative objections to the interview taking place there. The absence of any of these values would make the setting that much less ideal to use for the main interview.

An equipment list was mentioned in one of the video lists, to which I added a few extras that I think would be ideal to have during the production process.

The list is as follows:

• Camera
• Tripod
• SD Cards
• Memory Cards
• Laptop (to transfer memory to so that you can format the cards if they get full during the day)
• Microphone
• XLR Cable
• Headphones
• Lights

A summarised checklist approach was made during this class for some of the key bullet-points: 

1. Research / gather info on project
2. Have a task sheet / shot list and questions ready
3. Keep in mind crew members are potential interview subjects
4. Prepare plenty of Video Cutaways (Make use the environment)
5. Use a tripod as much as you can

Exercise with composition

Video Craft

We've started this week by focusing on elements of composition to get the right type of shot for the right scene that we're trying to portray. We watched a pretty good, informative video explaining some of the concepts in class.

Some intriguing things which stood out to me were the use of "flat" frames without much use of depth to portray a dissatisfactory situation - such as a character feeling lonely, or having a boring job etc.

The examples in the video gave us a bit to think about on composing frames using colour, positioning and even shape. Another interesting thing to keep in mind for 

So now we're starting an exercise of making a 5-Shot film sequence, to tell the story of something happening.

My group (myself, Aaron Askew, Nicola Abbott) decided to go with the action of someone grabbing something out of their locker at course.

1. Establishing Wide Shot (character walks down hallway)
2. Over-shoulder shot (focused on the lockers)
3. Extreme close up on lock (hands unlocking it)
4. Over-shoulder shot (Grabbing book out of locker)
5. Mid Shot (character puts the sheet of paper in their bag

The shooting of the shots was easy enough when we got a grasp of the camera, but had some difficulties.

Editing the clip and putting it together was easy, too.

Our biggest criticism was that the camerawork was "shaky", but this was due to us not having a tri-pod at the time we shot it and having difficulty. Annoyance in the lighting of our scene (having no natural light).