Prop & Equpiment List

Feedback Pitch

After pitching our Documentary idea I showed my documentary idea to one of the other media teachers just to get their opinion on my documentary, I was told that adjusting the idea would be best or change the idea completely. I felt that because I had planned the documentary so much it would be a shame to chuck it all away and start all over again so I have stuck with the idea of "Life As A Sixth Former".

Although one teacher didn't really like the idea, the other people who I showed the documentary pitch to liked the idea and liked what I could possibly do with it. They were really interested in to what the documentary could be like and what the possible outcome could be.

I decided after though that I would change the name of the documentary from "Day In The Life Of A Sixth Former" to "Life of A Sixth Former" This was because we didn't think we could get all the footage that we thought we could do in one day. So we decided that we are going to film over a number of days so that we can get a good amount of shots so that there isn't any problems with being short on clips.

We wanted to show different areas of the school in the shots so that the interviews would show different areas. We didn't want it to be all the same areas because there are different places to go in the school.

Another point made was that because I was working on my own they suggested it was a lot of work they suggested me working in a group where the other people can help to do more work instead of struggling and not getting the best documentary.

Evaluative Commentary

After releasing our Documentary we reviewed it by talking about what was going on and how we filmed the documentary as an explanation to the audience.

We went over what went well and what we could have improved if we were to film it again.

With the documentary we found that the beginning was interested as we were basically giving people a tour of the school so starting off at the school sign and gradually getting to the school common room then into the class room. If we were to do this again i think we would have done more footage of the school that the sixth form see but we would have speeded it up so that it wasn't too boring.

After that we explained the students we would be following for the documentary and how they are around school before we went in to the interviews.

We started off with interviewing Jade and we had some footage of her walking around the school and how she was in class and around her friends. We mixed all of this with her interviews so that we could show different angles when filming her. If we were to do this again I think that we would have made sure that we picked the surroundings better for the interview as often the background noise was very loud.

After that we started interviewing Olly, the footage we had originally got of Olly wasn't any good so we had to re shoot his interviews so that we could hear him and get more information out of him as he doesn't talk much! We interviewed him outside where we could here him a lot better and again we put clips of him in class mixed into the interviews too.

Lastly we filmed Tyler, he was the most interesting person to film as he had a lot to say and he enjoyed being filmed so we managed to get a lot more footage of him. We also added footage of him playing around having fun whilst also being serious doing his work. At the end there is a clip of Tyler stating that he feels like a Kardashian being filmed all the time, which was funny because that was what we were basically doing.

At the end we have some black and white pictures of Jade, Olly and Tyler where we have spoken about what they are doing now and what they plan to do next year, we felt this was a good end because it was an ending to  the documentary.

Interview & Evaluation

In this interview I spoke to Jade Mason where I asked her about what she likes about Ravens Wood School.

She was very positive about her transition from GCSE to A Level and she was very responsive.

One of the best answers Jade gave was when she answered the question: What do you do at the weekends?
She answered that she works on her work mainly but goes out and enjoys herself as well.
We weren't looking for the answer where she would spend her time working and I liked that she gave an honest answer to the question.

In this interview you can see that Jade is confident in what she is answering as she is smiling a lot and answering mostly in full sentences. She also in some other places looks a bit un interested because as you can see she looked a bit embarrassed to answer the questions.

The good thing about Jade is that she includes the questions in the answer which is really helpful when it comes to editing because it saves you from putting sub titles underneath.

My interview techniques were to ask the questions as straight on as possible, I hadn't pre prepared Jade to what the question was going to be because I didn't want it to look staged or too prepared because some times the "umm" make it more interesting because you want to know what the interviewee is thinking but your having to wait for them to answer.

Camera Shot Analysis

When filming our animation we didn't use many shots as it was just focusing on one area of the page as there wasn't really anywhere to go when filming. We would move the character so that it looked like different types of shots but we never really moved the camera.





We used a long shot for the majority of the animation because we wanted to make sure that we could get every bit of detail into our animation. We found that this was the most successful shot for us as we didn't think there was really places to move to throughout the animation.
















We tried to use a pan shot but we didn't use the camera to do this, we used the boy. We moved him across the room which made it look like a pan shot. This was easiest for us because panning of it would have been to difficult because the lay out for our animation wasn't that big.










We also used Zoom because we went into a dream so being able to show the intensity of the dream and showing how detailed the castle was would show how detailed the dream was. Zoom worked really well for us because we wanted to go in to the dream and make sure that it was as effective as possible.



After doing this we have found that it was quite hard to use a great variety of shots. If we were to have done it another way, we might have been able to add more shots but it was quite hard to do that.

Analysis of Movement

With our animation we tried to make sure that we could make it as realistic as possible. When filming there was a lot of stopping and starting so that we could get the shots right. We took a lot of time making sure that the movements were as effective as possible.







With the door we had to make sure that you could get the movement of the people walking towards the door with the same speed as them walking. To open the door it took 5 shots to make sure that it opened at the right speed. This took a bit of time to make sure we got a detailed movement.














With the people walking we had to make sure that we got the right speed and make it look as realistic as possible because we found that it made them look like they were moon walking which is what I didn't want to happen. This took quite a long time as we wanted to get it perfect and it was quite hard when you are trying to correct the mistakes that have already been made.








We then shot the logo where we found that we needed it to blend with the background as much as possible. Because it was paper we found that often you could see the cut out which is what we didn't want. The movement here was slow but we found that it was easy to blend in and wasn't too hard. This took about 20 minutes to get to the standard that we were looking for because without this it wouldn't have been as good as this was the ending of the animation.

Paper Edit