Final Documentary

Editing the Documentary

There was a lot of work to do in the post production process of our documentary. To start my group and I decided what order we wanted to have the shots in, using the shooting schedule as a general template. We decided to open the clip with a panning shot which leads to a cut to the sign for the club. From there we edited the shot of a disco ball fading out of focus into a a shot of people dancing from out of focus to in. As this happens we start to hear Noma's voice over of him introducing himself. Throughout the rest of the documentary we constantly cut between interview shots of Noma and cutaway shots of the nightclub, bathroom and shots of nature. We have edited it so that the shots continuously change and aren't the same type of shot the whole way through. For example, we have a cutaway establishing shot which is closely followed by a close up shot of plants. We also chose chilled ambient music for the beginning with a meditation style music choice to close on.

Relating our documentary to inspiration: Long Live the Kings

After looking at Long Live the Kings for inspiration in our documentary, I knew What sort of cutaway shots that I wanted to capture when my group and I was filming. From watching such a visually appealing short documentary I found that shooting a range of shots from different angles and using various techniques was the way forward. Therefore, whilst shooting our cutaway shots I made sure that we would shoot the majority of shots in different ways so that we could choose which one worked best when editing. We took shots from different angles, zooming from in to out from out of focus to in focus and visa versa. After looking back at the footage we were very happy with the end result and now are just yet to choose which shot worked best for each piece of footage.

Relating our documentary to inspiration: Louis Theroux

After looking at Louis Theroux for inspiration in our documentary, I kept in mind what we found to be successful in his work whilst we were shooting ours. As Theroux's documentaries fall under the participatory genre, we see him whilst actually interviewing, this is where I gained inspiration from. Theroux always takes control of the interviews and never seems to be afraid to ask any questions no matter how uneasy they may be. He also gathered the exact information by pushing for answers by asking a follow up question such as "But what if it were in the case of..". He also often forms a good bond with his interviewees by starting with normal discussions, making it easier to ask difficult questions. Keeping his interviewing techniques in mind whilst interviewing helped very much, for example when Noma was answering questions and going off on tangents I was able to take control of the interview by asking another question more relevant before too much time was wasted. My group and I have also formed a good bond with him making questions easier to ask, for example, when asking about an obviously unappealing job. Personally, I believe that we were very successful in our interviews and gathered a lot of information that may have been hard to get if asked using a different approach.

Shooting: Day 2

On our second day of shooting we aimed to capture the remaining footage needed for our documentary. This included interview shots of Noma revolving around his actual job and whatever else he had to say as well as cutaway shots inside the nightclub. We decided to take the documentary shots on Brighton beach as it was an appealing place for this shot and is opposite from the nightclub (which we made clear through one of our shots). When we got to the beach we found that the microphone we were planning to use wasn't working which left us worried about getting the sound properly. However, we decided to record the sound through my phone and continued with the interview as we could. On first listen the quality sounded good but we will wait until we start the editing process whether or not we will need to reshoot this interview. After shooting the interview shoots we headed over to Patterns nightclub to set up for shooting our cutaway shots. We started with establishing shots of the outside of the club whilst we waited for it to become busy. Before long it was crowded and we captured some very appealing shots, however, we had to shoot a lot of it freehand as it was difficult to use a tripod in such a busy environment. I fell though that having the shots free hand will add to the nightclub feel that I am hoping we have portrayed in these shots.

Music For the documentary

After recording our footage for the documentary we started to think about the post production process and realised that we needed some music to play over our opening sequence of clubbing shots.We decided that the typical music played on that night would work quite well with the footage. This music tends to fall under the house and funk genres. Below are a few songs that we thought would work well but unfortunately are copyrighted. However, one of our friends produces music and said that it would be fine to use one of his songs of the same genre.

After Trying to use this type of music we found that it just didn't fit with what Noma was saying and so we found some royalty free ambient music to open the documentary and meditation music to close it.

Adobe Premiere Pro cs6 tutorial video

I am not familiar with editing on the software Adobe Premiere Pro cs6 as I have always used iMovie when editing my work in the past. However, Premiere Pro is a much more professional software and allows for users to use more tools during post production. The other members of my group were also unfamiliar with this software but we decided to use it in order for our final piece to be edited better. Therefore, I have studied the tutorial video below and practiced on the software to help me get used to using Premiere Pro.