Documentary: Production & Post-Production

Production

We were given two  (10 hours lesson time) in order to research, plan, produce and edit the documentary. We used around 4 of these hours for filming. Fortunately, we were all avaliable for all of these allocated shooting hours. We all allocated roles for ourselves. Myself and another person in the group were involved with filming and editing and had a small role in acting, the third person in the group was the main actor. We also used a few extras for certain scenes, such as interviews and a mock drug deal. We managed to get to the town in the morning in order to avoid the business of the town centre which might cause problems when filming.

Post-Production

The post-production aspect of the documentary was very time consuming, and unfortunately due to people in the group being absent we only had two hours of lesson time to complete this process, therefore we decided to take an extra two hours of our own time to finish it. We should have been more organised with the timing aspect of the post-production and should consider this in future tasks.

The documentary had to be a maximum of 5 minutes long, ours was just over 4minutes. We had plenty of footage to work from and managed to incorporate most of the material into the documentary. Once each shot was put into the film, we also had to incorporate post-production skills in the documentary, these included:
Transitions- using 'fade in' etc to amplify continuity into the documentary.
Voiceover- expressing how Harlow Town Centre used to be a shoppers paradise however due to the rise of 'Chavs' is now a place of crime and derelict shops.
Captions- These were used to emphasise the name of the 'Chavs' We used the four words which made up 'Chav' along with four images into a montage, three of council houses and the word Vermin in conjuction with our main actor.
Music- To begin with we started with a happy song which faded out for the voiceover. We decided to use 'chavvy' music for the scenes where 'chavs' were and where the derelict shops were.

Overall I think to improve, more planning is needed in order for any aspects that could potential go wrong can be overcome. For example is someone in the group is absent then we should plan to approach another aspect of the task so there is time to finish everything required to accomplish the task. Within the planning, I also think we could have brainstormed in more detail in order to have acheived a better overall documentary.