Evaluation
Evaluation
The B2 Unit was a project to allow young practitioners to explore and develop a piece of media relating to the theme of 'who am I?' and regional identity.
The unit can be broken into 4 sections, 'Research.' 'Pre-Production.' 'Production' and 'Post-production."
This unit really opened my eyes to the pressures of big-scale projects and how to manage time.
Research
Client Research-Researching the client allowed me to understand what was needed out of this project.
Sunderland Culture is all about celebrating the way the northeast culture is important, so I knew that this project would have to highlight something niche within the North East, something that should be more celebrated.
It's also clear that Sunderland culture likes to get its community involved in a lot of its projects, so I kept that in my mind when thinking about my own project.
Project Research-Now, I had to move on to the researching ideas for the project, I knew I always wanted to make a project about being LGBT as it has been a big experience for me when living in the North East, but also one that I don't know much about.
When researching, I found a lot of support groups and charities based in the North East. However, I also find a lot of alarming statistics about LGBT students and mental health, which I knew I wanted to delve more into.
I felt, that LGBT experiences in the UK are normally centred around stuff in London or Manchester, so I wanted to make sure there was information out there for people like me who don't live in these major cities.
Audience Research-With my research, I decided to do a survey and an audience profile, I knew that I mainly wanted to aim my project at younger audiences, people my age.
With the Survey, I wanted to find out how much young queer people knew about their support within the North East and how much they would benefit from having a documentary highlighting some of them.
Out of the 59 responses that I got, there were not a lot of people that knew about support in the north east and most of them wanted to find out more, this gave me a massive base for my project as I knew it was something that people were looking forward too.
Existing Products-With Existing Products, I wanted to gain an understanding of documentaries, how they were set out and how they convey their messages so that I could start to develop all my projects. Alongside existing products, I also researched the different documentary types so that I could pick which one I felt my idea would fit into the most.
Doing this research, gave me a better understanding of how to produce a better documentary.
Aims of my project
For this project, I aimed to educate the community on the experiences and support that LGBT people have in the northeast.
I felt like this project was not only beneficial for queer people but also for people outside of the LGBT community as if we came together and educate each other, we will be able to do more about the issues at hand.
Pre-Production
When dealing with Pre-Production, It was important to learn how to be organised.
Dealing with Risk assessments, Location scouting & Personal lists, there was a lot of information that I needed to get together before being able to film.
The most challenging part of pre-production was the script writing, this is because it went through a lot of changes and was constantly being revised when I went through new filming processes.
Constantly had to adapt to upcoming challenges and shift the way my script flowed so that it would all be cohesive.
I feel like this project has really helped me understand the way to write scripts as I have a better understanding of the layout of different scripts.
Production
My first filming day was in January 2022, for the interviews with dsfc students. Due to the complications, I had had with being able to film and knowing that they had exams during the time I would be doing the majority of my filming.
The main bulk of my filming, I did during April-May.
During this process, I learned a lot about letting other people step in and take control of the camera while I was directing. This was because, I felt that during my projects, I had not shown examples of leadership enough and wanted to develop that skill more.
I think the area in which I really thrived was the interviews as I learned a lot about how to set up the cameras, for interviews and replicate these setups for future recordings, I liked to think that I am quite a good interviewer, as I pick questions that allow the interviewees to give quite broad answers.
If I was to record again, I think I would organise a better recording schedule as it was a really long process due to the fact I had to film and re-film a lot of footage when the quality came out poor, which meant I started to get very confused with the amount of footage I had which in turn made the editing process slightly more difficult.
Post Production
This project gave me a great opportunity to experiment, due to the pandemic in my first year, I had to use iMovie to edit my first documentary for culture in the digital age which meant that I was limited to what I could do in an editing aspect.
This year, I used premiere pro, which allowed me to have a lot more in terms of editing.
I was able to edit my audio more in-depth, add overlays to my videos and explore a lot more transitions, which in turn, I felt really elevated my work.
Analysation of Project
Subject & Purpose-Many Documentaries tend to focus on social issue topics; My project is focused on the idea of being LGBT and the issues that may come with that, I wanted to get the viewers to look at the options already available to them and push to get more involved in making more possibilities to LGBT people.
Documentary types-Out the six documentary types, I decided to make my documentary in the style of 'participatory'.
There are 3 key features of this type of documentary: The filmmaker, Interviews & the relationship between the viewer and the filmmaker.
The filmmaker-In this type of documentary, the filmmaker is often present. In my documentary, I am the main narrator for the whole project, the filmmaker's presence is important because they are meant to learn alongside the audience.
Interviews-In other documentary genres, interviews normally just consist of the interviewees' answers, while in participatory documentaries, the questions are always kept in. In my documentary, I kept my questions in as I felt like it connected the project more to the audience and made the documentary more enjoyable than looking at words on a screen.
However, In my project, I still made sure that the interviewer was off-camera, I really wanted to make sure that the audience was connected to the interviewees so I made sure that the camera shot was set up as a close-up shot.
The relationship between v&f-The audience experiences the documentary from the pov of the filmmaker, which allows them to learn alongside each other. Everything in my project is from the experiences of other people and not me as a filmmaker, which I guess makes it different from participatory documentaries.
Audience reactions
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Overall
Overall, this project has taught me a lot about the organisation and leadership that goes into the making of a big project.
What went well-I think what went will with my project was the overall aim of my project. I think that, my project did what i set out to accomplish, it allowed people to be educated on being lgbt in the North East. I also feel like it fits well with the brief, as it highlights a community within the north east, exploring their identity.
I think my editing of this project has greatly improved from my other ones, I was given alot more in terms of what i could do within the editing program.
What could be improved-At the start of my project, i feel like i was overly ambitious on what i could take on by myself but was also very disogranised in my work. this lead me to lose out on a massive interview and having to cut alot of footage out of my finale product. If i was to do this project again, i would 100% be more organsied with talking to possible interviewees as it is a massive loss if i dont.
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