BRIEF:
Research, plan, shoot, and edit a interview and other planned footage for a documentary film. The film should be about a specific person (or a small group of people ) and should aim to be 3 minutes long.
Planning:
Who am I interviewing?
-My Dad, Paul Thomas, captain of Apocalypse paintball team
Where and when are they available?
- Weekends and weekdays after 5pm, at our house
What locations and setups can i use?
-Garage, house as due to current lockdown restrictions we are not able to shoot anywhere else
Resources I have
-Camera, Tripod, Microphone, 2nd camera
Props I may need:
-Lighting set up
- Access to photoshop and premier
What should the story be about?
- Explains the sport of paintball, how it works, what got the interviewee first interested in joining the sport etc
Genre of documentary film?
- Sports documentary
Questions to be asked in the interview:
These must be interesting questions so that the viewer will stay engaged with the documentary and not basic yes/no answer questions. As the task is meant to be about 3 minutes long I'm looking to ask roughly 3-5 questions that will be in the final cut of the documentary film however in total I will ask roughly 10 questions and I will use the the best 3-5 results from those questions in the documentary.
Basic script for interview
risk assesment
Shot list
For the documentary segment I am primarily going to be using interview footage however i plan to intersperse the footage with b reel and archival footage, this will not only keep the viewer more interested in the documentary but it also helps add context to what the interviewee is saying.
B reel
In documentaries a main feature is often the use of B reel. It is often spliced together with the main footage to bolster the story, create dramatic tension, or further illustrate a point.
Here are some of the videos that I'm going to cut down to use as my b reel. I managed to get these by asking the members of the paintball group if they have any videos I could use, many I also obtained by peoples social medias such as Facebook.
Altogether I plan on having about 1-2 minutes of B reel in my 3 minute documentary.
One idea that id like to include in my documentary from the use of b reel would be to use the buzzer noise in the video to recreate the adrenaline which the people playing the match in the video would feel when hearing that buzzer noise as they wait to start. I would then ease the noise into the voice over which will carry on as the rest of the B reel footage is shown.
For my documentary as well as including old videos as part of my B reel I'm also going to include some pictures and have a small montage section with a voice over narrating the story. Here are some of the images i will be using, the majority of them are group pictures however I will also be including photos showcasing people individually.
Graphics:
For my interview I have created a graphic using photoshop which will be used as a name tag to introduce my dad in the interview.
I wanted to include the team logo in the graphic and so I used photoshop to create a name bar with a small version of the logo next to it. Now that when I want to use it on premier i can just import it from my files and add a transition effect to create a nice title sequence.
Lighting and Camera setup
Sound elements
For my documentary the sound elements that will be included are:
Dialogue: the majority of the dialogue in my documentary will be spoken from the interviewee, and loosely from a written script
Background music: This will be present at a low volume through my documentary, in some areas where i want to enhance attention from the viewer to a particular section of my documentary i may mute the background music, this contrast from background sound to silent can often grab the viewers attention without them realising as its not a visual change. The website i use to obtain this music is Freesounds.org
Sound effects: I will most likely not be using sound affects such as noises rather more transitional sound effects that can help transition one segment of audio to another.
I talk more about the process of including sound in my 'draft 2 edit' paragraph below
Editing process:
First I placed and ordered each of my clips on the timeline and colour coded them on premier pro for each question in my interview.
I filmed using two cameras so that I could use two different angles in my product, however this was tricky to add together when editing. For this I synced up each video with their audio and then deleted one audio so that both videos looked like they were using the same audio even though one of them was not. This then allowed my to easily cut out bits of video using the razor tool to give access to the other camera angle.
Once I was pleased with the camera angle sequence of the interview I started to add images and archive footage into the interview for a voiceover section. Here I have added footage from a livestream of one of the paintball tournaments/games my dad, the interviewee, played in. This was difficult to obtain as I had to get permission from the creator, screen record, cut down and crop each segment of footage I wanted to use.
One major issue I came into contact with during the editing process was storage problems as I was unable to upload any of the original unedited clips i wanted to use as many of them were filmed on a camera phone and because each original clip was about 8 minutes long my computer wouldn't let me download them. To work around this issue I had tried using a USB stick to download some of the previous data onto the USB so i could have more space on the computer, this worked originally, however when it came to trying to export my edit i then ran out of storage again. So I managed to find a hard rive my dad owned and connected that to my computer and repeated the similar steps I did with the USB. By this time I had a lot of different files placed in different areas and so when I tried to open my project on premier again, the computer could locate all the different areas where my clips were stored and so I had to find them manually, luckily I had renamed most of them and this didn't take me that long.
From this, next time I will make sure I am extra careful at where I store my files and have everything located in a much more organised and less stressful way
Rough cut( Draft 1):
I was finally able to present a rough cut, here everything is all in order and I have now added in and trimmed all extra footage into my video.
Some feedback I received was that my video was too long and I will have to cut it down by two minutes as my rough cut was about five minutes long and for the project it is meant to be around three minutes long , this will also help quicken the pace of my video as there are some quiet clips that may be uninteresting to the viewer.
Draft 2 edit:
This a second draft of my edit for the production project. I had managed to take off about two minutes of footage as previously suggested and have also added in some minor sound effects to allow the audio to transition more smoothly between cuts.I included some background music to help the overall video to run a bit smoother for the viewer, I did this by downloading some audio tracks off of freesound.com and placing it under my interview audio. Originally the background music was too loud so to quiet it I right clicked on the background track and selected audio gain then used trial and error in decreasing and increasing the audio volume, I eventually settled at '-15 dB' compared to the original volume of the background music.
Final
Finally I added a rolling credits scene at the end of my video to make the production seem more realistic and professional. I did this by clicking on Essential graphics>edit>text (I then typed in my credits)>roll. I found this extra step quite simple
Review
Overall I'm quite proud of the outcome for my interview project, one of the main things I've learnt from this project, besides getting a better understanding in premier pro, would be rather than one main focus, its actually all the small details, which are often easily overlooked, that boost a productions quality such as audio transitions or how long a certain shot is used for and what angle the interviewee is seen on frame. Compared to when I started my media studies course, throughout my work the quality has significantly improved.
This project was certainly different to what myself and other classmates were used to which took some time adjusting as we were suddenly in a national lockdown straight after Christmas. Due to the lockdown we suddenly had to become more independent in our work, this made it difficult for such things as learning new tools on premier pro or photoshop as instead of someone in person helping explain it to us we had to watch YouTube tutorials which were effective, but if you didn't understand something you couldn't ask the person why, we had to figure it out ourselves. Moreover we had to find different ways of filming as we didn't have access to use college equipment such as cameras so we had to improvise with what we already had, luckily I was able to order a few basic necessities off amazon such as a lapel microphone for better audio quality and a tripod to stand my iPhone on for filming.
A specific area in my production that I think worked really well was my use of Archive footage, it was especially hard to obtain as I had to do a lot of emailing to see if anyone had any old videos I could use as we weren't allowed to go out due to the lockdown, but once I managed to get the footage I created a voiceover section in my video and I think that part especially really draws the viewer in and makes them become submerged in the subject of paintball and almost makes the viewer seem like they're watching the paintball game in real life.
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