EVALUATION QUESTION 4

LAURASTANFORD

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA

TECHNOLOGIES IN THE RESEARCH,

PLANNING, CONSTRUCTION AND

EVALUATION STAGES?

The first p iece of research I conducted after dec id ing what our documentary was going to be about, was news reports of the current refugee cr is is . I wanted to further understand what was go ing on and to read about part icular s tor ies because i t would a l low me to dec ide what sort of route I could go down when making my own documentary, and what important facts and figures I should inc lude.

I found one part icular news art ic le on BBC News which summed up some of the key quest ions that I had mysel f. http: / /www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

I then decided to create a mood board of images that I found on Google search. First ly, I typed in ‘refugee crisis’, ‘Syria’ , ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘chi ldren refugees’. The pictures that came up were quite distressing and they real ly shocked me.

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

Simi lar ly, the news report of the young Syr ian boy named Aylan real ly grabbed my attent ion. He was found washed up on a beach in Turkey after the boat he was on capsized whi lst try ing to escape from his war-torn country.

http: / /www.mirror.co.uk/news/wor ld-news/ l i t t le-syrian-boy-washed-up-6371871

http: / /www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking- image-of-drowned-syr ian-boy-shows-tragic-pl ight-of-refugees

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

During one my media lessons, I remembered hearing about the theory of compassion fatigue. This was a particularly important concept to be aware of, especial ly because of the subject of our documentary.

Compassion fatigue is when an audience is unable to react in a sympathetic way towards a cr is is due to simi lar cr ises being overexposed. Because the current refugee crisis is shown in the news and the media so often, we had to make sure that our documentary was structured in an interesting way and featured different things in order to draw the reader in.

However, when researching compassion fatigue on Google, I came across an art icle by David Campbell :

https://www.david-campbel l .org/2012/02/29/the-myth-of-compassion-fatigue/

He argued that compassion fatigue is a myth and there is no absence of compassion, although al l issues are responded to differently.

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

Documentaries aren’t al l of the same type, they can each be very different so I decided to Google search different types to help me understand what type I want my documentary to be.

I came across a theorist cal led Bi l l Nichols who identified 6 different types of documentary modes: poetic, expository, participatory, observational , reflexive and performative. Our documentary is performative because we aim to educate the audience on the issues involved and we want to create an emotional impact on them.

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

Similarly to the previous sl ide, documentaries also fol low different narrat ive structures. I was hoping to find various different arcs which would help me to understand the typical structures. I came across Freytag’s Pyramid after searching ‘documentary narrat ive structures’ on Google.

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

Freytag’s pyramid shows how a film or documentary’s narrat ive is sect ioned into 5 different parts:

Expos i t ion Ris ing ac t ion Cl imax Fa l l ing act ion Denouement I decided to use

this as a kind of template when textual ly analysing documentaries myself.

During the researching sect ion of my main task, I textual ly analysed three different short documentaries us ing the fo l lowing websites:

I watched Hotel 22 on https:/ /www.shortoftheweek.com/search/?q=HOTEL+ 22 I then found Wait for Me on https:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v= TL9L2s0rGuE And final ly , Saving Face on

http:/ /www.filmsshort.com/short-film-pages/saving-face-daniel- junge-sharmeen-obaid-chinoy.html#.VvQpoxKLSCR

RESEARCH – MAIN TASK

The very first piece of planning I completed for my main task was creat ing a mind map t ime lapse of possible ideas for our documentary.

PLANNING – MAIN TASK

I used my Canon 1200D camera on a tr ipod facing down over the paper in order to record myself writ ing out my ideas.

I imported the recording onto Fina l cut pro and used the sett ings shown in order to speed i t up to create the t ime lapse.

Final ly, I downloaded some royalty free music to play over the top of the video.

Nishi l and I filmed our first set of test shots around school to prepare for filming our documentary and to test out possible establ ishing shots to use as wel l as practising shots for interviews.

We used a Canon 6D camera and a tr ipod to film the shots.

After filming we imported al l our videos into Final cut pro and added simple fading out transit ions between them, such as Fade to white and Gaussian.

PLANNING – MAIN TASK

Before filming our next tests shots for audio and l ight ing, I used a website I found on Google which enables you to create your own diagrams to represent where your l ighting wi l l be, as wel l as the posit ion of your camera, audio set ups etc.

PLANNING – MAIN TASK

http://www.lightingdiagrams.com/Creator

Nishi l and I then filmed our l ight ing and audio test shots. We set up our camera, two l ights with umbrel la diffusers and a boompole microphone. Simply using our iPhone camera, we took pictures of our equipment set up.

PLANNING – MAIN TASK

We then went back to the GDWG to complete some further test shots, and edited them in the same way on final cut pro then uploaded to YouTube.

Similarly, when we went back again to film some cutaway shots, we used Final cut again to put the short videos together.

To put al l our shots together, we imported them into Final cut pro. We then recorded a voiceover on our iPhones of ourselves explaining each individual shot. We weren’t sure i f recording on an iPhone would be clear and loud enough but I think that i t turned out real ly wel l , al though we did adjust the audio enhancement sett ings s l ight ly.

I created my audience research questionnaire on a word document. After looking at the results, I placed them into a table on Microsoft Excel

and created a variety of different charts to show the results clearly.

PLANNING – MAIN TASK

We constructed our main task in Final Cut pro. We imported al l of the videos that we filmed and began

cropping certain parts that we l iked, as wel l as experimenting with different transit ions to put between them. We decided to use a simple fade to black transit ion between al l the cl ips.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

Our ini t ia l idea was to play very short c l ips of each person saying a quick, s ignificant phrase to then have the t it le of the documentary fo l lowed by newspaper art ic les. However, we decided on a different idea but wanted to save and upload this first cut, but unfortunately Final Cut pro would not al low us to export i t .

We used the ‘basic t i t le’ for al l the text screens because we wanted quite a simple effect. We chose the font ‘virtus’ for the text and used an off-white colour.

Unfortunately, in some of our interviews there are horizontal l ines going through the shot.

Before start ing the interviews, we set up the l ight ing and found that with the art ificia l l ights switched on in the room as wel l as both of our l ights with the umbrel la diffusers, the horizontal l ines were real ly bad which we could see on the camera. We switched off the rooms l ights and decided to just use our own. As the l ines now didn't ’t appear on the camera we thought we had solved the problem. However, when watching the videos back on the computer the l ines were there.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

We looked at many websites onl ine and we were unable to find a software that would remove the l ines, so we tr ied to reduce it as much as possible.

In the first cut of our documentary, we used the sound that was recorded from the camera. However, the voices weren’t loud enough and there was a hum that was picked up which drowned out their voices. We tr ied to remove this on Final Cut pro using the audio enhancement sett ings shown below, but i t didn’t turn out that wel l .

Within our audience feedback, everyone also mentioned that the audio wasn’t great.

We then remembered that we used a smal ldictaphone for a back up recording. We detached the audio that was already onthe cl ip and replaced i t with the audio fromthe dictaphone and found that i t was muchlouder and there was no hum either.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

For the introduction of our documentary, we wanted to include news reports playing over the top of somebody searching on Google about the cris is.

We searched ‘refugee news stories’ and found two videos on YouTube of news reporters talking about the cris is. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1j3EDOcPw from ABC NEWS

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

YouTube grants something cal led ‘Fair Use’ which al lows you to download and use copy-righted videos without gett ing permission from owners, providing its being used for particular reasons such as non-profit educational purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/en-GB/fair-use.html#yt-copyright-four-factors

We then used a YouTube downloader website cal led https://savemedia.com/ where you simply copy and paste the l ink of the video from YouTube and i t downloads i t onto your computer.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

As well as using this to download the news reports, we also downloaded the sound of a Mac computer start ing up which we found on the fol lowing l ink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9qOJqNjalE

We also downloaded the background music from YouTube, which we found by searching ‘sad instrumental music’ on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUZeSYsU0Uk&nohtml5=False

When we downloaded the news footage, we imported them into Final Cut pro. The video was long, so after l istening for key parts, we chose to crop the first 10 seconds of the news report.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

We dragged the cropped section into the t imel ine, and detached the audio by r ight cl icking on i t . We then deleted the video itsel f and placed the audio underneath.

CONSTRUCTION – MAIN TASK

For the intro of our documentary, we used QuickTime Player to make a screen recording of us researching about refugees and immigration etc on Google. However, it ended up being quite a long recording, so in Final Cut we cut parts of the recording and sped it up sl ightly.

We were or iginally going to find newspapers with artic les on the refugee crisis, and create a montage of them on screen. However, we decided to use this software instead because it is more relatable to ourselves and our target audience, as they general ly are more l ikely to read onl ine about it rather than in a newspaper.