Final Documentary - Evaluation

My documentary is about the new choir that has been set up in the college called Young Legacys (YGL). I came up with the idea to do a documentary on YGL after my previous idea fell through and didn't work at all. I decided to do it on the choir because it is a new group that has been set up and it has a lot of potential. The group also needed to be filmed as it was for one of the music student's units and this was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. This documentary is expository. In order for it to be this type of documentary we held interviews and added music in the background.

I feel like my filming skills have been developed while completing this task. I used a two camera set up for the interviews and I feel like the angles that we shot at were very good, although there was one issue that I would like to fix. The side camera had a different look to the shot even though I made sure that they were both on the same setting. So my only guess can be that the lighting messed with the shot causing it to look different to the second camera.

I managed my time well considering that my new idea only had 5 days to come to fruition. Within those 5 days I managed to find people to interview and sort out the time of the interviews and schedule when I was going to edit. Therefore, I believe my time management was very good. However, it was also quite poor considering that I had about 4 weeks to complete the project and for 3 and a half weeks I did nothing with my original idea.

I worked with a classmate to film the interviews we were both in charge of a camera each and planned everything together. In terms of working independently, I feel like my editing and interviewing skills really shone through as I was able to ask the questions in a way that would get an answer that made sense without needing the question for context and if anything went wrong I was able to edit it out without making the footage seem unnatural.

The main issue I had was the idea itself as I was unmotivated to complete the task so it was very easy to get past that by just changing my documentary topic. The other problem I faced was while editing. Every time I tried to add graphics to the timeline, the video would turn black and white, flip upside down and reverse and I couldn't figure out how to change it back after that had happened. So the only way for me to overcome this was to begin editing from the beginning again and create my own graphics using photoshop.

In my documentary, I think the things that went well were the interviews and the editing. The interviews were fun to film which made them easy to use in the editing software because I had multiple ideas and ways I could have edited the footage. However, I feel the way I edited it was the best out off all of the options. The only thing that could have gone better would be the quality of the second camera during the interviews. The colouring was off slightly to the main camera which makes it a little awkward when the angle switches from the main to the side. Although, apart from that, I feel like my documentary went great as it was based around something that no-one else has done and tested my editing skills.