Documentry Project Part 1

Our next group project was to create a documentry about Harlow, two groups were to attempt to make Harlow seem like a shoppers paridise where as the other two were to make it seem like it was struggling.
I was put into a group with Sam, luke and Shane and we were given the task to make Harlow seem like it was struggling.

The Start of our plan was at first to just talk to eachother and brainstorm and get some idea's flowing, we all soon realised it was going to be hard to actually plan specific parts of the video in advance and it would be easier to just go up to the town and look around and see what shots we could find, we were looking for places that looked empty and derelect and all around miserable and unhappy.

Another aspect of the video that we needed to sort out an interview that was going to take place we had to ask the person we interviewed (Mrs Rogers) carefully worded questions that would make her respond in a negative way towards Harlow town, we wrote down the questions and then filmed the interview that took place in front of a white screen to give it that proffesional feel.

We then finally had to deal with the audio side things, we began by finding the music that we would place at the video's introduction it was an instrumental segment from an arctic monkey's song, and about half way though the video 'bad day' will play which really captures the feel that the whole video is trying to create.

The Final thing we had to sort out was the voice over that would be over the entire video in my opinion this was the most important part of the video because it linked everything together and gave out alot of information about Harlow town, we wrote the script and then invited Ryan linden to record it because he seemed to have the kind off voice over, voice we were looking for.

We then went to the town on both wednesday and monday and took shots of as many things that we could find because its better to have to much then to little in all honesty, this left us tuesday and wednesday to get all the editing down it was just a case of placing all the clips in the desired order adding the interview into the centre to break it up a little, then it was just a case of adding the music and voice over were required nothing to complicated but there was no need to make it complicated.

First Preliminary Task Evaluation

After everyone had finished there music videos we came together as a class and were told we were going to all evaluate eachothers finished pieces. As a whole i think that i video went over well with the class, they all seemed to enjoy it except for some shoddy camera work at the beginning by yours truly, the dance me, matt and kelsey danced at the end seemed to be a highlight for everyone except me because well i'm dancing.

I think what my group did particulaly well was using the mise en scene Matthew's outfit with the waistcoat and bowler hat etc. really gave the impression of the older times, it was important to give this impression because this is a very old song and a classic that everyone would have heard of, i think the rain and black and white effects we used were also instrumental in adding to the mise en scene of the entire piece and really made the viewer feel like they were almost in older times.

I would also like to believe that our attempts to relate the lyrics to the visuals were very successful because the song is called Raindrops keep falling on my head, and we use rain effects throughout the video and an umbrella is used throughout.

I learned alot from this experiance mainly about different filming techniques and different ways of using the camera for example to make good use of the zoom system to cut out shaking camera's whilst moving, and i also learned about the any different things that the movie maker on the mac's can do for example adding rain effects and slowing parts of the video down.

Overall i think this project was a success!