1. Documentary Review. Bart 12C Media
Our task for this project was to produce a short documentary in partnership with the British
Museum and Chocolate Films. This was to illustrate detailed information about the Lewis
Chessmen for those who have maybe not heard of them and those who would like to learn
a bit more about them. We set out to make an interesting and effective documentary that
people would enjoy.
For this project we had to carry out a few research tasks so that we could make the
documentary feel as if it was a documentary. For instance we did primary and secondary
research on the codes and conventions of short documentaries. To get a basic
understanding of a successful documentary we had watched a few professionally made
ones. They were; Tupac and Biggie, Inconvenient Truth, and Fahrenheit 911. This helped me
contextualise the concept of documentaries. We had also watched some short
documentaries such as; Pong, and Apology Line.
Short documentaries are succinct and get to the point quickly. Short documentaries also
tend to be visually nice by using rule of thirds, framing and focus points.
In relation to these some of the conventions I had learnt about are the visual styles of
documentaries, talking heads, titles and text, and exposition. What do these mean?
Talking heads - is when a person is displayed on camera giving information about a certain
topic or subject without the use of any illustrative material.
An exposition in a documentary is usual to set the theme and give the viewers a first
impression of the documentary. The exposition is at the beginning of a documentary.
Titles and text are used to quickly convey information about a certain scene or to introduce
a new segment.
The Visual style in documentaries is the Mise en scène. It is generally what is in the visual of
the audience so that they can interpret what the location is and if it is suited to the topic.
Considering our documentary was about chess which is considered to be a game of intellect,
they would have the setting in a library or a place which conveys the idea of intelligence.
The conventions I have used in my documentary are; talking heads, titles and text, and
visual style. The reason I have used these conventions for our documentary is that they give
the feel of a professionally made documentary. Our visual style was quite
formal/intellectual as it was based in a museum and in front of the Lewis Chessmen.
Museums usually connote information.
Before we had started making our documentaries we pitched our ideas on a storyboard to
get a general idea on what we aimed to produce. The story board consisted of telling us
what different shot types we had to use, if there is any dialogue during a certain scene or
even text and titles. After we had made our storyboards we planned on making our

2. interview questions and practiced them within our group to see what kind of responses we
could have received from the public or the curators at the museum
The pre-production task that I personally was responsible for was to come up with 7
different interview questions. Some of the questions were not related to the area of
information we were looking to get information about which meant we had to rewrite some
questions based on the subject that was the origins of the chess pieces.
Our research and planning was quite effective as we conducted secondary research. The
secondary research was gathering information from the curators of the Lewis Chessmen
who knew a significant amount about the chess pieces. This was a strong milestone in the
making of the documentary. The reason for this being effective is that the curators were a
reliable source of information.
The let down in our research and planning was that we couldn’t decide who’s storyboard to
use which led to a little dispute within the group. This was resolved by combining the ideas.
As we started the production stage of the documentary my group fairly chose what they
would like to do. Each lesson we worked on the documentary we swapped roles such as
uploading footage, producing footage or editing the shots and syncing sound. This gave
everyone the opportunity to practice their skills in the allocated area. Within a few days of
production we knew who was good at what and kept those roles permanent. This gave us
an advantage of time management and group cooperation. If there were any mistakes on
the timeline or the music was jumpy we looked over our documentary and fixed the issues.
Near the end of the documentary we were missing footage so we improvised and filmed
fake public interviews of people giving their opinion on where the chess pieces belong and
why.
Overall the documentary was quite neat with good lighting, camera angles and shot types.
The transitions between particular clips were among the strong points of our documentary.
The only bit that could have been improved is the range of interviews we had with the
curators which could have been livelier if there were different people speaking.
After the documentary had been finished we received feedback from peers, teachers and
the people we have worked with at the British Museum. Most of the feedback was positive
and some was supportive telling us what we could have improved or added.
The editing process was successful as we set out to make it look like a real documentary and
that’s just what we did. The finished documentary was not so different from our
storyboards. The reason the documentary was not so different is because we followed our
storyboard throughout the process hoping it would turn out what we expected.
The documentary was also suitable for our target audience which had no age demographic
but was aimed at those who wanted to get to know the chess pieces or for those who
already knew some but wanted to find out more information.