Evaluation on my film

1. Evaluation
Harmeet Kaur

2. What I have learned from this
project
As I did media level two in Leyton college last year, I thought that I wouldn’t learn or
find out more things in the induction project, however it was the complete opposite I
had learned a lot of things; an example would be how to explain and help to new peers
in my class on how to use primer; I had an advantage because I has used it last year so I
had some basic skills an knowledge about it already. I t was my first time making a
documentary in media because last year I did not do anything in this particular field, I
had learned how to assemble a mike together and connect it to the camera. Another
thing that I have learned from this project is how to export a file from the new premier
in the college onto Youtube, without messing up the work you are uploading. I have
learned how to be confident and not shy to ask people if they would want to be in our
documentary. I'm glad I had a really hard working and productive team (Andrada,
Daniella and Aisha) the best thing about this group is that we all shared similar ideas,
this made the project more chilled out and relaxed out.

3. How this all came about
There was a lot of research done before even starting to plan the documentary, at
the beginning of this project me and Andrada had decided a theme together that
we were both interest in, which was ‘use of social media networking’ . The reason
for picking this topic was because it is frequently used by our target audience
which was teen agers, we thought it would be a very controversial subject as well
interesting. One of the main reasons why we picked this topic was because the
people that we were going to be watching our documentary were our class peers,
so the topic had to be interesting. Another reason why we choose this topic was
because this project had to be completed within college and within a small period
of time so the only people we could interview were teenagers or young adults .

4. My Research
In order to gain more knowledge about social media networking and find out the
typical asked question about social media networking, I decided to watch a few
documenters on this topic on YouTube this gave me an example of what type of
questions I would need to make up and to ask in the documentary, also by
analysing the videos on YouTube it gave me a rough idea of how I would layout my
documentary. Another way to gain research was to find three websites sources
that had unique and interesting facts about this topic on it; this helped me create
my questions and broaden my knowledge more about specific social media sites,
e.g. Facebook owns Instagram.

5. My Planning
Planning was a very essential part in not only this project but it mostly everything you do in life, in this
project it played a very significant part, we had designed a production schedule that had to followed
whilst producing this documentary it also reminded use of what equipment was needed to we wouldn’t
forget anything for the production of the documentary. Personally I think the schedule should have
been created more in detail because at the beginning of the production of the documentary we needed
a mike but however we didn’t have it , but on the other hand we managed to make use of it some how. I
personally made my own ‘ To do’ list’s these were made various times through out the course of three
weeks, I set my self daily two tasks which had to be completed by the end of the day. Overall I think this
helped me not miss any of my deadlines and kept me organised so I wouldn’t miss any of my tasks. In
the planning we also made a recce, in this we discussed as a group what our location would be, after we
decided what it would be which was on the street. We send two of our team members to take pictures
of the location, this helped us cause if we didn’t discuss this before hand we would have panicked on
the day of the shooting cause we would have not known where we were going to be filming. Not only
for this reason but we took pictures to see if the lighting was good for the shooting because if it wasn’t
clear we had time to change the location.

6. The production work
Overall I think the filming production was successful, we had got various different
answers from various different people, which made the documentary look more
natural. Writing an essay for the magazine spread was quite tough task I would
describe it as, the reason being because we had to write an specific amount that had to
fit into the magazine spread, and being very truthful about it, it was not easy even
though me and Andrada and shared sections out to write about for some reason it still
was too less for the spread to be fully completed. The post production for the double
spread was preety simple, I mean to say that constructing it wasn’t that hard as I had
done it before last year, like I said before th only difficult part was writing the text out,
laying the image out wasn’t that hard, because we had taken it in the correct way so
that when placing it on the magazine it wouldn’t give us any problems.

7. Interviews
I’m very pleased with the fact that this experience has taught me a lot on how to direct a
interview session as it was my first time doing it. It was a challenge to go up to random people
and explaining to them why we wanted to interview them. The interviewer which was Andrada
has to create rapport with the person she was interviewing, this was very important because once
the person is comfortable that’s only when he or she can open up, this is one code I had also
found when analysing the videos I watched on YouTube. A strength of the interview I would say to
be that we had covered a lot of different emotions, in the sense that there was a bit of
seriousness and humour if the interviews we took. Another strength would be that when Andarda
was taking the interview even if the person gave a one word answer she made them expand their
answer which them became a explained answer. However not every thing is perfect, there are a
few weakness’s for example before interviewing a person the interviewee's must always tell them
not to directly look at the camera, as this is only the interviewee's job, however we made the
mistake in our documentary we had two people looking directly at the camera.

8. My target audience
Our target audience was sixteen to nineteen years old teenagers, there was no specific race or
gender. You can see that we have made our documentary for this specific target audience, cause
the content isn’t that formal, the interviews done have a bit of laughter in them and also humour.
Also the language used isn’t formal language for example Randal says ‘man don’t like bullyin’ as
you can see this sentence is not said in formal English it is said in a way which the target audience
talk to each other within college and maybe out side of college is well. The style of the
documentary was quite relaxed and lade back, as you know quite serious documentary's like
‘Catfish’ do have very formal interviews where the person is sitting on a chair and getting
interviewed, however we didn’t used this technique in our documentary. All we had in our
documentary was a sign of the college behind us and the interview taking place in front of it, it
had no chair or desk it was just simple and normal how teenagers like everything. I say that my
film is short and interesting it keeps that audience attention because its not all just about peoples
opinion it has a few statists within it as well as humour. The double page spread was hard to write
but at the end of the day it wads finished to the best of mine and Andradas ability, we covered all
the subjects that needed to be covered.

9. Editing
Where do I start from, editing our documentary was a massive myth and a real challenge as we
had a total of 4 hours of footage however we cut that down to 28 minutes before realising that
the average documentary time in our class was about 2-5 minutes. We asked Rob for his opinion,
and he said it should be 2-5 minutes long so as a group we managed to do the final editing in an
hour. We reduced our documentary from 28 minutes to 2 minutes and 18 seconds. Exporting the
film created a very big problem, because whilst exporting it deleted some of the footage this was
a technical fault which ended up making us re- editing the footage once again. The second time
we exported it, it exported but the intro and outer music wasn’t there, the reason being for this
was because the IT technician had deleted the music file from the desktop. I had initially saved it
on the desktop which was a wrong thing to do because the track was meant to be download into
the same file as the film had been saved as; so then I re downloaded it and saved it in the correct
file, then placed it on the Premier timeline and finally exported the film for the last time.

10. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths:
 Documentary was edited to a realty good level, it had intro music and outer music.
 Film itself had nice transitions from one interview to the other
 The voice of the film was loud and clear
 Lighting was on point, non of the sun was covering anyone's face
 Various different opened ended questions were asked
Weaknesses:
 Could of used various camera angels
 Made the documentary slightly longer
 People being interviewed should not have looked straight at the camera
 Sound should have been the same level through out the whole film
 Interviewed more people

11. What I could have done better
 Taken another shot of the outer (Could of compared results of interviews)
 Would interview teachers as well to get more varied results.
 Maybe added background music throughout the whole film.
 Included some stills to make it look more professional.
 Had different members of the group interviewing people.
 Increase the length of the documentary.
 Have more questions to ask.