Final evaluation of my CITDA documentary.

1. Final
Evaluation
Culture in the Digital Age Draft Four
Evaluation

2. At the beginning of my project, the process went smoothly, I finished all my research and
presented my rationale. From my survey results I found that my rationale was successful, the
target audience understood my idea and who the client was as well as saying that it appealed to
them. For the improvement section of my feedback I was quite pleased due to two people saying
that there was nothing to improve, and the only other feedback was directed at the way I
presented, saying I should speak more clearly/directly. To help this I represented my rationale,
rehearsed it more beforehand and spoke more confidently. I would say that this did help my
confidence with speaking in front of a crowd. Also, because I presented to people who were part
of my target audience for BBC Three, I could find out if the idea for my documentary interested
and appealed to them

3. For the preproduction work, in preparation for my project,
I completed all the necessary paperwork that I needed
before I started filming. This paperwork included the
consent forms from the participants that I included in
documentary (i.e., the ones I interviewed), location
scouting and location release forms, risk assessments
and evaluations of these locations, personnel list and
resource list of who and what equipment is needed for
the filming and the storyboard, a roughly sketch and
detailing of how I want my scenes to look like.
I filled out all this necessary paperwork up to standard
with no issues, because of this I could therefore begin
filming my documentary straight away.

4. To record footage of my interviews, I asked 5 people out of my media
class to participate in these interviews. I planned to record these
videos on a Thursday morning (23rd of April 2022) as I know that
all the people that I asked to participate were in college that day
anyway. I also gave my participants the questions a couple days in
advance so that they could prepare their answers, this meant that
when they got to answering the questions in the recordings, they
weren't pondering thinking for an answer which would create an
awkward cut.
To record these interviews I used my own camera however borrowed a
mic and tripod from the college. I booked the recording studio for two
hours from 11am till 1pm, this way I had plenty of time to set up my
equipment in preparation for recording my interviews, to make sure
that everything was working properly and that my camera was
steady and fitted properly on the tripod.
Because I was not on camera during the recordings (only the person
that I was interviewing) I could start and stop the recordings myself

5. For the band recording I had to fit in with the timetable of the music
students and find an opportunity where we were both free to
record. Because of this we decided to record on a Friday morning
before our classes (24th of April 2022) as we both didn't start till
after 11am.
We started at 9am to give us time to set up cameras and for there
to set up their instruments and therefore we had around and hour
and a half to record after this which left us with plenty of time.
Recording this required
quite a lot of
communication between
us all, as I had to know
when they were ready to
perform, as well as
communicating with the
sound and lighting
technician.

6. For the production part of my project, the only real issues I had was with the mic when recording,
this was because to mic stand was broken and therefore would not sit securely on top of the
camera, therefore was often falling off and certain footage had to be rerecorded several times
because of this and because the mic kept picking up the sound of the air vents in the recording
studio over the sound of my interviews, making my interviewees less audible. A simple solution to
overcoming these next time I am to record for a project is by finding and using a mic that is not
broken and is more stable as well as recording in a room where there are no air vents or where air
vents are less audible. Aside from this, my recording
process was very easy, I managed to get four people
to interview, and they were all reliable and showed up
on time although one dropped out, therefore I had one
less person to record. I knew that was a possibility as
everyone has their own circumstances that can affect
their commitments, that's why I chose several
interviewees in the first place, in case some didn't turn
up I knew I could still gather some interviews and
footage.

7. Within the post-production side there were a few issues that I
had to deal with. The editing process itself went quite smoothly
however I had to create four drafts in total as there was issues
that kept popping up after I had rewatched them or gotten
feedback from my peers. The differences from my first draft to
final draft included subtitles, credit music, louder overall audio,
louder interviews, quieter live music performances and a fixed
spelling error. Overall, the editing of cutting clips, adding and
recording a voiceover, adding background music, downloading
and uploading clips, adding text, video and audio transitions
went well. I added subtitles to make my project appeal to more
people, credit music to make it more like a regular documentary
(I found this out from my codes and conventions of a
documentary research), and the other issues were all related to
the sound. To link back to my client, I even edited the BBC
logo into the top right-hand corner of the screen like in the real
TV shows, to show who the client was for my documentary to
make it as professional as possible, as well as the name of my
own production company.

8. To download footage, I used a platform
called Y2Mate. For this all I had to do was
find some footage from YouTube that I was
interested in using for my documentary,
(footage that I could not record myself as I
did not have the resources, such as clips of
jukeboxes) copy the video link and paste it
into Y2Mate. Y2Mate would give me the
option to convert and download just the
audio, or the video and audio files into an
MP4. Another good aspect was that I could
choose the file size that I wanted to
download, for all the clips that I
downloaded I chose the biggest file size so
that I could get the best quality fo

9. Overall
Evaluation
This project has overall helped me improve my video and sound
editing skills, especially sound as I had not experimented with that
much before this project. The research and pre-production work I
had experience with from my last projects and therefore I would say
were simpler and didn't require much improvement in comparison to
the production and post-production work. Although I did have
experience with production and post-production work, this was a
different type of project therefore the production and post-
production process was quite different (e.g., smile campaign I didn't
have to use a mic as the only audio was the background music
whereas I had to record live music and interviews for my
documentary).
I have also learnt more about video recording with a mic and text
transitions, especially with creating credits which I had
no experience with before. The only aspect that I would change
would be to try and record more of my own clips, instead of just
using downloaded footage from YouTube using Y2Mate.