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1. Production diary FMP

2. Week 1 contextual research
This week was the start of our final project where we started by researching products, people and
things that we would like to research. It didn’t have to fully line up with what we were thinking of
making for our FMP but it was things that interested us especially stylistically and things we would
enjoy making or watching. Most of my research was looking at photographers and videographers that I
liked and doing more research into their work and certain projects I chose photographers like George
Muncey who I talk a lot about in my work as he's a huge inspiration to me and also photographer Alec
Soth who has recently been catching my eye with his work on traveling America.
I did tend to lean towards some people and projects that I knew would be useful for the project I
wanted to make so I did a lot of researching of tattoo artists and styles as I already knew my project
was going to be about tattoos people like Arthur Muzy from Ukraine were big style inspirations for the
kinds of tattoos I wanted to document so I wrote a lot about him and his Instagram page

3. Week 2 proposal and contextual
research
This week I focused on finishing off my contextual research adding more writing
and sources but I had also fully decided what I was going to make in terms of my
documentary and had great ideas for styles I wanted to use so I s tarted writing
up my proposal talking about what I wanted my project to end up being like and
naming it ‘Under The Skin’ which I found a fitting name for a documentary about
tattoos and it also sounds quite dark which is what I wanted my doc to be like.
In my proposal I talk about how I'm going to make the project in terms of
research and how I want it to look and feel but I also talk about my other
projects and how they have helped me get to the stage I'm at now ready to make
a final project with skills I've learnt like using premier much more fluently and
learning niche skills that will set my documentary apart from others in my group.
I also credited a lot of websites and pages that I will be using for my research
which consisted of peoples portfolios and Instagram pages that id seen before
and knew would be useful to my work but also some films that I plan on watching
for my research that have things to do with tattoos as the plot.
This proposal was also good to write as it also helped me set up a timeframe of
what thing sim going to do on certain weeks like a roadmap.

4. Week 3 research
This week I started on one of the most important parts of this project which was the research document, this is one I've always
struggled on for previous projects so I wanted to make sure I was doing as much as I could to make it as detailed and relevant as
possible so I could use it lots while making and planning my project otherwise there is no point in having it. Since I already had a lot
of ideas of people and thing I wanted to research I decided to look for things online that I hadn’t seen before and had no idea about
information wise to try find something fresh and I stumbled upon some really good work like the project named yantra which is a
documentary video/ photo project talking about a tribe that uses tattoos in ways to talk to gods and devils which I found really
interesting and they had some really cool visual elements I liked and wanted to maybe replicate in my work so I did a lot of research
into that project.
I wanted to make sure my audience work was better than previous projects so I made sure to try be more detailed and write more
as its something I've struggled to do with other projects as I find audiences the hardest to talk about.
One of the main things I did for research this week was watch a film called eastern promises which is a film about the Russian mafia
in London starring Viggo Mortensen this film was really informative about how tattoos were used in the past to show rank in these
cultures of criminals and it was interesting to see how the styles have been mimicked and used nowadays as more of just a homage
to those criminals. It was also really good to see some filming choices and how they filmed the tattoos being made in the film.

5. Week 4 research
This week in research I carried on looking at products that would be
suitable to research for my project and found a great documentary that
is I a similar vein to eastern promises a film I watched last week called
the mark of cain and its about Russian prisons when the mafia and
gangs were forming and it went into great detail about why the tattoos
were so important to the criminals and why they decided to use them
and have them on their bodies but it also showed a lot of the horrible
conditions that the prisoners lived in so overall was a really great
documentary that showed me a lot and will defiantly help me make my
own documentary and I really like how some of the scenes were shot
with he angles and the colour grading.
I also ended up doing a lot more research this week into photographers
and videographers that I knew were going to be super useful to help me
find ideas for shots and how to edit up my documentary people like
negative feedback and jack Latham to name a few. But I also this week
started looking at ideas for lens choices as I knew I wanted to
incorporate my vintage lenes into this project again like I have with
other work I've made for college so I did a lot of digging on websites
about the pros and cons and what other people thought about using old
fashioned lenses and why thewy liked them over traditional digital
lenses.

6. Week 5 problem solving + pre production
This week I have been working on my problem solving document
where I talk about things that have gone wrong in previous
projects and how I could avoid making the same mistakes in the
future and what kind of problems I could come into with the final
project I'm working on now .
This document is really important and its good to keep a guide to
go back to so I don’t fall into the same problems that I've made
before, things like not leaving myself enough time to complete
work and getting behind but also simple things like going back to
work when I have free time to add to things so I can add more
detail and hopefully bump up my grade if possible.
all these things are super important to plan as I always forget
things and it will be great having this document to go and look at
while making my project so I've included things that I need to
remember and work on while I'm filming my documentary. The
things I need to remember is to give myself plans like scripts so
that when I go to film, my interviews I have something to use while
I'm there so I'm not fumbling my way through all the questions and
making a mess.
I've been going into details about specific things I need to do on
the days I'm out filming like specific techniques like suing my
camera lenes and using my 4x5 camera.

7. Week 6 planning + pre
production and experiments
This week I started my experiments and I knew I needed
to definitely try somethings that I hadn't done before
otherwise they cant be classed as experiments so I
started looking at techniques from my research that I
wanted to try and figure out how I could do them myself,
the first of my ideas was scanning in text with my scanner
at home and morphing and distorting the words with my
hands so that it looked really wavy and strange for my
fonts.
This worked out way better than I had planned and looked
really cool to say I did it all at home, I used my Epson
v600 and it only took me a couple of tries to get a good
result that I was happy about here some pics of my
process of me putting in the hand drawn text I made and
sandwiching it in-between my scanner.
The one with the text on is the final product that I was
satisfied with and I think it really fits with the look I'm
going for my project so I'm exited to try incorporate this
into my final video and make it work somehow.

8. Week 7 planning + pre
production and experiments
In between doing my experiments this week I've been writing out my whole
planning document and so far I'm really happy with it as I've done a lot of slides
with lots of detailed writing and its looking much better than any of my previous
projects planning so it seem I've learn from my other failures and managed to
get this one looking right I've been making sure to get everything I need for my
interviews like an script and shot list but also making sure I know what gear to
take with me so before I go I can cross things off my list and be prepared.
With the rest of my experiments I've been testing out an audio device that I've
borrowed from college that will be really helpful for my interviews and
capturing any other sounds I need for my project, it’s a bit confusing to use as
I've never had to use anything like it before but the whole point of my
experiments is to get used to suing it so I can be prepared for filming my
project. I started off taking it outside to film some traffic and sync up the audio
in premier which was a good thing to learn but I decided I needed to do
something a bit more trickier so I wanted to incorporate music into my project
but add my own spin on things so I started recording with the Tascam my
record player from home with different albums on vinyl to try change up some
tracks to make them fit the tone of my project, this included lots of Radiohead
albums and the soundtrack to the second trainspotting film but is settled on a
track by Aphex twin that I though would be perfect for my project so I dropped
it into this app I hadn’t used before called mixer which is a DJ booth app where
you can switch up the pitch and changer the sounds of tracks so for my last
experiment I screen recorded myself mixing the Aphex track to fit my
documentary and I was really happy with the results as it just adds another
personal level to my documentary instead of just dropping some generic
unchanged music over the whole project with no second thought.
Here's a little pic of my record setup with a
selection of records I used

9. I also in-between scanning I attempted
to replicate the morphed text in
photoshop and these are what I managed
to come up with for my experiments , I
believe I will sue lots of these for my
documentary as I really like how they
look and they fit well with the aesthetic
I'm going for

10. Week 8 production
This week weas the start of production and I was very
nervous as one of my sets of interviewees had not
messaged me back for a couple of weeks so I had decided
to solely use Alfie for my interview which meant a lot of my
planning was wasted on the two people that said they were
happy to be interviewed but its all good for my evaluation
so I wasn’t too worried I had a script and I knew exactly
what I needed to get for my documentary to work so I
carried on starting to make the opening for my project
suing clips I found on the Pathe website archives things like
vintage tattoo machines being used and people showing off
their tattoos, this was all really useful stuff for me to do
this week before I cracked on with filming Alfie.
One of the main tings I worked on as well was getting all
my fonts into premier so I could start making a title screen
with clips running behind them with the old-fashioned
tattoo guns

11. Week 9 production
This week I was a lot more focused and knew what I was
going to be doing and working hard towards completing as I
had a few ideas for backdrops I wanted to make in
photoshop. I had the idea to make some textured backdrops
to put text and images on that looked like paper as paper is
a big thing in the world of tattooing mainly for drawing flash
designs on so I went into photoshop and made some really
cool effects that looked a lot like paper but then I had an
even better idea to make it much more experimental and
weird to fit with my style so I decided to make them morph
between each layer so it looked like the paper was growing
and moving in the background. This took me awhile to get
right as I had to test a few different techniques but ended up
just using the crossfade effect in premier to have them
cross over into each other and changing the opacity of the
layers. The final product I think looks really nice and I was
really proud of making this effect especially since I ha
thought of it myself and hadn’t really had any prior skills
with this type of editing.
This is a screen shot of one of
the layers I made with the
papery strange effect on it.

12. Week 10 production
For this week of production I've been working on getting
some transitions using text working for the opening section
of the project, since I made the backdrops last week I
decided id need to go full out on the text visuals too and
came up with an idea to make my title section look really
nice. My idea was to use rows of text to slowly cover up the
screen in a swipe motion and then have my title font pop up
in the middle but I hadn’t really done something as elaborate
as this before so figuring the logistics out was tricky but it
basically involved me making a lot of layers of text and
having it slowly move in and jut keep increasing the time
frame of the clip until I was happy with the speed and
duration.
I was really happy when it was finished this week but it did
take longer than I wanted to make but it means I was ready to
film my interviews this week coming and I could focus on
editing all the rest of the project.

13. Week 11 production
This week was possibly the most important week I've had as I
had to do all my interviewing and filming this week.
At the start of the week I went up to Grimsby to see my friend
and tattoo artist Alfie and get his interview filmed, when we got
to the tattoo shop I started by setting up my tripod and camera
with the Tascam audio device attached I already knew I was
going to have a problem as it was quite loud at times in there
with the other artists chatting and working but I've already
looked through the audio and most of it is usable and the ones
that have too much background noise I have edited using some
software called audacity which helped me mute and compress
background noise on my clips.
The filming altogether went off really well I'm super happy with
he clips I've got as Alfie turned out to be really good with
handling the questions I asked, I dint expect him to make such
good conversations and answers from the script of questions id
given him so I was really happy at the end of the filming day as I
knew id got exactly the kind of footage I wanted.
The filming of the actual tattoo he gave me went really well too
we managed to figure out a way for me to lay and be able to film
at the same time and the clips I gained look really good even
before I've edited them.

14. Week 12 production
This week I managed to get almost all my editing done as I had all my clips from last week from my filming d
ay so I knew I could crack on and get the whole project made, I started off my cutting down my interview
into sections to spread out through the whole documentary which ended up being 3 big blocks of
conversation and then over that I filled in with clips I took of Alfie tattooing me and small things like him
showing me his old flash books that had drawn on vintage pages of wuthering heights which I thought was
too cool not to show in my documentary I also had a lot of footage of vintage pathe archives work to put in
my doc as it was all really cool to link in with some of the history parts I talk about in the project so having
this historical footage made it pair really nicely.
I managed to get a draft at around 4 minuets but felt like there wasn’t really enough going on in terms of
voiceovers and more clips of tattoo related things so I managed to record myself talking over a lot of the
documentary and I added some images of Alfie's Instagram flash art to bulk it up.
I was happy with he draft id made and sent it off to get feedback which I will find out about next week and
will see what I need to add or work on.

15. Week 13 production and evaluation
This week I worked on some feedback id gained on my draft of the documentary and what I had to do was
change up the volume of the whole project as it was a bit quiet all around and I needed to re record some of
the voiceover I had done as my voice wasn’t as confident as it needed to be and then I needed to add
something a little bit more to the end of the video as I kind of just had it end on a conversation that was
quite abrupt which at first I thought was cool but then realised it doesn’t really make sense in terms of what
the documentary is about as its meant to teach and inform you not just leave you with more questions.
After I had worked on these issues I was really happy with how my documentary had come together and
uploaded it with the rest of my documents to my wix website.
Then I started this week working on my evaluation which is the last section of the project and involves a lot
of writing which is something I struggle with a lot so I've been trying my best to write in as much detail as I
can and explain my processes properly so that its evident what I've done and why for his project.

16. Week 14 evaluation and presentation
This week I was working hard to get my evaluation done and try to finish up the whole project so
that id only have my presentation left to do but writing this week was super difficult for me as I
struggle trying to get what I'm thinking in my head down in writing in detail as I tend to just write it
really basically instead of going into the whole process of explaining everything.
I manged to write a lot and I hope what I've done is enough as I really tied to do a few slides on
every topic including the improvements and the good things that I enjoyed. Getting the peer feedback
was easy too as I just asked friends and family to review it for me and my dad whose a graphic
designer so he sees video work a lot so he gave me good answers and feedback to use in my
evaluation.
Once I had finished off my evaluation I got to work on designing some merch for my presentation to
show off my documentary this included making lots of designs for t shirts in photoshop using images
I took for the project and even some of Alfie's flash work, I was really happy with how they looked
as they looked like the kind of t-shirts I would happily wear if they were real.
I also made some designs for prints that could be sold with frames alongside the documentary to
promote it.
Then I did my presentation where I livestreamed on discord to a group of my close friends who
watched it all and typed their feedback out in the group discord server to give me some thoughts
they had on the project.