The student produced a short documentary about the Lewis Chessman pieces with a group for the British Museum. They researched documentary conventions like archival footage, voiceovers, titles/text, and interviews. These conventions were used in their documentary to provide historical context and information about the Chessman pieces to museum visitors. Some challenges included time management among group members and achieving the target length of 5 minutes. Overall the documentary provided educational facts about the Chessman pieces and received positive feedback from an audience at the museum.

1. Review of documentary
In my group wereHadila and Dyalnwe had to produce a short documentary about the Lewis
Chessman pieces conjunction with British Museum and Chocolate film factory. Our target audience
was for people who visited the British museum and wanted more factual information about the
Lewis chessman pieces by watching a short film.
My group we did some research about documentary conventions to find ways to improve and make
our documentary as professional looking as it can be. To help us to get an idea of how to make a
successful documentary we watched a bit of Biggie & Tupac, Kurt & Courtney, An Inconvient truth
and Fahrenheit 911 documentaries.
I learnt some conventions of a documentary one are archival footage it’s a video or picture of the
real incident or thing on the specific date and time of when it happened to show historical events or
to add additional information in the film. Another convention is a voice over it’s a commentary or
soundtrack during the production this is when the filmmaker can speak directly to the viewer,
offering information, explanation and opinions. Another is text and titles simple showing a quick way
of conveying information to the viewer. Lastly anotherconvention we learnt was interviews it’s quite
common in documentaries and it allows people to be filmed and speak directly to the camera giving
out additional information you would need in your documentary.
The conventions I’m going to use in my documentary are archival footages, titles and text, voice over
and interview everything I have explained before. I want to use these conventions because first of all
archival footage will help with showing the Lewis chessman pieces and the historic footages of the
Lewis chessman to the viewers. Titles and text to show who is speaking to the camera and tell who
these people are to the viewers as the documentary goes along. I would also like to add commentary
or soundtrack so if an image shows up on the documentary as it goes along of the Lewis chessman
pieces a commentator will still be talking behind it about the chessman pieces giving out
information. Lastly I would like to add interviews as well into my documentary so it can feel like the
interviewees are talking to the viewers and make it more interesting.I want to use all these
conventions because it will make my documentary look as professional it can be and it will give it
more sense of realism.
I undertook various preproduction tasks to help with making the documentary to the best it could
be. When my group did research on the Lewis chessman we searched the history on the internet,
asking questions in interviews to the curator and other interviewees that had a good knowledge of
these chess pieces to make our documentary as factual and reliable it could be. Also making
storyboards to plan out a structure of the documentary and how it was going to be set out. My
group planned to get different shot types outside of the British museum to establish where the
documentary was set and were we was filming but also we added images of the Lewis chessman
pieces between the establishing shots. These were useful because it helped me and my group to get
a clear idea of what we were going to do and gave us a clear structure of what our documentary was
going to be about and what our documentary was going to look like which our documentary was
about the history of the Lewis chessman pieces.
The things that went well were the storyboards and the interviews. These were effective because
the interviews we gathered all the information we needed to make our documentary as factual and

2. reliable as possible as our aim was to make a documentary about the Lewis chessman pieces history
that you don’t see on the plaque in the British museum and give facts to people who doesn’t know
about the Lewis chessman pieces at all. By gathering all the information we needed we was able to
give a structure to our documentary and make a storyboard that would make our documentary
successful. In the research and planning I could have improved the way we filmed and caught the
footage and the archival images we had collected and try to make it a longer length as our
documentary was roughly around 3 minutes when we should have done it till 5 minutes long.
The strengths in the documentary and the actual production process were the footages we had
collected were the interviews, actual footage of the chessman pieces, close ups of the replicas,
inside the gallery and inside and outside around the British museum. The things that went well with
the whole production were the footages and information we had collected to add into the
documentary. The things that did not go well were the time length of the documentary we made
which was 3 minutes long. The teamwork we always got together and tried to make our
documentary as successful but sometimes there would be times were only one person would be in
doing all the work for one day as the others would be poorly on that day. The shots that worked well
in our documentary were the panning and close ups outside the British Museum and slowly panning
down to the columns which gave it a nice effect of where the documentary was established also
what went well was the shots of the replicas and the Lewis chessman pieces in the gallery it looked
good as there was good lightning in the room. The bits that could have been improved were the
sounds of the backgrounds when we were catching some footage some sounds sounded a bit
muffled when other tourists were passing by at the time in the gallery which makes this
documentary a bit less un-professional and hard to hear for the viewers if we didn’t sorted it out.
The editing process of the documentary was a bit hard for me as this was my first time doing
anything with editing I found it difficult but luckily I had people in my group who knew few skills and
taught me which I added into the documentary like fading visuals, text & titles on live type and the
background music on garage band. What also went well in the editing process was we had a clear
idea of the structure and the archival images we added into the documentary. The parts that did not
go so well was the time management we kept between in the group as most of the time one person
would be poorly to be in and if we had enough time we could of made the documentary a bit nearer
to 5 minutes. We searched for images that we thought that looked professional and didn’t have a
copyright on it but we got most of the images from the British museum website and added into the
documentary. We had a commentator talking facts about the Lewis chessman while the images will
fade or pop up and this is when the fading visuals came in handy as it looked much nicer and more
professional then every picture or footage would have popped up. My group also made the
background music on garage band we made it into a classical upbeat song and after making the
background music we placed it on to the footage all way through but quietened when there would
be a commentator speaking. The strengths of this documentary are its defines the history of the
Lewis chessman pieces but the weakness of this finished documentary is the time length where it’s 3
minutes long when it should have been 5 minutes we tried to long the shots out but it made it felt to
long and boring and we had a aim were we wanted to keep the audience attracted. The plan we had
first were to make our documentary stick to the original but we tried to keep it that way but while
we started to edit there was a few changes of different shots at the beginning and decided to add
some other footage of the Lewis chessman pieces into the documentary rather just the outside
exterior of the British musuem.

3. Our target audience was visitors of the British museum who would like to know more about the
Lewis chessman and visited the gallery before and would like to know more information about it
that they couldn’t see on the plaque and we kept it age appropriate to all ages so it was suitable for
the family.
We made this documentary as professional as possible and we tried to add all the effects and editing
skills to make it a successful documentary. After we went to the lecture room in the British museum
to show to an audience and gave a speech of what we done in the past 2 months we got feedback
from the audience and the main comments we received was it had a good humour to it but had a
good historic facts for people who didn’t know nothing about and it was an educational
documentary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IABpeGc233g&safe=active