Craft and Media Technologies-Three minutes documentary
For the second semester of this year we (in small group) of four or less we had to produce a three minutes documentary video, to achieve a three minutes documentary I had to through three main steps that are the basic steps for any documentary: The research, practical preparations and production a documentary. In our researches we went to college library to read some books, aiming to gain some ideas about the project that we were about to start, I must say here that doing a documentary film is the a new experience for us as we have not ever gone through it before. The practical preparations step was taking by each pair of us, Michelle and I were given a video camera and tripod and being sent out side to make a three minutes film (practical one) so we went to a place called the Chinese laundry in Hull city centre, we asked for a permission to start our video footage inside the shop before starting the camera and the interview, we made up to three minutes and twenty seconds as original piece including the interview excluding the editing, with the editing it became less than three minutes. This practical work was such a vital idea for learning and a superior starting point. As a last step has arrived some worries were there about what is the idea, where to start from what is the topic and who is the main character etc. before shooting the film we went through:
1. The starting point is, of course to think of an interesting topic that the four of us would agree and also a topic that makes them all enthusiastic about. This is wasn’t an easy one but being patient did helped. It is crucial to formulate the basic notion of the documentary film as precisely and clearly as possible. Because simple if we didn`t know what why we want to make this documentary, what is it about and where to make the story going, then we might end up with a bad quality film.
2. The documentary film experience is a first time for us; it was a good idea to find some examples that we can draw our inspirations from before laying down the aesthetics and method of our film.
3. We had to discuss whether where is this film going to be which means what for television (public) or film documentary as our primary source of inspirations.
We have all agreed about the idea of sculpture that was found near the Deep on coming from the mud of the Humber, two heads of a couple the art work was done by Stephan Gec called the True Love.
Being a camera man wasn`t an easy but I had to do it, as the weather sometimes was changing and also there was a scaffolding structure in a very close distance to the Sculpture, my job was to avoid any kind of constructions that has nothing to do with our documentary.
As the two heads were thrown in a place that is so hard to be found, and in a strong appearance, with sad gazes from each one of them at different direction the idea was interesting to do some searches for we had some visits such as:
Hull maritime museum
Hull History centre
Hull city Library
I think the conflict of this documentary is the location of the sculpture as it has been located in a place far away from the public eyes, despite there is a motor way above it, Premiere Inn hotel and the Deep next to it but still the sculpture is very hard to be understood or even found, and that’s what I we attempted to show in the first footage. The editing was a hard job as well as the rest as we had to go in the early morning, and we had to stay all of us together and do the job.
Conclusion
In three minutes documentary I have learnt that researches and gathering information job is on parallel to the technical job, I also learnt that working on video with group is different than working by your self or for your self in with help from the others as each other member has right in the video as much as I have rights on the video.
This is three minutes documentary video
