Evaluation FMP Year 1

Overall, I am very pleased with my final media project for year 1. After some deliberation, I decided that my primary target audience were 12-17 year olds and secondary target audience 35-64 year old. I therefore created the documentary with that in mind. I researched my documentary topic in some depth and investigated the main components and codes of practice for documentaries and ensured that these are all included but I used my editing techniques and fast pace to appeal to this audience group.

Researching is a major part of any documentary, without it you wouldn’t know your subject and you would be teaching people false facts. Without research there can be no documentary.

The secondary research I conducted helped me find out about the subculture the Mods but also how it impacted British Culture. I wanted to know how the Mods started so I looked at previous subcultures as well. I had an understanding of what the Mods are and the timeline of the Mods which helped me create a script for the documentary. The book “Mods!” written by Richard Barnes gave me heaps of information. I annotated points I could add into my FMP by the side of the text. If I had more time to research I would look more at Mod bands such as The Who and the impact they had on Mod Movement. I have looked at the album they made called Quadrophenia and how that became a film and I found it fascinating. However there is much more research I could have done on The Who.

I watched documentaries to understand the formula and what elements make a good documentary. I took a screengrab of a documentary I saw and listed the codes and conventions of an interview within a documentary. I also researched about the codes and conventions of a documentary overall. I did this because without the knowledge of the codes and conventions I could derail and end up making something completely different to a documentary. From previous experience, I have learned how important research is and how it can affect the quality of the end product and reduce my overall grade. So that’s why I pushed myself with this research, reading a whole book and watching documentaries and looking at codes and conventions.

Overall my secondary research included, History of the Mods (which my documentary is going to be about), a bit of history of the teddy Boys (I will include this in my documentary as I believe it is important of the impact they had), Codes and Conventions of a documentary (because I’m making a documentary) and Quadrophenia (a film which revived the mod movement.) I now believe I’m very knowledgeable about the Mods due to the research I’ve done.

The primary research allowed me to understand who my target audience are. The surveys I distributed showed me who my target audience should be. My primary target audience for this documentary is going to be 12-17 year olds as they are the only age group who do not know about the Mod Movement. Documentaries purpose is to educate someone about a certain subject, hence me choosing my primary target audience. The secondary audience for my documentary are going to be in the age groups of 35-64 year olds as they are aware and interested in the Mods. I set these as my primary and secondary audiences because in my survey I included questions such as:

1. What Age Group Do You Fit Into?2. Do you Know About The Mods? (Subculture Modernist)

Overall, due to primary research such as questionnaire I decided my primary and secondary. Due to youths being my primary audience I decided to apply technology into my documentary and make things fast paced. This is because youths are the generation of technology and keep it fast because teenagers have a low attention span, so to keep them awake this documentary will be fastly paced, not slow and dull. Due to 35-64 (adults) being my secondary audience I’m going to add music that they will remember and appreciate. I will talk about my survey answers in my pitch and how it will affect the production.

After my research I then pitched my idea in front of my class and tutors. My pitch consisted of the synopsis, What Mods are, What will be involved, Summary of primary research/secondary research, target audience, Rationale, Aims for the project, How it represents British Culture, Potential Problems, Project schedule and inspirations. This was included in my pitch so my potential buyers would get to know my idea in more depth. The Pitch also showed my confidence, standing in front of an audience and talking about your idea is nerve racking; but it must be done within the media industry to achieve higher positions. The skills I learnt about pitching is to not stress and instead give yourself breaks time to time as your brain can’t be running on your pitch constantly. When pitching my idea I was nervous to start of with, but once the first couple of slides were done I realised it wasn’t that bad and was on a roll. I got my idea greenlit and I could finally begin to start on the production of “History Of Mods.”

The production first started off with the script I used a script making program called Celtx which made the whole process of script writing much easier. Rather than making the script template myself on word I could simply input what I wanted and if I wanted it to be a part of dialogue or action. With my knowledge of codes and conventions I knew to include interviews, voiceovers and archive footage etc. At the beginning I had the idea for the viewer to hear an old clock, followed by text saying “This is a documentary made by Harry Doherty.” This was done because I wanted the viewer to know it is a documentary, who it’s made by and what the documentary is about. As the ticking of the old clock sound plays it focuses in the change of ‘time.’ Also, after watching one of my favourite TV shows Breaking Bad there’s a specific scene where Walter is in the basement and the camera zooms away from him going upwards.

I wanted to implement this zoom out so I had the idea of a spinning record, the camera looking down at it and then to slowly zoom up.

Throughout the script I made sure that the music was relevant to the years and always something visually pleasing is showing. I really enjoyed creating the script it showed me the directions of my FMP and gave me more detail of how my documentary will end up. The script is 9 pages long and was been through a word to minute converter and is under 10 minutes (the reason I did this is as the brief only allows your documentary to be 10 minutes long or less.) What was challenging was cramming all the information of the entire history of Mods in that 10 minutes but I did do it. After the script was done I looked at the areas I’m shooting and wrote a risk assessment. This was to reassure that no accidents will happen in the day of shooting and how to prevent them from happening. I setup the greenscreen for the interview next which the setup looked like this:

However, after editing the footage of the greenscreen my tutor pointed out that the people I interviewed had a green outline. This was because the people were too close to the greenscreen and the lighting reflected the green onto the people being interviewed, this giving them a green outline. The way to fix this next time is to give more distance between the person and the greenscreen, so when the colour is reflected, the person is far away from the reflection green radius. After doing my interviews I went to Brighton to shoot location, I was the host of this documentary. I made sure my crew knew the risks while shooting and made sure all of them were prevented, ticking them off the risk assessment. Once footage was all taken care of I went to the sound studio where I recorded my voiceovers. I found this very hard compared to the other parts of the project as you had to keep a clear understanding voice, which when overthought is very hard to achieve. Also when I struggling on one line I got quite frustrated but after 1 hour of doing voice overs I could do it easier than before. Practice makes perfect.

After all my production was done it was time to do post production. I edited the raw footage on Final Cut Pro. Here is my overall timeline of the project:

The intro of the documentary is very dramatic and shows the Mod symbol with a

black background, the music playing is Harlem Shuffle and I made sure the intro was in sync with the footage being displayed (even in the script it is detailed) when the second trumpet hits, the Mod symbol disappears revealing the earth and when the trumpet hits again and again the earth zooms in to the specific location I’m at. The way I achieved this was by using google earth and rendering Google earth zooming into the specific coordinates of where the cameraman was standing. The cameraman was looking down as when we are zooming down we are in fact looking down. It wouldn’t look right if were to zoom into the camera man looking directly at me, instead the cameraman looked at the floor, then panned up getting the shot at me. I knew all this because beforehand I experimented with this idea, giving it a test run before actually committing to it because it could of looked horribly wrong, but as it turns out it didn’t. Here is a closer look at the sequence of the intro:

As you see here the Mod symbol overlays the earth, as they are both circles and them it disappears revealing a still of the earth I took. Then there’s a zoom transition to the next still this time, more like a satellite closer in shot of the earth and finally the last shot is a still shot of a bird’s eye of view Brighton pier. The transitions to one shot to the other is in fact a zoom transition to give off that these still shots of the earth are actually zooming into one and other. I also included some clouds in the bird’s eye view shot, using the cloud generator tool in FCP and adding a handheld effect to it giving it some form of movement. This gave off that the still shots are actually real shots and are moving. I’ve showed you

previously how the greenscreen studio is setup but I didn’t tell you the process of changing the background. It is actually very simple as the computer does all the work for you. There’s a video effect called Keyer and once you apply that on your greenscreen footage and tell it what colour to get rid of, it will completely remove that colour. So selecting the green background will rip the green out of the back giving you a choice of what background you can have. I choose the background a garage for Michael because he is a Mod and Mods have scooters which they store in garages and choose a Library for Elizabeth because she’s a Librarian however I noticed a problem with Elizabeth interview:

The lighting was different to the background, so I used colour correction to change the lighting and make it look like Elizabeth was actually in that room:

Colour correcting made the whole shot more visually pleasing as it simulated the same lighting as the background has. To the right of Elizabeth was the colour board I used to achieve the lighting I got. Colour correcting, greenscreen keying and zooming in transitions effectively are all skills I learnt in this FMP. To stick to codes and conventions I also Photoshopped there information adding it on the bottom right corner. What I really liked about this FMP edit is that I went to places in Brighton, talking about it’s historic value to

the Mods, then the next shot being the same place and the history being displayed. For example I talk about the alleyway being a part of the revival of Mods as it’s featured in the film Quadrophenia but then the next shot is the alleyway in Quadrophenia. It’s just fantastic that I could stand somewhere which had a big impact towards the Mods and include it in an informative Documentary.

My personal thoughts on my final product is that I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. In the pitch I talked about how I wanted it to be visually pleasing and not boring and with the feedback I got it looks like I achieved what I wanted. The whole intro was to entice the viewer and wake them up from the “oh documentaries are boring” to WHAM “HISTORY OF MODS.” I believe this FMP is great, but it can be greater! My tutor pointed out that there were areas where I could of talked directly to the camera and not used voiceovers. This would have been achieved by using a boom mic, however I do not know how to function a boom mic but in later projects I wish to learn to use that. Also, as shown before the interview greenscreens, the green reflected onto the people giving them this green glow breaking the realistic approach I wanted. But apart from those mistakes I think this is the best piece I’ve made due to the amount of research and dedication that took place. Those two mistakes I believe are learning curves and I can make them better in projects later to come.

Companies and parents came to see our work. So, I jumped to the opportunity to get some feedback. All of them were positive and rated my work 10/10 and said it related to British Culture. However, there was some criticism; But criticism is not bad. They said that it seemed too much information was crammed at some points and there could have been more me talking directly to the camera. Which now looking back I can see that and I can use that criticism to construct a better project later to come in the year. However, I did already point out how hard it’s going to be to fit all the info about Mods in a short 10 minute documentary, but I did do it and I think youths don’t really want a long documentary. I remember taking my GCSEs and wanting to learn things as quickly as possible. So my documentary jumping one thing to another appeals to my target audience.

I promoted my documentary by making a poster with a QR code sending people who scanned it to my blog (which has my video on it.) Also, I sent it to a cast member of Quadrophenia and this is what he had to say:

You heard him, definetely a distinction!