Individual Assignment
Multi Media 1 (MMP 2101) – Individual Analysis
Blane Stewart – 0902955
Within Multi-Media Project One I wanted to, from beginning try something new that would be an integral part to the group and would contribute something that would show my skills individually and yet also help everyone else within the team. After looking through all of the separate roles, and also viewing many of the previous documentaries made last year, I found that editing gave the fundamental feel and style to the film and could have lead the production down many different routes in which the documentary would overall look like. This then led to me wanting to become editor of the production and contribute to choosing all of the stylistic elements that would need to be decided in both the pre-production, during filming and most importantly post production. I also felt that the editing would help me learn a lot more to do with post-production and final cut pro which are key parts of documentary making. Afterwards I became to study many famous editors with unique editing styles and approaches towards documentaries that I could help towards choosing a style for our own production. I found several key editors, but I wanted to focus on a specific documentary editor. I then found an editor called Jon Neuburger who had edited several documentaries that I had previous watched called 'Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives' and the more recent 'Expedition Apocalypse’ which is exploring similar themes to the documentary that we later choose. Jon’s stylistic approaches to editing are extremely ground breaking with constant fillers and breathers and less cut away to focus entirely on personal journey of Mark Everett and his emotional response to the situation, even when it is silent, to keep the audience interested personal in his story. At the start of the project, when it came down to choice the company name I was one of the key contributors in ‘Red Bus Productions’. Another feature that I felt we need to have within our group immediately after creating a company name was a logo and email address. I then created a hotmail account with a password that we could all access and start to use for all of our websites, applications and contacts that we start to use. As to relate to our target audience 18+ , I thought that creating a Facebook user account would be useful to show what type of areas and topics we are interested in through the commonly known ‘like’ system. This do bring up several issues in creating the account because you cannot use a Company name, as a name unless it is a ‘company page’ which after discussing with the group we instead decided to create.
The group dynamic of the group was straight away strong, with everyone guiding each other, especially when creating the Yola site, setting up the main pages and what to include. Throughout the pre-production stage, we regularly met up for meetings, and group discussions several times a week, to make sure everyone had the opportunity to get their points and ideas across, whilst constantly emailing through Facebook to keep in touch. We quickly discovered it to be an ideal way to keep in contact with every member of the group, and to instantly share ideas before our next group session. We also felt that we should start to record our meetings, so that we could remind ourselves of the progress we are making and the idea’s we are gathering. The initial ideas for the documentary were a bit slow during the first couple of weeks, but I give several ideas for the main theme such as Phobia’s which has now become one of the backup ideas. To continue these ideas I began to research the types of Phobia’s, and give it a separate tab within the Yola website. This was to gather the main backup research for the project in case our other ideas fell through. The research I was looking into dealt with what are the main reasons that cause Phobia’s, whilst thinking of the long term if this idea could exactly become a documentary, and style it would take. I researched this further, looking in modes and types of documentaries and settled on The Performative and Expository Mode from the theory by John Grierson, to help engage us with the subjects. Also I start to find many previous documentaries that had covered this particular subject, but none had a fresh, contemporary look of the subject and didn’t follow an individual person on their journey through overcoming the fear. This is the approach I felt would become our unique selling point that would make this documentary stand out for the others. This prompted me to start to contact several support groups and treatment centres into securing interviews to use within our production, which I found many in and around Southampton and Winchester, proving that this was a worthy cause to continue to research into.
After finally deciding that we want to go for a fresh, new topic, that of 2012 phenomenon agreed to keep the Phobia’s Documentary for back up. The reasons behind this decision was because of the more recent media interest in the issue and that we felt that this was the right time to put this idea across because more people would be interested in it and could relate to it. The time issue was a major factor in our decision because we felt that next year would simply be late to research all possible information and create the documentary in time before the event accrued. We then decided to explore and research individually the different reasons behind the topic, and what is supposed to cause the event. I also felt that due to the nature of the subject linking to religion and individuals person belief that I thought it necessary to research ways in which to represent this on screen, and theories to use. This included the ‘right to reply’ which I thought was integral to our documentary as we start to make statements about religions before asking their option, and set up a set of questions to ask the best response and reaction from our interviews.
The marketing material and press pack was a major part in preparing to get our message across about the documentary and ‘Red Bus Productions’. We decided to spilt up the different aspects of this between each member, as each of us could concentrate on a particular item, and put our best efforts into it. This also linked to trying to incorporate each member’s abilities, e.g. a member understands more of the technical side of promotion i.e. creating flash on the website then they would concrete on that aspect. I decided that we should start to create business card, which I concentrated on making. This was because business cards are extremely professional, direct and easy to use when meeting potential interviewee’s, businesses, location managers and most importantly friends, family and the general public for something they can keep and remind themselves of our website details and email addresses. I designed them be attract attention to our company logo in full colour and included both a front and back side to gather more information on them.
When presenting our idea to an audience, we decided that we wanted to come across as an organised and structured group. We again decided to research our own individual slides, in the needed area’s and then come together as a group and run it through to gather help from each other. I found this approach worked very well, and allowed us to show our own individual work, and that we can function separately and all together. The presentation also tied into the research that I had previous done, on the representation of our documentary and how we will be presenting the given arguments on screen.
After the feedback we were given from our presentation, I agreed that the main part of our research that we were lacking was the journey that the audience need to follow through with us, as somebody goes through preparing for the 2012 events. I then started to research certain activist groups and target forums that believe in 2012 who are preparing survival packs for the apocalyptic events. We started to post several comments on the forum to gather a reply, but with no such luck. I then took the initiative to start to ask several friends and family members of any people who are interested in the subject. This then lead me to find a family that is extremely involved in the beliefs of 2012, and of currently planning on leaving the U.K. a month before to avoid the predicted events. I felt this was a perfect opportunity, to use them, and decided to get in contact with them and suggest a meeting to follow the family in their attempt to survive 2012.
Overall I found the post-production of the documentary extremely helpful in discovering contacts and theories to put forward in semester two, and also bond as a team. It also expanded our technical understanding of creating a website and using flash and Photoshop for our promotional materials that will generate a lot of public interest and press on the subject, to gather more followers for the U-Doc festival next year. We have also started to research other festivals in the surrounding areas as we are keen to further this project outside the university. To think outside the box, we thought it necessary to select a member of the company to research private funding to expand this documentary even further, but for the main reason being travelling expenses. This is due to one of our major issues that we did experience, with gathering interviews with a member of the Mayan community because they are mainly situated in Mexico. Another issue, is that we have secured an interview with Robert Bast who wrote the book ‘Surviving 2012’ but unfortunately is located in Australia. The funding will initially help stop this problem as hopefully one member of the company will be able to travel out there. The only improvements that I believe we could of made were to start to finalise are documentary themes a lot soon, as to develop our ideas quicker so start to contact potential interviewee’s as soon as possible and to get up-to-date more with each individuals progress together, and not just have it to be the producers responsibility.
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