Evaluation

Introduction/Action plan       

At the start of the project I created a goal for myself that I was going to create a documentary to support the growing shellfish industry on the North Norfolk coast, I also created a time table to accommodate this idea showing week by week what process I will be conducting in the weeks leading up to the hand in date.

The way I planned out is that I would use the first 2 weeks of the project to use for the research section of the project.

The week after that I would use for creating and writing up my post production documents such as an equipment list, location recce and a risk assessment which I thought it was up to a good standard detailing the smallest and the most unlikely problems so that I would have a safety measure I could put in place in case the risk occurs.

The rest of the time until the 14th of June was spent editing and recording and evaluating.

But what I could’ve written the location recce to a better standard as I have only included a birds eye view picture of the location in question, instead I should’ve given a picture inside of the building to give an inside view of where I would be filming.  What I have learnt from this experience of making a timetable is that I shouldn't have guessed how long the research. 

After doing the post production and the research stage I planned to use the next few weeks to gather footage and write the script for my narrations which I decide that I would do it in the style of the voice of god as it is one of the most common forms of narration in the documentary.

The experience of making a stable timetable showed that having a proper plan helps with my one problem during my past projects which has been my time management which has caused me to rush my work in the past but with an action plan I have scheduled weeks from where I can focus on the work that is needed to be done in that week which is great.                            

Idea creation

When I was thinking of an idea for my project I had to separate the easy and simple ideas from the basically extreme ideas and hopefully by going through this process I could create an idea that would help show of my skills I have learned throughout the year.

The process felt like it would take forever to come up with a decent idea but I thought what about something which is in my family so I decided to look at what some members of my family have been apart of or are still involved in and that’s when it hit me part some of my relatives are in the fishing industry and knowing this I looked at the relevance of the industry in Norfolk.

Then an Idea was created and I felt I could make a decent short documentary talking about the relevance of the industry in Norfolk and how it has affected it over 5 generations in there industry.

The fishing industry is a hard subject to delve into and choosing it as my subject of my documentary with only a term worth of experience in documentary making wasn’t probably the best Idea but I felt passionate about it as if I succeeded in making this a success I would feel some pride in my work and I did have second thoughts on even making a documentary but I’m glad I pushed through and got it done. 

What did help was the action plan as making a documentary takes a lot of research and planning to create and by using the action plan to cut up the research and the planning made the process not as stressful as it would've been without it but what didn't help was the lack of information on the industry growth in Norfolk as back then keeping information like that wasn't a popular thing to do unlike now so I had to search through the internet to find small bits of information that would help support my documentary.

Research

When I was doing my research into what defined the shellfish industry and what prompted the industry in Norfolk I realized that most of the research I am going to use are in the area of primary research as finding secondary research on the subject of the fishing industry would be hard to find and use.

The way I got around this problem is by using my personal experience with the industry how it affected me personally such as my diet.

The reason I talked about my diet is that talking about how the shell fishing industry and especially shell food is a major part of my life as I consume it almost every week and making up a huge part of my diet as due to me living on the coast fish and shellfish are consumed more often due to it being fresh compared to people who live in the midlands or they live in more rural areas compared to me.

By using myself as an example it shows that the industry affects the coastal regions the trade is based in such as the coast.

If I would come back to the research section on a different subject I would use myself as an example again as it shows that when researching a subject I’ve looked on how it has affected my life in general.

Comments on page

The comments I received on my blog has told me that when placing information I took from a website from my bibliography I should put the reference next to the piece of text so to react upon I listed every source that was used in my research section under my research page I also did this with the stock footage I have used in my project as I have listed them under the production page so it won't seem I have been plagiarizing footage and research. 

I also received a comment from my tutor James saying I should look at channel 4 as it is known for showing documentaries with uncommon subjects and that are usually third party made so I found a set of graphs that shows why people watch channel 4 than any other channels and that the reason why some people come to channel 4 is because they want to see weird subjects being covered and the documentary on the subject of fishing is a weird one. 

Planning/production

Planning this project was a stressful process as I had to create a script for my 3 narrations and because I’m not good at writing powerful and interesting pieces of text I had to have help as I laid out a basic first narration and got my tutor James to have a look so I could get his opinion and by doing this and getting his advice we created the opening narration which presents the atmosphere I wanted to create for this project.

The way I feel about script writing has changed since creating the scripts for this project as it doesn't have to be boring process as I originally thought it would be as using a technique I learned during this project which is a brainstorming/reviewing method which starts with brainstorming exciting ear catching words and weaving them into a sentence that could be turned into a narration which I would do again in my future projects.

The stock footage

The way I chose the stock footage was from using key words from both videos and finding footage that could show what was being said.

For example when Cyril was talking about the fish markets I decided to find footage of billingsgate which is the largest fish market in Britain which is located in London, by showing this it would help the Audience understand the information easier.

The one thing about stock footage is the quality of it sometimes it can be bad sometimes it can be good but when I set my S.M.A.R.T targets I said I would finish the editing phase this included the stock footage, and due to this target I didn't want to find any random footage I had to find decent footage which was hard because most of it came from YouTube so it wasn't as easy as I thought. 

Shooting the interviews

One major part of the documentary process is the interview section which was actually quite hard to do as when creating the questions to ask you have to consider what to say and more importantly what type of question will it be open or closed will you leave room for a follow up question or would it be a simple yes or no, these are the things I had to consider. 

The way I chose the type of questions to ask was asking myself the question, which was “what type would give the information/content for the project? That's why I chose mainly open questions so my interviewee could expand on the question as much as they want and by doing this it would give me ideas for footage that would be played over the interview to help visually present the info to the viewer.

After creating the questions I was satisfied with what I was asking I had to think of the framing of the interview so there is something behind the interviewee so it actually looks like something is going on and this is the problem I had I filmed in the crab shed they have which was alright but if I was going to frame these interviews again I would look at more exciting places like the marshes or their boat.

Overall the interviews I shot were up to a good standard I got the answers I was expecting and the much-needed content I wanted. 

Target Audience

The response from my target audience has been great I have been left comments of praise and comments on how I could potentially improve the video most of the comments have been about the shaking of some of the stock footage which I can't really do anything about but while doing this project I have learnt that sometimes you have to sacrifice the quality of the video for the content which resides in the video to help show the audience the information being shown over the video.

The way I tried to overcome this problem is picking out the more stable parts of the video but the video is only a little bit less shaky but I’ve tried to fix the problem, next time I will find more stable footage or shoot it myself. 

Overall the response to the documentary has been positive, as the people who have watched it have said it that even though they weren't interested in shell fishing they were left intrigued and pleased about the documentary.

If I was going to do a documentary on shellfish again I would make it longer and shoot most of the footage myself as it would help show off more of my skills.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

In conclusion

During this project I have learnt new techniques in premiere pro such as using an adjustment layer to brighten certain sections of the final product i also learned how to write a bibliography in the harvard system and during the filming i have learnt new techniques with cameras and when interviewing a person which would help with both the occupation i hope to get later in life and in my future projects. 

This project even though I was questioning it was a good choice or not was actually an amazing experience it has taught me valuable skills in the industry and has helped with my knowledge in documentary making which is amazing.

After making this I feel my documentary puts my point across and present my knowledge of filmmaking showing off the skills I have learnt this year even though I had trouble along the way, I still feel this was a successful project overall.