In our first few weeks of the video production course, I was put into a group with 3 other people with a brief of gaining interview and cutaway footage for a documentary entitled "My First Day at Sussex". This was a practice exercise in which we utilise the information we had learnt from the workshops and readings and put it to practice.
Planning
In practice, you should gain cutaway footage after you have you want from your interviews. However, in this exercise we did this the other way around and acquired our cutaway footage before we conducted any interviews.
As a group, we thought about our first days at Sussex University, since we're all first year freshers it was quite easy for use to rekindle our memories of our first few days. Stories about meeting your flatmates, going to fresher events, attending drinks and pub quiz's at the campus bars etc. Since we now had a 'recce' or list of locations we wanted to gain cutaway footage we then thought about where and who we could interview, we didn't really plan this part of our documentary as much as we took our initiative to plot our equipment and crew outside 'EatCentral' on Sussex campus, where a huge majority of students pass by on their commute to lectures, seminars or of course, lunch!
We thought we could random passers by if they would be willing to answers a few questions about their experience of their first days at Sussex University.
Equipment & Crew
Luckily for us, we didn't have to use the SISO system to book out any equipment as the Sony Z1 was available for each group in our workshops for the first few weeks. Since we we're all needing to get to grips with using this advanced filming equipment, we decided we would alternate the roles each week we would go out to film so we all have a fair understanding of the Z1 camera. The workshop sessions we're really useful in terms of understand how the camera operates and reinforcing the understand of how to change microphones, white balance, exposure, shutter speed etc.
Shooting the Documentary
We gained about 14 different cutaways, consisting of 2 sequences, lasting around 7-10 seconds per cutaway per location. Myself and Ben went around campus and gained two different shots per location. One was a static shot, the other we would either be a panning shot or we'd pull focus with the Z1, depending on the varsity of the location we were at. These consisted were of different halls on campus, Falmer bar, East Slope bar, Eat Central, Co-Op and the bus/train stations. We we're happy with our cutaways and the selection that we had to choose from.
For our interview footage, our group did as we planned and planted ourselves outside Eat Central and asked random passers by if they'd be willing to be interviewed about their first day at Sussex. We had a great response and managed to film around 6 different short interviews in the space of half an hour! Here is a picture of us in action below.
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Editing our footage was a bit chaotic at first as we didn't import our footage in the right format so when we used Adobe Premiere our footage lagged, thus we couldn't edit it properly. To rectify the situation in a short space of time, we imported our footage into Final Cut Pro which did work!
This was my favourite part of the project as the editing stage is where the narrative is constructed and comes to life. I have done projects similar to this with my A-levels and Chocolate Films in terms of making short, interview-based documentary's so I was aware that cutaways are mainly used to piece together interview dialogue smoothly, so the audience are unaware of the transitions between dialogues. Exporting the footage wasn't as easy as we'd hoped as we we're unable to format the final piece to be played as an MPEG4 QuickTime file.
Conclusion
I found this practice documentary a great way to break the ice with my main practical project group as well as getting a firmer knowledge and understanding of the cameras and equipment available. Mistakes were made along the way during the process of this documentary such as not making our interviewees fill out consent forms, not filming our footage or importing it to Premiere in the right format, filming the cutaways in the afternoon hence not having a lot of natural light in our cutaways, the list could go on. However, mistakes are not to be repeated and I'm sure myself as well as my group are more prepared for when it comes to make our main practical project documentary. Overall, I thought this documentary could have been a lot better with more time, planning and preparation, but it's only a practice exercise so it was nothing to take too seriously, more something to learn from.
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