The Mouth/Punktured Piercing - Main Project

Project Brief

You will be required to plan, research and produce a four-minute documentary in small groups of three to four persons. 

The documentary theme will be - A Portrait of a person or a place

Each student must present an individual proposal in Week 3 based on initial research of a possible subject. This involves contacting the relevant people, investigating their availability and willingness to be filmed and deciding on how to present them. Each unit will select one proposal to be produced.
The group will present its research in Week 6, this will involve an enthusiastic and detailed description of your projects aims. We will be expecting your final piece to engage its audience both visually and conceptually. It may be informative, challenging, moving, controversial, revealing or disturbing depending on how you choose to interpret the subject.
Bear in mind that even a short documentary works best if there is some narrative development. Rather than relying too much on an interview with your subject to reveal themselves, try showing them engaged in an activity. Think about how you can structure your film around a key event/moment e.g. a family gathering or someone trying to get something or go somewhere for a particular occasion. How might you give their story a shape?
You should not shoot more than one 60-minute DV tape otherwise you will have too much material to edit. 

Chosen Documentary Topic: 

THE MOUTH

Initial Research

One of the initial parts of our planning stage was researching the mouth. Here are different examples and definitions of the mouth that I found whilst using an online dictionary. 

Online Dictionary: Definition of the 'Mouth' [Picture 1]

Online Dictionary: Definition of the 'Mouth' [Picture 2]

After looking at the various definitions of the mouth, we decided to stick to focusing on the the human mouth and its functions as we thought this would be the most practical aspect of 'the mouth' we could make a documentary about. 
However, as we are limited to making the documentary 4 minutes long, we had to think wisely about the people we could interview about mouth. The best way to share and express everyones idea's was to make a mind map of people and industries we thought related to the mouth...so that's what we did. (see below)

Cast Mind Map

Mouth Ideas Mind Map

As you can see, we narrowed down our mind maps to possible industries/occupations available to us and assigned everyone an industry or occupation to find and contact about filming an interview with. I was assigned to find a dentist, chef and e-cigarette company owner.

Keeping in Contact with the Group

By creating a facebook group chat between us all, it made communication between us all a lot simpler, whether it was considering what date to book equipment out, to finding out what snacks one wanted from the co-op during the edits. This chat we used almost daily during our course, it was a great resource is sharing our views instantly, exchanging documents and transcripts as well as photos of maps (mind and road).

Project Plan: Presentation (SEE SEPERATE BLOG POST)

Reading Week Meeting

Once we knew whom we wanted to interview, We later discussed all the dates we would be available to film from now until the deadline so we could give our interviewees specific dates of our availability, that way it could suit both our needs as well as theirs. Here are the notes we made from this meeting (see below).

Contacting Falmer Dental Care

Falmer Dental Care: Contact Info

I chose to contact the Falmer Dental Care for an interview due to its location, situated on campus, I thought they would be more accepting to record a student interview than a dental care situated in town. Also, it would be easy for our group to get to, especially when transporting equipment. 
I first got in contact with Falmer Dental Care via email. I received a positive and punctual response from them. They were willing to do the interview at their dental practice, however it had to be on a weekday, after 5pm or during a half hour lunch break. 
On the other hand, our group were in a situation where we were running out of time and had to change our project idea from being about 'The Mouth' to being about 'Punktured Piercing'.



Filming @ Punktured Piercing

Before we decided as a group to change our project idea from being about 'The Mouth', we had filmed our first interview on location @ Punktured Piercing with Julie, the manager of the piercing studio, based in Brighton. Ben had done the initial contact with Punktured Piercing and had set up a date with Julie to come into the Piercing Studio and record an interview. We rented out the HRV-Z1E kit and printed out our consent forms and all went along to Punktured piercing in town via train. When we arrived, we were greeted by Julie, whom we'd be interviewing. Ben was assigned the role of questioning Julie, since he had been the one out of the group who had contacted Punktured about filming for our documentary, so we thought he would be best suited for this role as it would be more comfortable for the interviewee. I was the camera man that day and ensured all the equipment was set up properly, tripod and camera, whilst Roshana and Mariah where in charge of sound recording whilst the interviewing was taking place, as well as finding suitable cutaways we could use in and around the studio. 
The interview was a great success, it lasted for over 10 minutes and Julie gave a very confident and knowledgable interview, so we were pleased with the interview footage we had acquired. We took various cutaways of things around the store such as the front desk, products on sale and merchandise as well as an establishing shot of Punktured, similar to the image used in this section. We managed to get Julie to sign a consent form after the interview, we then said our goodbye's and took back our footage to campus to convert and upload into our group media folder and on to Adobe Premiere to edit. However, we had a huge problem with our footage - all the sound was recorded in mono instead of stereo, therefore the only footage we had that was actually of any use would have been the cutaways! Therefore, we were hopeful we would gain some more interviews from the people our group had been contacting.



Other Responses for Interviews

From the list of possible interviewees we chose to contact, we received a wide array of negative feedback when approaching different industries above filming a short interview with them about their profession and how it's related to the mouth. I contacted my Fred Cassman, a good friend of my sister's about whether he was up for an interview about his business. Fred is the owner and manager of Mist-E-Liquids (an electronic-cigarette business, based in Brighton and Hove). I first asked him about whether he'd be up for an interview for a documentary film project for my degree when  I met up with my sister at the Foundry Pub in Brighton. He was happy to do it, so I got in contact with him on the phone to organise a date to have a filmed interview in a couple of weeks after meeting him, but he was unable to co-operate with us for our documentary since he had to go on a business convention for a couple weeks in Los Angeles. 
Concerning the other responses my group members would have received where also not so positive, because I'm not to sure if or who they contact with but it was beginning to seem like we were running short of time and needed to gain more footage as soon as possible if we wanted to make a documentary in time. We had a meeting with Peter (Course Tutor) about our situation, and he suggested we changed our approach to our documentary. 

Changing from 'The Mouth' to 'Punktured'

Research on Punktured & Piercing

When we had our meeting with Peter, he thought it would be best to change our focus from 'The Mouth' to just about Punktured Piercing because it matched the criteria of the project brief more of having a documentary which was a portrait of a person or place. Also, we thought this would be the most practical thing to do in our current situation since we had little footage gained and minimal response from our interviewees for our documentary on the mouth. It wasn't hard to convince members of our group to change our documentary and we were all eager to get going on filming again, but since we had changed our approach to our documentary, we knew we would have to re-film our interview with Julie and construct new questions to ask both her and a fellow colleague at Punktured. 
Myself and Ben spoke over Facebook about possible angles we could take for this documentary and went and visited the studio and picked up flyers and searched on their Facebook page to help us construct a list of questions that we would ask the workers at Punktured. We also wanted to structure them appropriately in terms of grouping the questions around certain topics, such as the history of the store, what they do their and what the future holds for the business. We hoped we would achieve informative and insightful responses from our interviewees through our questions, so we shared the questions document with the facebook group so others could tweak questions if needed. After we had made our new lists of interview questions, I thought it would be good to give Julie, a phone call to enquire about filming another interview on the premises of Punktured Body Piercing Studio, so Ben got on the case.


New List of Questions to Ask the People of Punktured Piercing

- What is your name and role at Punktured?

- How long have you been working at Punktured?

- Can you tell us a general overview of goes on at Punktured?

- How many other people work here besides yourself and what are their roles?

- Why did you choose to go into this profession?

- Do you need any certificates or qualifications to work here at Punktured?

- Tell us about some of the tools you work with at this facility?

- What’s the most common piercing you do?

- What’s the most difficult piercing and why?

- Can you tell/show us how a piercing is done?

- What do you think makes Punktured unique?

- Can you tell us any interesting or quirky stories you have surrounding your time here at Punktured?

- What is your average day like here?

- What do people need to know before considering a piercing?

- Would you say you are the most popular piercing place in Brighton? If so, why?

- What do you think the reasons people get piercing?

- Why do you think people should come to Punktured?

- Do you think the success of Punktured is to do with location?

- What do you think the future holds for Punktured?

Filming @ Punktured...Again

Since our group were all settled upon making a documentary that focussed purely on Punktured Piercing, I thought it would be best if we contacted them over the phone to arrange a date for our group to come in and re-shoot some interviews. Ben was the one in our group to make the call and spoke to Julie on and she was happy for us to come in again to acquire another interview with her, as well as one of the piercing artists who worked there. Ben organised a shooting date with Julie that we would come in on the Friday of the Easter Bank Holiday weekend.
Unfortunately for our group, Ben was away for the Easter Break in Swansea and Mariah was at home in Hampshire, so it was only myself and Roshana who were around to film that allocated day, which wasn't the most ideal of situations. 

On the morning of the shoot, I called Punktured to confirm that we would be coming in to film interviews for our documentary, only to be told by Julie, that this wasn't possible as she had double booked herself accidentally and wouldn't be able to offer us to film until the end of the Bank holiday (which would be Tuesday morning.) This was a shame as without our knowledge, Mariah had decided to come back to Brighton to film that day, only for us to be postponed to another date. 
Later that day, Julie called me up saying she felt very guilty about the situation we were in and felt it responsible. To make up for it, she said she would advertise a free piercing to anyone who would be willing to be filmed by us and ensure that she'd prepare the best responses possible for our interview that would be happening on Tuesday.

My role as cameraman & interviewer

I told the group the situation on our Facebook group and everyone was a bit worried about the situation, especially since only myself and Roshana would be the only ones free that day...again.
On the morning of the Tuesday, myself and Roshana went into town early and planned our production process on the journey. Since I'd been in contact with Punktured, I put myself forward to be the interviewer. I set up the camera and rode mic, and filmed Julie (twice, as the first time the store's radio had been left on!). We also got an interview with a piercing artist, Alex, who was an interesting character and also got some great footage of him performing a tragus piercing.
After filming the interviews and piercing, Roshana pointed out some extra cutaway shots we could get, so we filmed that then said our goodbye's once again to Punktured Piercing. I was very happy with the footage we acquired that day, gaining nearly an hours worth of footage to play with, now came the fun, tedious part came. The edit.


Composition & Narrative Development Research

Since we were following the influence of Werner Herzog in terms of his pre-production procedures, we had no storyboard to work with for our narrative development for our documentary. As our original storyboards and planning were meant for our documentary on the mouth, we had little to work with in terms of arranging our footage for our documentary. Therefore, I wrote up a list of shot sequences and watch various other short documentaries on YouTube to work out a formula of how to structure our documentary in terms of its aesthetic and composition. From my research I found out that:

- Most open with an establishing shot of the location of which the documentary's focus is on.

- Shallow focus is used when shown footage of the interviewee, whereas cutaways has a greater depth of field, or even pull the focus.

- As well as talking to the people who work at the facility, customers and passers-by are also questioned about things in the interview.

- A light theme tune is played during the course of the short documentary and gets louder and more emphatic when there's no dialogue or at the documentary's conclusion.

- There's a lot of cutaways! Gaining as much cutaway footage as you can there better, as long as they are relevant to the dialogue, if it isn't, the cutaway seems un-natural.

- There tends to be a balance in the arguments or information being expressed in the documentary. This is done contextually, in terms of whom is telling the information and aesthetically, it is done by where the interviewee is positioned in the frame - this connotes their position in the argument being expressed in the documentary.


Editing the Documentary: Day 1

Since the HRV-Z1E kits were booked out for the remainder of term, we had to resort to using Ben's Panasonic GH1 camera to film our footage and his Rode Shotgun Microphone with a Zoom H1 audio recorder to record the sound. We had used some of the footage we had recorded using the Sony HRV-Z1E, but these were just the cutaways. 
The first task we had was to convert our recorded files through Xilisoft Video Converter into H.264 video files from AVCHD files due to the fact that Apple Macs don't support AVCHD codec and video. Once the files were converted, we uploaded them into organised event folders in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. 

On the first day of solid editing, myself and Ben where the ones who went to the Edit Suites. Our first major task for our documentary was to match up the audio that we'd recorded on the rode gun mic to the footage. This was managed by us both looking at the wave forms from the sound recorded via the camera's microphone, alongside the WAV. audio from the rode mic. Once we had that organised, we permanently group the files so the audio and visual were combined together, ensuring our footage had good sound quality. 

Shot Sequences for Julie & Alex Interview [Shot Transcript]

Once we started our project on Adobe Premiere Pro, we had to cut down our two, 10 minute interviews into 2, two minute interviews (since our brief was to make a 4 minute documentary). Me and Ben approached this by keeping the clear dialogue of the interviewee and cutting out everything else; the questions; interviewer dialogue; pauses etc. When we had managed to do that, we listed each shot, captioning each piece of dialogue to it's subject matter, then it was simply a case of choosing which pieces we wanted to keep and were relevant and discarding the irrelevant bits of footage.
Once we got rid of the irrelevant footage, we had around 2 minutes of footage per interviewee. We thought it would be best if we interlaced answers from the interviews that were the same or of a similar subject because it makes for a more flowing narrative structure. However, when we did this, we realised that we didn't have the most relevant cutaways that were to do with the subject matters of the dialogue we would be using so Me and Ben decided to write up a list of shots that we needed and to call it a night and go to town tomorrow and acquire them.


Gaining Extra Cutaways

Myself and Ben went into Brighton on Friday 10th April and recorded the following cutaways around town.

Me & Ben shooting cutaways in town

• Establishing Shot of Punktured
• Close-Up shot of Punktured 'Sick Night' Ad
• Medium Shot of Sticky Mike's Frog Bar
• Establishing Shot of a Pub
• Long Shot of the North Lanes
• Panning Shot of 'Punktured' Sign
• Long Shot of G.A.C.
• Medium Shot of Punktured (Inside)
• Tilt Shot of Price Lists
• Close-Ups of Helix Ear Piercing

Once again, we used Ben's camera and tripod to film these cutaways and brought them back to convert and upload to Premiere Pro.

Editing our Documentary: Day 2

On that same evening, myself and Ben returned to the Mac Suites to continue with the documentary. The first thing we decided to edit on was the sound for our documentary, we added a constant ambient background sound but there was a much bigger task afoot with the sound in terms of the dialogue. The sound of the interviewees dialogue was fluctuating a lot as both Julie and Alex had different tones and volumes. We had to make the sound levels balance and equal to around -6 to -12 dB as keeping the sound level constant wouldn't disrupt the spectator from the narrative. Going about this wasn't to hard as we just increased the volume when the interviewers where speaking quietly and vice versa when the dialogue was loud. 

This did prove quite an issue and Ben had edited the dialogue on a previous project, it took us a long time to rectify the sounds and to convert it over to a more recent project file, but we did manage to do it.

After editing the ambient sound, it was then a matter of adding the extra cutaways to the documentary, like a jigsaw, we then only had to worry about title cards, credits and colour correction. 

Editing our Documentary: Day 3

The next session of editing, myself and Ben set ourselves aims each hour. I took care of the end credits, cropping each shot - paying attention to the rule of thirds and the four points of interest. It was important that we keep our interviewees at a constant eye level when cutting from each shot too.
For the titles, we chose to use a similar font to that of the logo of "Punktured" and also kept with their colour scheme of turquoise and pink. Once we had added the opening title and names title cards to the documentary, it was then a matter of finding music for the opening and pauses between dialogue. Me and Ben considered looking at the genre of Punk music and instrumentals of that genre through SoundCloud. We chose this genre since Punk was in the title of the name of the piercing studio and also, Punktured sponsored a Punk night at Sticky Mike's Frog Bar in Brighton, so we deemed it to be appropriate for use in our documentary. Ben found various interludes on the web and we found 2 punk instrumentals that were perfect for our cutaways pauses and opening titles. We had to remember to credit the artists at the end if we were definitely going to use them.

For the titles, in terms of the opening, we opened with a moderately paced punk interlude with a montage of body piercings, following a close up of the the shops sign with the words place 'A Documentary' wrote underneath. For the closing credits, we kept with the continuity of using the same font and colour scheme as the title cards on a black background which I constructed using on of the handouts put on StudyDirect.

When it came to colour correction, some of our shot seems a little under exposed. Therefore, we increased the brightness and contrast levels; colour corrected each shot by altering the colour hue and angle balance. This gave our footage a more stylized and natural feel and since we were happy with the product we had produced, then we had to export the documentary into the appropriate video format for hand in.

Exporting

Before we exported our documentary for hand-in, we screen our documentary to Peter before finalising it into the correct format. He commented on

When it came to actually exporting the documentary....


Conclusion

Overall, I think the documentary we made was a successful and quality project. We kept to the project brief, kept a simple narrative structure with smooth transitions between shots and cutaways. It was great to get to use industry standard equipment, but unfortunate that we couldn't use it for the entirety of our project. I was very happy with the final piece we had made in such a short space of time, but if I were to do this project again, I would definitely make some changes.
For instance, having group members which all wanted to contribute to the project and not leaving it to others to make up the effort. It put pressure on the situation but I believe we came out strong. Also, if I were to do it again, I'd like to research more into the industry of piercing to gain some more informative response from our interviewees or maybe gain more interviews from the general public or customers of Brighton. This would give more balance to narrative of the documentary since we only interviewed employees of Punktured piercings and not its customers.