Carla Castagnetti: Documentary

Editing the Final Project -In terms of editing, each member of the group took time to edit in pairs to ensure that we all had our fair share of time and responsibility. It also allowed for different modes of creative input as opposed to having one editor and one mode of creative input. - We began by creating a transcript which is written in another blog post you can find on here, this enabled us to understand the narrative and piece together different sections to ensure that the narrative flowed and made the most sense, seeing as the questions we asked the participant were in no particular order. - We then named each clip so that they were easy to identify, this allowed us to place them onto the Premiere Pro timeline in order. - We then began to crop and slice the clips to ensure that there was not any unwanted sections or awkward pauses as the aim is to make the documentary 4-5 minutes. - After having done this we began to overlay shots and place transitions in between the ...

Roles in the Group In general, there have been little issues amongst our group in terms of delivering a well-thought-out and edited project with a clear aesthetic and narration. The main issue we encountered in terms of members of the group was originally that Sara did not attend lessons in the first few weeks of the term which we then had to ensure upon her return that she was up-to-date with the idea we had chosen and also meant that she missed the creation of the presentation. Moreover, the only other issue I personally found amongst the group was a language barrier, which meant that Valerie found it harder to follow the ideas we would come up with and in terms of editing the project, she found it hard to understand what the participant was saying to then be able to piece together the clips into the correct order. Despite this, in terms of meeting up to organise and prepare and edit as well as film, we did not encounter any problems and worked very well together.  I would...

Final Idea The final idea we have chosen out of all of the potential ideas we came up with is to film at the Old Police Cells Museum situated below Brighton's Town Hall.  This Police Cell acted as a detaining center for prisoners in the 18th and 19th century, it was in use until recently when it became a file storage unit for the council. In the past ten years, ex-policeman and police enthusiasts act as tour guides for this free-to-visit facility, where they speak of their own experiences working in the Cells themselves as officers during the final years of it being open for police use as well as local stories and historical information. We have contacted Phil Meeson who is in charge of events and filming and he has given us the date of April 1st to commence filming and we have all day to film with ex-policeman Philip Armstrong. Mr Armstrong used to work in the cells just before it closed and therefore as a group we believed it would be most interesting to hear from someon...

Transcript 1 st Video (Duration: 00:48) I’m Phil Armstrong, I have been a serving police officer for 30 years. Been retired nearly 22 years now, but err although I have worked in Brighton it wasn’t when this was an active police station. I joined the same year activities moved from here. 2 nd Video (Duration: 01:21) 00:15 – Yes, having been retired for quite a long time, it was err somewhat refreshing in a way to come back to see everything that’s in the museum here and to think in many cases ‘Oh my goodness I use to use one of those’ and then I’d find it in a museum. So, it also gave me another opportunity to meet friends who I had worked with and I am now sharing my interest in the museum and what it represents and telling people about how things were when we were in service. One important thing to say about it is a lot of people come down to visit thinking they’re going to look at prison cells, but that’s not the case. These are simply police detention...

Final Project Evaluation The overall nature of this documentary is heart-warming and simplistic. This was not the original idea for the piece however I am happy with how it turned out. We had arranged a set of potential questions to ask the participant and we used his answers to chose a new basis for the documentary. We originally were going to go for a dark aesthetic, with eerie jump shots of the cells and Erroll Morris inspired sound effects of glasses dropping for example. The final product we created no longer suits this and the intended reading is more of a story-telling nature. Whilst we kept to the idea of having corresponding shots overlayed to the topics the participant is speaking about, we chose not to change the tones and aesthetic of these shots to ensure that they kept true to the narration.

Nichols 1991: Documentary Modes of Representation Reading Notes:  Observational Mode - Attempts to observe aspects of the historical world as they happen typically have no voice-over commentary, no supplementary music or sound, no intertitles, no historical reenactments, no behaviour repeated for the camera and no interviews. social actors behave as if no filmmakers were there. -'Window on the World' The Interactive Mode -It arose from the availability of some mobile equipment and desire to make filmmakers perspective more evident  -This mode wants to engage with individuals more directly while not reverting to classic exposition interview styles -It allows the filmmaker to account for past events via witnesses and experts that the viewers can also see -Archival footage becomes appended o these commentaries to avoid hazards of reenactment and monolithic claims of Voice of God commentary.  Expository Mode -Nichols refers to this mode as the '...