Documentary - Life of a College Student

Our new topic for this term is Documentaries. In my opinion a documentary is a film, television programme or radio programme that provides a factual report on a particular subject. In this case myself and my colleague Olivia Searle decided to do ours on a college student. In this case I was the student and we filmed my morning from getting off of the bus to arriving in the classroom.

In the brief all we were told was, 'What a documentary of a factual programme is to you?' We also were told that we had to plan, film and edit all in one day. Considering myself nor Olivia had ever filmed a documentary before this was quite a challenge. It was important for us that we did something a bit different. I came up with the idea of a college student because I thought it was a simple idea that could easily be developed. It wasn't necessary that we had a plan however we typed up a quick plan so it was something that we could go back to later on. 

The brief shot list myself and Olivia came up with. 

We got out our equipment. Our first two shots were filmed outside. This was quite difficult because it was raining outside. However we managed to get the shots and in my opinion I think that they came out really well considering how bad the weather was. Next up we filmed walking through reception and into the college, these shots were definitely the hardest because there was so many people and it was such a hard task trying to make sure that people weren't in the way of the shot. It was important that all of our shots were clear. The rest of the filming was upstairs and by our room therefore there wasn't many people so it was easy to get the rest of our filming done. 

After we had finished filming we decided to edit. Our edit had to be 2 minutes long exactly. This was by far the most difficult part because it was so hard to get the timing and to include everything. In my edit I decided to speed up all of my clips to 120, the reason for this was because they were originally on 100 which I felt was too slow and if they were on this for the film it wouldn't have made it boring but also too long. There were also three clips that I sped up to 200. These were walking through the reception and walking up both sets of stairs. I think that the affect it gave was really nice therefore I was happy with the outcome of it. 

Like all documentaries it is important to have a voiceover. I wrote up the voiceover and then myself and Olivia recorded it on the zoom recorder. The voiceover was just telling everyone about what was happening in each of the shots. The quality of the sound came out really well because we were able to put a mic over it to block out any outside noise. After we had recorded it all we had to do was match it to our edit, which was pretty simple as it was only voices.

The typed up version of our voiceover. 

The song that I decided to put in the background was The Intro by The XX the reason for using this was because it had no voices as it was just a backing track. I like this because it wasn't too heavy and when turned down it fitted really well with the edit. 

My edit 

If I'm honest although we did the filming and editing to the best of our abilities. I don't think it turned out as well as I hoped it would. I think that the reason for it not being as good is because we are used to having a couple of days to do a project and in this case we only had one day to do the whole lot. We weren't able to do much planning therefore I think that if we were going to do it again more consideration needs to go into the planning as I think it is the most important thing and the reasoning behind a success or failure.