From making this documentary film, I consider the most successful part was the audio interviewing of my protagonist because she gave great detail about having a new born child, and was very natural towards speaking about this. This was really helpful because it meant that I had a lot of audio/ information for my documentary film that I could use and it made the film more interesting from a personal level as in enables the viewer to see the position of a new mother from her own shoes. I wanted this film to have a very relaxed and casual vibe to it which I feel the recordings allowed this to happen.

The problematic part of this film was that it was hard to film the protagonist (my sister) and her child (Liam) together, because he is still very young and would never settle in front of the camera for when Nat was talking to me. This meant that in my film I had to do majority of it in a voice over form in order to actually understand what she was telling the audience about being a mother and Liam. I wanted to have more action shots of them together, but every time we tried to film he would always cry and not make out to be the happy baby that he really is. This would have been easier for me if he was a bit older- but in this development of him, it was best to make a majority voice over film so I could convey to the audience the difficulties of having a new born and the idea that it is a lot harder then what people make it out to be.

The key learning I discovered was about the extreme difficulties of editing and piecing together a film so it has flow, but also a different/creative touch to the film. I found Premiere Pro hard to use at first because it always seemed to glitch and not form to the way I wanted, but after many hours of playing around I was able to edit my film to the way that I thought best suited the type of documentary I was creating. I have always made films on final cut pro, or iMovie which I got very used to in school- but what I learnt was that it just takes time to understand and find the tricks around a new programme in order to have a full flowing film.

What I learnt in the process that is relevant to my broader development as a media practitioner is that in order to create a successful film you don’t always just have to film what is relevant/only the subject. I found that I didn’t have as much cut away clips for my film as I had hoped and feel in some parts the scene drags on for a bit longer then it should of/ if I had more cut away shots. I know for next time when making a film to just continue to document everything that is going around me because it always comes in handy at some stage for a cut away or a transition from one scene to another.

Overall I was quite happy with the outcome of my film, and spent a lot of my time making a flow between the footage and audio recordings.