Project Brief Three: Reflection
I consider the most successful aspect of my portrait to be the sound quality. Given my subject is a musician I think sound played quite an important part in the portrait, I originally intended to use music from her studio album but the audio I recorded turned out to be of a high quality that I could use in the portrait. While I did use the Zoom recorder, In post I found that the audio from the onboard mic was better so that’s what I ended up using in the final cut. Generally I do prefer to use the Zoom mic but when filming I was more focused on operating the camera which came at the expense of high quality audio from the microphone I think in future productions, having a person operating the microphone independently of the person operating the camera is the best way to ensure both audio and video footage are of the highest possible quality. The least successful aspect of my portrait is the quality of the video footage. Had I taken more time to learn how to adjust setting on the camera maybe this would have been remedied, but the final product looks slightly grainy and not the quality I desired. The space I was shooting in was also quite small, which provided very limited lighting options, thus contributing to the poor quality footage.
A key learning discovery I made was that the best moments in a portrait, or documentary are generally not planned. When documenting a non-fictional subject candid moments can be the best thing to capture as they are honest representations of the subject. Something I learnt the hard way during production is that while obvious questions may seem like the best way to get information from your interview subject, they’ll often prompt obvious answers which the audience could have assumed themselves. This is something that I’ll take into consideration when conducting interviews in the future.
The main thing I took out of the process is that there’s no way you can plan for everything. I ended up interviewing my third preference, which I had slightly anticipated, and even then things still went wrong on the day of shooting. The best way to avoid this is to go into the process with no optimism and expect everything to go wrong, this will at least provide more resilience, and to be as organised as possible without being able to anticipate everything that will happen during production During this process I’ve also learnt to adapt to new equipment in a more timely manner. I think this is an important skill to have as a media practitioner, as realistically I won’t always have the opportunity to use equipment I’m used to. This production was also the first time I have worked with found footage, it was a lot more time consuming than I thought to actually find what I wanted, I will know in the future to allow more time for this process.