On Friday I had the opportunity of presenting the work I have done so far on my documentary. The days leading up to the presentation, I was only able to record interview footage and edit it the day after.  Essentially what I presented in class was an edited roll of the interview footage where I attempted to clean up the audio, cut parts that I felt unnecessary and put some non-copyrighted music over it. What I wanted to achieve out of the presentation was constructive feedback on the story of the documentary in regards to flow, clarity and content. Technical feedback was also welcome and suggestions for b-roll footage. Overall the video was about seven minutes long.

Screenshot of my Work in Progress video

After presenting the video I was given plenty of good feedback so that I could use for my final product.

The comments were:

• Reshoot the interview with better audio and nicer location
• Dwell into more personal questions so that the audience can be more intimate with the subject (Talk about Ethan’s relationship with his mother and brother)
• Less promo type responses in relation to Ethan’s wrestling and basketball career
• Record B-Roll of wrestling training, old basketball matches, family etc.
• Use less music (too distracting)
• Do cut out moments of silence where Ethan physically shows impactful emotions (this will aid the narrative)
• Keep the video less than five minutes

After hearing these comments I now had a better idea of what I needed to do next to improve the quality of the video. Audio was subpar and definitely needed to be worked on.

source: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/pitching-mayerson.jpg

This week I compiled my thoughts and ideas to create my own pitch to present at the end of the week. Up until now doing this exercise really helped me give a better idea of the direction that I am going for in my own documentary.

Finally reaching the end of the week it was a great opportunity to see everyone’s pitches and the feed back that was given to the assessors. The feed back was very interesting and a lot to learn from. A consistent problem from the majority of the pitches was not the idea but how it was going to be presented and structured in the final video.

Initially in the structure of my documentary, I was going to start with Ethan’s basketball career and transition into wrestling. However, the feedback that I was given, the assessor told me I should start with purely wrestling and then slowly bleed into basketball. In doing so it changes the dynamic of the story and makes it far more interesting than what I originally had.

This is the link to my Pitch Presentation:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eEoPYcEMPxDAOmMCadsIFbuq6GW9LuFKrIxzK8vMt4o

This week has been planning and organising for shooting on my final project for the subject. I think the most important and often overlooked is just to make some kind of start. Since the documentary heavily relies on the subject’s voice over, it has to be my main priority and needs to be done otherwise the documentary goes no where. In preparation for the interview with Ethan, I have compiled a short list of questions that would be good to build the foundation and structure of the story:

How has your career in wrestling progressed so far?

What challenges do you face in wrestling?

What do you hope to achieve from all of this hard work and dedication to training?

How have you been able to accomplish so much skill in a short period of time?

Why have you coined yourself as ‘The Half Man Half Machine’

Do you think your transition from pro basketball has helped you immensely in learning the moves?

Why have you made this transition?

Where shall we see you in the future?

I tried to make these questions as open as possible so it leads to more potential sub questions and depth to the story. Hopefully there will be plenty of content to work with so that I can develop an interesting story for the documentary. Further research will be required to make the interview better.

I found this tutorial on interviewing very interesting and informative:

source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9FKKU5ROFI

This week I had the opportunity to help document youth unemployment for a youth centre in the western suburbs. Just a little background into this project: the documentary aims to give people perspective from the current youth on the challenges in employment sector today. Through multiple interviews we hope to send out the message to the masses to eliminate the stigma that young people today are lazy and refuse to find jobs. There was plenty to learn from this experience in regards to camera work and interviewing.

In terms of how the interview footage looked, it was framed in this similar fashion.

source: https://www.michaelpage.co.uk/sites/michaelpage.co.uk/files/styles/large/public/Five%20interview%20mistakes%20you%20should%20NEVER%20make-Blog%20image-MP.jpg?itok=YTSt3Hji

We followed the rules of thirds and made the background as minimalistic as possible. Overall we attempted to achieve a basic aesthetic look so that we could focus on the subject and his or her message.

In regards to the interviewing process, we had a list of default questions, but for the majority of the interviewees we did whole heap more of adaptive questions. This process required a lot of on the spot thinking and careful listening.