This week Jess and I presented our work in progress for the class – we put our interview of Wendy, the sewing tutor, together with some B-roll footage in the background and asked for everybody’s thoughts. The feedback we got was fantastic, so as we continue editing our footage we’re going to try to keep as much of it in mind as possible.

The first piece of feedback we got was to make sure our audience is informed about what the interview subject is talking about. Wendy mentioned Hilary (Community Services Development Worker) during the interview, yet the audience wasn’t aware of who she is or what she does for the program. While this was just a snippet (so it was difficult to give context), this is good feedback for us to keep in mind if we decide to go ahead with Jess’ idea of creating mini-documentaries separately (30-60 seconds) of single people, as well as the final film.

One suggestion that popped up a couple of times was to include archival photographs. Unfortunately we don’t really have access to any, and the sewing program is only three years old (not that we’ll be covering it in a historical sense). We think B-Roll footage should suffice and fill the role that archival pictures would, and we’re going to take the suggestion to include more B-Roll footage on board in places that we can. We were also given feedback regarding our selection of B-Roll, and were told we should include some shots of Wendy teaching. We have a few of these from memory so this should be no problem to fit in.

All in all, we were happy with what the class had to say and we’re going to try and use every piece of feedback that we can, where appropriate. Moving forward, we’re going to begin a rough cut of the main ~5 minute film, so hopefully we can show a sequence, or maybe even the whole film in week 11. After that we can use the feedback to cut our final film. If there’s one thing I’m concerned about in the future it’s music – I looked at a few royalty free songs for Wendy’s sequence but everything I listen to seems to miss the mark. The film’s tone is tricky to balance with music, so hopefully we can find something that’s right.