Vox pops with Dan

Vox Pops (Voice of the people)

A few weeks ago, my team went out to film Vox pops, firstly we were taught the skills and how to pull off a successful Vox pop in the studio by Dan. I first learned the framing and how to hold the camera, this would be on the shoulder, I would put the camera on my shoulder as this is around the average person’s head height and also the shoulder is a comfortable place to rest the camera for a long period of time. For the framing I learned it is best if you rotate the subjects from left to right, this would be to stop the Vox pops becoming all so similar, it can either be done by mirroring the image in post or physical swapping the subjects from the left third of the frame to the right. I will use these skills in our documentary when we are interviewing men and women on the streets of Weston to get an insight on what the public think the menopause is and how painful it is. I also learned from after I had taken the video that I could have involved my group a little more with the capturing of the footage and maybe using the audio recorder and shotgun mic separate from the camera so I could get a separate audio channel and it would have been higher definition, however at this stage in time I did not know how to use the audio recorder, now I do however it would be nice to get everyone in my group familiar with the kit. I also picked up whilst we were filming that I sometimes had the subject looking in the wrong direction and also, I was drifting off with the camera leaving the footage almost unusable for the last two people we interviewed. I also did not capture any B roll shots which hindered the video and I will definitely need fill shots in our actual documentary Vox pops, as well as this I did cut quite often in the edit which makes the video look unprofessional and choppy something that I should not on in the documentary Vox pops, we should instead include B Roll shots where I would usually cut to make the flow of the Vox pops more fluid and professional. Last thing I would also like to point out the focus was a little soft, however I thought the camera was already in autofocus , so my bad, this will not happen in the real Vox pops as I will be using my own camera which I will leave in autofocus as this will track the persons face and in my opinion is better than manual focus for this type of workload.

Things we did right, however, I included tattoo shops in the background of our mini Vox pops to add context to the subject of which we were asking questions about and also the audio was clear, as well as the music in the edit which was also suitable to the subject we were talking about.

Below is the video of the Vox pops: