Documentary Evaluation and Reflection.

Documentary Evaluation and Reflection.

During my documentary, the methods of research we used have been critical to the success of both the documentary story and the visuals. However, things were slow at the start and research was slow, to begin with after we had chosen to do our documentary on the menopause. We began researching by asking women aged 45-60 if they would be interested in this documentary, I asked all of my aunties and I asked my mum (Claire) if she would post in her menopause room that I was making a documentary on the matter. The feedback was indeed tremendous, and this really motivated me to make a documentary these ladies wanted, not one that I wanted which was more on the sports side of things which is not so unusual. Below is the post that I asked my mum to share on Facebook in a The Menopause Room Group.

Our second biggest research task was the interview with Dr Greenhouse, from this interview I learned so much about the menopause, as I was not a researcher for this task, I passed the information on to my colleague Laura to write up on the menopause and what it is. From this interview I believe it gave me an unbiased view as to what the menopause is really like and the fact it is not just where women go a bit loopy, they are going through an extreme change in their life, a change so big that from my research I have come to the conclusion that there is a lasting effect after you come out of the other side of the menopause. Something I personally had no idea about. Through other research that we acquired, we found out about a menopause café and we really did want to go and do some interviews, sadly we received no response, despite 3 attempts to try and organise a date, so instead of this café we decided to shoot some Vox pops, though as mentioned in an earlier post they did not make it into the final film as we had too much footage and from asking family members and college colleagues I came to the conclusion that Vox Pops would just be too upbeat for the style of editing we were gunning for, which was a silky smooth piece with some amazing cinematic cut shots from St Ives Cornwall, Sennen Cove and Carbis Bay. Vox pops from our research would have been great but we went for more detailed interviews over fast and possibly choppy Vox pops, I am personally glad we did not include our Vox pops in our edit.

In our film I believe after reading hundreds of comments and judging by the like-dislike ratio at 100% on the actual video and also our initial rating from our teachers averaging out at about 9.5/10, I am immensely impressed with the information we showed in the documentary giving an insight into the menopause and giving women something to relate to whilst going through the menopause. I believe some of the research, like the immediate into voicing that 13 million women are currently going through some stage of the menopause and the fact most women are keeping quiet about the matter. Another interesting thing is, the reason there are no jump cuts at all in our film, this was because something I learnt from my teacher Dan, when I did an edit on a workshop we did on Vox pops, he said “try not to cut people’s voices whilst they are in a sentence without putting a cut shoot in the background”, from this feedback, I applied this into my documentary and this is why there is not one cut in the whole Documentary, well there was initially but after re-editing the documentary and making over 100 different changes after the initial render I believe we had done a pretty good job of applying research into our documentary and delivering it in a polished fashion.

So was I happy with the final film? the answer is both yes and no, I will start with my own critical feedback then I will add the feedback from my teachers and after this I will list the things, I am most proud of as well as the things my teachers liked.

So, what would I definitely change? I would definitely consider using a second camera for my interviews if I did this documentary again. I had a close-up and a wide angle. However, in fact, we did use 2 cameras for all of our interviews but the footage from the college camera looked to different to the footage coming out of my GH4 which was shooting in 1080p 200MBs in 60fps the closest the JVC camera could do was 100 MBs which was not on the same level as my GH4 so I made the directors decision to cut the footage from the JVC out of our edit as it would affect our consistency and possibly even get us downgraded, my next critic point would be that a few of our shots were underexposed, for example, the beginning of Bridget Winterbourne’s interview, where one side of her face is almost completely dark and we could have used some lighting, to correct this I could have brightened the image in post but then the right side of her face would be over exposed, so my conclusion for this would be just to buy a lighting kit off of eBay which I have done to improve the quality of my films and rely less on college equipment as it may not always be available when I need it to film. One of my other criticisms would be the face, we could have had more relevant cutaways for example when Dr Greenhouse is talking about medication, we could have pulled up an image of a pharmacy and also when Lydia Davies is talking about exercising, I could have gotten her to do some walking for the camera, which I should have thought more about when I was filming. Finally I think we could have included even more family photos of the ladies we had interviewed, though it was indeed quite hard to insert them into the edit as the quality of the photos did not match the quality of the edit and also after gathering their photos from their Facebook timelines (after getting permission) there were not many images of them in person so I had little choice. In hindsight I could have asked them personally for some proper photographs of their families and older photos of the ladies I had interviewed.

Feedback from teachers was amazing and there were some points they made; we could have used more professional titles; however, this was a restriction of Vegas 15 my editing software and I really did try to get the subtitles as good looking as possible, but they could have looked better. We could have interviewed a husband of one of the ladies we interviewed going through the menopause, this would have added another perspective in our documentary, however, it would be hard to find where it inserts into this documentary as we struggled to get it down to 15 minutes as it was!

Next was the fact there was too much drone footage and not enough relevant cut shots, something I definitely agree with and looking back I should have done this. Also keeping the help website at the end of our documentary on for a second longer or so, which I should have done looking back as I had 3 seconds of extra space before the doc ended at 15 mins, so it could have been on the screen for an extra 2 seconds or so. It was also suggested that we used a second camera in our interviews, but as mentioned earlier I could have but I decided against it as the footage from the JVC camera was completely different to the footage from my GH4. Also it was suggested we play around with some time lapses, which we sort of did at the start, but I agree with my teacher we could have added some more cinematic style time lapses. We could have had some close-ups of Dr greenhouse’s hands whilst we were interviewing him to add a different perspective to the interview, however without a second camera this would have been hard to achieve, also it would have been hard without having a cut to it and I don’t think a fade would work, therefore it may not have fitted the laid-back style of film we were going for, although I would have loved to have achieved this with a second camera. Also our beginning title should have been a bit longer, I did shorten it from our initial edit however, to reduce the documentary down to 15 mins, but on reflection I should have left it on a bit longer and just taken away some of the cinematic drone shots, but then again that would have been hard to do as the establishing shots are really quite important to the beginning of a documentary, but I should have found a way to make the beginning titles a bit longer, most likely by cutting down the cinematic drone shots at the start and extending the title by about 2 more seconds. For my last critic feedback, I contacted the owner of a Facebook group called The Menopause Room called ‘Jane Atherton’ the group has over 83,000 women in from all over the world who all talk about their experiences of the menopause and they use the room to relate with other ladies and also let off steam. I asked Jane for some critical feedback for the documentary she said that during the end I make it seem as if the menopause ends!, in actual fact, she corrected my knowledge, yes, the symptoms do die down over time but she did mention that some symptoms can in fact last forever like the low levels of hormones. I found this extremely interesting and if I was ever was to present this documentary again, I would absolutely add these facts to the documentary! She also said how refreshing it is to hear a young man do the voice over and also, she was also impressed that I had interviewed very fit and healthy ladies and how this was different to most documentary’s on the menopause, which I really was happy about.

So for positive parts of our documentary, I really do believe we did well with our planning for interviews, we knew what we were doing when we got to the locations, where we would be filming, we planned for audio issues and also if there was bad weather as we wanted to get all of our filming finished in the first week of the filming week and spend 2 weeks editing and reshooting if we needed to, we were most worried about one day when we went to film in Weston as the forecast was not good, luckily it turned out to be a very pleasant day, though if it was not we had the next day available to film the shots we could not capture. Other things we did well was our attention to detail in editing, we only achieved this as I got multiple people to check our film one after another as this was the best way to ensure there was no spelling mistakes/miss pronunciation of words in the voice over which I did say woman instead of women every single time and also in the first 5 attempts I was reading the script too fast and it felt unnatural and did not match the footage we wanted to play in the background of the voice over. Another good point in our documentary was our usage of natural lighting in all of our interviews except Dr Greenhouse where we used the fluorescent bulbs above to light the subject and used colour correction in post to balance the warm tones in introducing some more blue light to match the rest of our interviews, all of this was done by myself in post and this took many hours of patience to get all of the colours correct. My favourite use of natural light, however, was the way Bridget Winterbourne was positioned in her interview, where the sunset was on her left and there was daylight on her right, then with Claire Derham’s interview there was almost a wall of natural sunlight on her right and a mirror on the left reflecting natural light onto her left side which really made the image really pretty. Then after this Lydia Davies was positioned right next to a window on her right and Ian Eisenstrager (Claire’s coach) was positioned right in front of a window which filled his face with natural light and really made him stand out of the image.

For framing I remembered my training on looking space and managed to get the looking space with my interviews, my favourite looking space was joint between Bridget Winterbourne’s interview and Claire Derham’s interview, I also loved the props I put in the background of Bridget Winterbourne’s interview, although it was only a simple plant it really went a long way to bring out the creative side of Bridget rather than Claire’s, where we shot the interview with an aperture of f1.7 with a 42.5mm lens so we could get a really good looking shallow depth of field, in Claire’s shot we positioned her so we could see some blurred out family pictures in the background which was actually really nice and brought out the calm side of Claire other than the fighting side of her boxing. Other good points in our documentary was our audio, I was really happy with the quality and consistency of our audio, though there was some background noise of a phone ringing in the background of Dr Greenhouse’s interview this was the only error, I must have spent about 7 to 10 hours going through and through the audio in our documentary to make sure there were absolutely no dips in audio where an interviewee may have gotten quiet when talking about a certain topic and louder in another, this was especially present in Dr Greenhouse’s interview, where he was loud one minute and quiet the next, also in Bridget Winterbourne’s interview she tended to raise her voice before the start of each sentence so I quietened these peeks all down in post, which did take a long time as I was not just turning down whole clips, I was using audio curves as this, even though it takes more time, leaves you with a more professional audio, and I did also receive positive comments on the level of the background music, not being too loud and as one viewer said “was set at a perfect level”.

We were also praised for our silky smooth transitions and our beautiful b roll of Claire Derham’s boxing, a real motivational piece of filming, especially the close up when Claire was doing some pad work and the sun was in the centre of the shot, also everyone I had spoken to love the shadow boxing and also my footage of Claire Derham in a boxing fight about 2 years ago. Other things that we were nice to hear was the beautiful cinematography, referring to some of the drone shots and also the interview setups and also the little usage of archived footage of Dr Greenhouse performing at a conference, he gave us permission to use this. People also loved how informative the documentary was and how we had a good range of ladies relating to Dr Greenhouses interview which were, going into the Menopause, coming out of the menopause and an early menopause. Other things I think we did well was including a link to the official NHS page on the menopause which was a recommendation from one of our teachers, this was a good idea as it shows ladies where to go and what to do if they do want further help or support with either symptoms or even mental health. For my final last points on what I thought we did well, I think we achieved a really nice inspiring and positive tone in the voice over with a positive ending, there was a consistent flow throughout the documentary, it looked professional which I was really proud of, we had a good range of experts and I believe we did a really good job to get an interview with Dr Greenhouse, good use of music in the background, very calming and copyright free which took a long time to find. On the whole I am really impressed with my teams to work, Kylan’s voice over script was amazing and Laura’s research was fantastic and really aided the information in the documentary, Laura also helped me with the of the clips in the documentary and helped me film 2 interviews (Claire and Lydia), she was really invested in getting our documentary facts and figures correct as well, I think she did an amazing job. Also, Kylan worked really hard towards the voice over on correcting me if I said something wrong for example women instead of woman. Also, Kylan suggested I fly a bit lower with my drone while we were filming by the water to get a better shot and I think that worked out really well (this was the shoot leading into Bridget Winterbourne’s interview. But on the Whole we all stuck to our jobs, there was one incidence however where, I needed to involve Kylan a bit more in the editing, so what I did was went back home with him early one day and spent about 6 hours polishing the edit and ironing out the last mistakes, he also helped cut down the documentary from 16 mins to 15 which was actually a really hard job as we did not want to damage any of our existing interviews, I do believe we trimmed the documentary successfully and we both did a really good job of the other editing that we needed to do, for example there was one or 2 errors with some lighting which were corrected. But in the end, we came out with a documentary that we should all be very proud of and I am really happy with the support we were given throughout the whole process!

Below is some feedback i have gotten after publishing our documentary, we asked the Menopause Room what they thought of our documentary (the question was asked from my mum's Facebook account (Claire Derham)) on behalf of my group.

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