Evaluation

 My Documentary is finally finished and I am very happy with the final outcome and it matches the initial idea that was in my head.

The product: 

The documentary is meant to show show the good and bad side of social media so people can see how to manage their time properly and to be more socially active. I chose to make the video about this as it will be shown on BBC Three. BBC Three has a young demographical target audience and they use social media a lot. The youth believe a lot of things that they read online and therefore I have decided to use a lot of online news footage. Social media is a place where people can say anything and people will believe it. I needed to find a way to show everyone that watched, that what I was saying was true. By sharing personal problems (participatory), the audience will gain a trust with me and what I am saying. They will see what I am saying, recognise that the same is happening in their lives and try to change.

However, if I didn’t have the reinforcement of anything else e.g, news reports, deaths, riots, Elon musk… people would not be as invested in what I had to say. We already know that people trust the news, therefore I could use them to prove my points. The George Floyd incident was used in order to prove my point of how social media can help spark change. If I had not included a big event like this, the audience wouldn’t see my point as clearly. Then after my points were shown clearly, I had a strong trust and bond with the audience. So far everything I’ve said has been proven as a fact. To seem like a regular person, I decided to talk about a hobby I have. The audience is starting to learn about me on a personal level now and will hopefully see me as a ‘friend’.  I am being used as a two-step flow for the audience. The audience, as we know from past research in other projects , find it hard to get up and find that motivation to change. By showing them the outcomes and possibilities by pushing through, my character will hopefully act as a role model and inspire the demographic to push through their struggles.

After all the news clips, long clips, fast clips, depressing voiceovers, I spend a few minuets talking about myself and how I bettered myself. If I just delved right into my issues and gave help at the start, the audience wouldn’t be interested due to me not making that connection and bond first.

The Documentary begins silent. A record player begins to play ‘express yourself’ a link to the upcoming compilation of tik toks where people are being themselves. As explained in my post production diary ‘day 1 audio’, the music has a riser and then cuts to a fast paced, upbeat music. Fast clips mixed with fast audio gets the audience happy and laughing (hopefully). The audience are seeing the good/innocent side of social media which they are used to. 

The audience are a happy feeling and in a fast paced rhythm. I needed to slow down the pace of the video seamlessly. Therefore the clips gradually got longer in order to slow down the pace. The music began to fade out and I began to talk over a clip (J cut). Then once the music is almost fully faded, we cut to a clip of me talking. In this time the upbeat music fully fades out and a slow paced, action music begins to play-out. This transition of an L cut of the upbeat music and the J cut of slow music gives a smoother transition and a better flow.

Then from that I went into Elon Musk talking about social media and how it effects the youth of today. As referenced in my research, Elon Musk spoke about how the youth didn’t need college degrees in order to become successful because of the fact that you can use social media for almost anything. However, he also believes that instagram has massive issues.  For the young demographic, Elon is a big role model and is a man people admire. By having him in the documentary, the youth and target demographic will be influenced by what he says and his views. Onto of this, I tried to reinforce Elons points by over-cutting news points with L and J cuts. 

After this speech, I began to talk about how social media effected my life and how sluggish it made me. The video is in slow motion in order to show and emphasise how slow social media made me and how bad I became with it. As said before I need to slowly gain the audiences trust and empathy. After the audience has become sad with the news reports, I relate myself to the news reports and therefore get empathy from the audience.

I have empathy from the audience but the audience also now feel bored. Tension has been lost and the audience need a new twist. We have gone over the positive, then a negative. I decided to then talk about the positives of social media but on a separate section. This is where I spoke about how social media can help news spread across the world, good or bad. As learnt in my past ‘smile’ project, action sequences are full of camera movement in order to heighten and keep the flow of action. The movement is usually used in order to make the audience feel as if they are there with the people in the action sequence. They are feeling each punch/ movement. I wanted my audience to feel a sense of action and tension when watching the documentary. Therefore I decided to add the rest of the previous track. There was a drop in the music and then the compilation began to play. The clips were cut in a fast pace in order to give the sense of action and I tried to pick footage with a lot of camera movement. In order to keep the pacing and flow, L and J cuts were used heavily in order to blend clips and emphasise what was happening.

The audience are now overwhelmed with all of this action and now I need a drop in action and a new emotion, in order to keep them interested. Therefore I decided to use a J cut into black while I start talking. This gives the audience time to process what they just watched and then shift their focus own my voice. Once they have ‘calmed down’ visuals start to play again and this is when I begin to talk about skating. The skating segment changes the mood of good social media and bad social media. This time I relate to the audiences struggle in a different way. 

Yes people find it hard to find motivation or to quit social media. But, some people find it even harder to keep at a certain task because they feel like they are failing. So I allow the audience to watch me fail at skating and laugh at me in order to give them comfort about failing and not being the best straight away. 

After the audience have been given the reassurance that it is okay to fail, I begin to talk about my problems. As said earlier, I chose to leave this part till the end as I now have a connection with the audience and they trust me. If the video was done the other way around. They would have no interest into what I had to say and would have most likely stopped watching. However, from using help from Blue Planet and the knowledge of uses & gratifications, I was able to engage the audience into my story and then they were prepared and wanted to listen to my story.

Finally I say that after social media, I was able to regulate my time online and I was happier than ever. The clip fades from black and the audience try to figure out what is going on. When suddenly nightclub and party footage starts playing. This music is meant to get the audience ‘pumped up’ and wanting to go out and change themselves.

After getting the audience feedback, they wished to see credits. Therefore I extended the audio and added credit before fading to black yet again.

In order to keep the audience in the flow of the story and to keep the rhythm, I used J and L cuts. I have referenced L and J cuts within my post production and previously in this evaluation. A J cut is where audio begins before a visual plays, making a J shape. A L cut is where a visual stops playing but the audio carries on playing, Making a L shape. The most generic example of this is in dialogue. When a conversation is going on, L and J cuts make the conversation flow and look natural. 

The basic hard cuts in the documentary are used to show the difference of place and time within the documentary. There is no masking transitions or cross dissolves transitions. Hard cuts mean the audience are concentrating on one clip at a time. Hard cuts allow to keep the pace of the video the same throughout and do not distract the audience. For example, imagine an action sequence with lot of cross dissolves…  The video would be very confusing and the flow would be broken. 

To make cuts less noticeable and flow better, they are all clipped to the music audio. This satisfies the audience anyway due to the fact that sound and sight are matching. For the audio I wanted music that was upbeat, one that was action tensed and a calm audio. I began to look for audio on epidemic sound. Once my clips were found, it was a matter of placing them where I needed them. There was no problems, as I had already had the video planned out well.

Clips were colour graded in order to look natural and appealing. Adjustments included highlights and shadows in order to make sure detail was there. However, for the footage of me in my room asleep and going on my phone, I added a blue tint and lowered the whites. Overall this gave the image a dull and depressing look. The depressing look gives a massive contrast to the rest of the documentary and reflects the amount of change I have gone through. 

The forest footage was also colour graded in order to brighten and saturate the greens and oranges. In return, this implies that I am at my best and that quitting social media has helped my perception of life. The colours played a big role in helping ‘tie the knot’ on my transformation.

Overall my documentary was trying to engage the audience through personal identity and education.

Reflection:

Overall I think that my project went to plan and I never came into problems. The only problems I ever ran into with my project were the syncing of clips to audio. I had no problems doing them, it was just time consuming. However the final outcome was worth the time spent into it.

The way that moods fluctuate throughout the video allows the video to stay engaging and keeps the audience hooked for another twist. Although moods (happy, sad) repeat, the reasons are different  which gives the audience a new subject to think and learn about. Nothing is repeated for long so there is no reason for the audience to get bored of one area of the video.

Identification:

Throughout this project I have learnt many professional and working standards. Having already been used to using cameras and video equipment, the physical act of recording and editing was not new to me. This project was a lot more challenging compared to my last project. However, I used what I learnt in my last project to my advantage and was able to overcome issues that I struggled with last time.

In my last project  I was worried about if my work was right and if I was doing it in enough detail. In this project I was able to look back at my old work if I was unsure and I had more confidence in myself. This resulted in me being able to spend more time on practical work, rather than paper work.

The client was quite simple to understand due to the fact of me watching them personally and that there were analytics of what viewers are watching. My research from my last project came in handy when understanding how the audience need to be addressed. The research in this project, especially examples of other documentary’s, helped me understand how to use tension and music to change moods. 

Pre-Production was simple as I had a strong idea of what I wished too create and that my pitch was well received. Compared to last time I was able to get through them effectively as I was way more confident in completing them. 

Production ran into issues, such as framing and exact shooting locations. I quickly changed or waited for a better time to shoot and ended up getting the shots that I wanted. It is better to get what I want and it take slightly longer, than rush and struggle in post production. 

Post production was time consuming, not difficult, but highly time consuming. Most of the video came from post production and was the foundation of where the tension and story was told. J and L cuts added a lot to the video and if I hadn't used them, a lot of the video would have been choppy and unattractive to the ear.

Overall this project went very well and I am proud of the outcome. In the future I wish to try and collect more footage myself then use YouTube footage. However the clips used, were impossible for me to get myself.