Connor Winfield TV production

Throughout the pre-production and production for my documentary, there are many things that I could have done better, but there are things that went really well. I feel like I managed to overcome the challenges that arose in a good manner, and also made some decisions that led to some very good results. The first thing that I could have done better is doing more thorough research, and trying harder to contact people from the club outside of club hours. If I had done this sooner, then I would have a better portfolio of more people who attend the club. I did manage to interview quite a few people at the club, both volunteer and customer, so I feel like I still had quite a good range of opinions, however it would have been good to broaden the types of questions that I asked them, such as what they did before coming to the club, or how they heard about the club. I feel like this would have been better to do as then the audience could build up more of a relationship to the characters, and

When thinking what I wanted to make as my final project for University, I had a few ideas that differed from one another as I wasn't sure what type of film I wanted to make. I had one idea that was a thriller, which focused on a set of twins, and one of them accidentally kills the other, so has to take on the role of their live, as well as their own. This would have gone on to possibly even include things like getting married to the twin's fiancé and having to make up excuses as to why they can't be at the same events. The other Idea was a documentary on the importance of local stories, and how they are passed down through the generations.  However, I eventually thought of the idea of doing a documentary about the Lunch Club at Holy Trinity Church in Sittingbourne, because my nan used to volunteer there before she sadly passed away before the start of this project.  I wanted to make this as she often talked about volunteering at the club, and so I felt like it was a topic

The final case study that I researched was an American student documentary called  'Where will the frogs go' , and told the story of a small town in Nevada that became a hotspot for local miners who were heading for Bev's Miners Club. It was a place that the people, both men and women alike, could drink their whiskey and stand together sharing gossip.  Sitting like this, these “Friendly Old Retired Geezers” are able to escape the reality that their rural town is dying, withering away beside the Black Rock Desert. I chose to watch this documentary for several reasons. The first is that unlike the previous two case studies that I have researched, this one is made by a student, so is relevant to what I am doing as there are going to be differences to how a student makes a documentary compared to an experienced filmmaker's techniques. I think that this is good because I can see what a documentary can look like what made by someone nearer the skill level as myself. Durin

Another documentary that I watched to see how documentary techniques are used was made in 2018 and is called  'Found at the Deaf Club' , and follows the journeys of three people from different backgrounds and places who are deaf and join their local Deaf Clubs. They explain how discovering their local Deaf clubs changed their lives, giving them a new identity, language, and community. How difficult was it to "take the plunge" and go along, despite not knowing anyone there. I chose to research this documentary as it is very close to the subject of my film, due to both of them focusing on a club within the community that has the aim of improving the lives of the people who go to it. It also follows the lives of more than one person, and while I a not doing that to the extent as in this documentary, I am getting opinions of the club from numerous perspectives, which I feel help emphasise the importance of the Lunch Club for people.  From the start, I really took not

For the pre-production of my project, I needed to watch some relevant documentaries to see what the techniques used in them were, and how they can be used effectively.Doing this is much better than reading about the techniques, as I am able to get a better sense of how to use them and the effects that they can cause. I also wanted to try and find some examples to watch that where spaced out in time, rather than being set and filmed near the same year. I feel that doing this can greatly help me, as it will allow me to see how the documentary genre has changed its way of filming over the years. I also want to find documentaries with a similar focus to mine, being a social issue or inspiration, because if I start taking notes on how a wildlife documentary uses certain techniques, it is not going to help me out as much as something more similar to mine. The first documentary that I watched was called 'The Centre' , and was released in 1948, and was a Central Office of Information

In order to be able to produce a higher quality of work for my documentary, I need to understand fully what a documentary is, and why and how the key elements in the genre are used.  The start of documentaries was around the same time as the birth of film. However, they were a lot different to how they are today. When documentaries were first being made, they were simply a way of capturing a moment on film, simple things like a boat docking or a train pulling into a station. The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, shot many of these short films, most lasting less than a minute since that was all that film making was capable of at the time. Almost all of their work is incredibly influential due to it being a starting point for film to evolve from, and traits can be seen in films since. One example of this is in their film 'Demolition of a Wall' , which was the first film to have reverse motion in it. The film plays normally at first, then after the wall is made to fall, the f

Throughout the course of this project, I have learnt so many things about the art of making a documentary. I have definitely built upon the skills that I had before the start of the project, and feel a lot more confident in my ability to make a documentary.  During the documentary, there were several things that went really well, such as the fact that I was able to interview more people than I was expecting to, due to the two days of me filming at the club, which were a month apart, were some of the busiest times that I have seen the club, so this allowed me to broaden the amount of footage that I shot, and to get more opinions on what the club means to people, which is the story that I wanted to convey to the audience. This helped me in the edit stage as well, as I then had more of a variety of personalities that I could include in my film, and could also use more that three or four people, as adding a few extra people who could add more to the story worked really well.  Another t

Throughout this project, I have been looking for tips and tricks for making a documentary, as this is the first film of this genre that I have made, so needed to know more about it in order to make it the best way that I could. But there is only so much that I could learn from searching in the internet, so I started to research the styles of some well-known documentary makers to see how they convey their preferred style, and the techniques that they use to do this.  One of the most famous documentary film makers is Ken Burns, who has won numerous awards for his films, including 4 Primetime Emmy awards. I felt that he was a good person to research, and found out that he is a frequent user of the 'Ken Burns technique', which is zooming onto a photo, and then panning over it. This technique  wasn’t invented by Burns; he has most frequently said he learned of it from his mentor, documentarian Jerome Liebling . But it’s nonetheless become heavily associated with Burns’s efforts to

As part of my hand-in for this project, I had to design a poster of A1 size, so that I could have it for our film screening. This was difficult for me, as to design the poster, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop, however I had not used this programme before, so had to learn about it as I went along, and sometimes asked friends for help and advice.  As the poster had to be A1 sized, I took a screenshot from my film that I wanted to use as my poster image, and imported it into Photoshop. I set the image size to A1 measurements, and started to design. I had the colour of the title, 'The Lunch Club' as a yellow, however I wasn't happy with the way that this looked. I had used red first of all, as the text was becoming lost in the colour of the sky on the image, so was becoming hard to read. This looked very wrong, so I just kept it as white for the time being.  As I don't have a great eye for colour and design,. I asked a few friends what colour they think would suit the po

When planning my first shoot day at the Lunch club, I did start to write a script for it. However, I found it very difficult, due to the fact that my documentary was very interview-based, so I couldn't really write out what answers people would give, or how long they would be talking for. Also, as I was going to be interviewing customers at the club, I had no way of knowing who was going to be there, as it can vary from week to week, so if I planned for certain people to be at the club in order to ask them a certain set of questions, then they don't turn up, it would really mess with my plan.  On the first day of shooting at the Lunch club, I did try and use the script that I had written, however as I was working on my own, I was to busy rushing around trying to catch people for a few minutes for an interview, and making sure that I had enough shots for my edit. Because of this, I did not use the script for the other shoot day at the Lunch club, and for the days where all I w