Connor Winfield TV production

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 t...

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...

Over the course of this project, I have had several edit reviews from both my tutor, fellow classmates and also a producer who came in a few times to give us some more professional feedback. From these sessions, I learnt what I needed to change and keep in my edits in order to be able to tell the story that I want n a better way.  The first of these edit review sessions was on the 5th March, and as I had only done two shoot days, being an interview and a day at the club, I had only edited the interview together. My tutor said that the interview looks good, and told me that I need to play around with the sound a bit, at some of the clips were at slightly different volumes. Looking back, however, I should have at least made a start on editing together the footage from the Lunch club, as that is the main part of my film, so should have got my tutor to look at it together as soon as possible.  The next edit review was the following week, and I had edited together another inter...

Original shot On the various edits that I had done in the past, I had not realised the importance of colour grading. When I first attempted it on my edit, I was having difficulty in making the colours the in the same scene look similar, as the two camera shots were from two different cameras, so the footage was quite different. The scene took place in an interviewee's house, and I thought that the footage would look good, as she had a red sofa, so I though that the contrast between that and the cream walls would look good. However, when I came to do the colour grading, I thought that I would start with these scenes, as I wanted to see how they looked afterwards. It was here that I realised how difficult it can be to colour grade, as I found it difficult to match the sofa colour between the two camera shots, due to them being different makes of camera as mentioned before. Also, when it seemed that I was starting to make the colours seem similar, the shot would become darker than...

Having been the editor on a few project before, but only one being the editor for a group, I felt like I could have a decent edit for this project. However, after my first edit review, I found out that there was a lot that I could change, so I went and researched some editing techniques, and found that there are several differences between editing a documentary from other genres of film. One of these is the fact that as a documentary will often include several interviews, it is a good idea to transcribe all of the interviews so that finding the right question and answer is a lot easier. Another good technique for documentary editing is to cut a clip on an action or some dialogue, which add to the flow of the story. For example, if the person in the shot is using their hands a lot while talking, use that movement as a marker to make your cut. Additionally, you could also use the words that the interviewee says as markers to make your cuts. If they pronounce a certain word strongly, th...

With the role of Director, I have been in this role several times before on projects that I have done in the past, but again, they have not been this complex, often only involving two or three characters, and one or two locations. This current documentary that I am filming involves a lot more characters, is less scripted than other projects that I have done, due to those being stories and ideas that I have come up with that were not based on anything, whereas this is filming real life, so is more natural.  I do know a few things about being a Director, such as making sure that the shots are how you want them, in terms of the lighting, framing and type of shot, among other things. In order to be able to direct more effectively, I did some research into the role to see if there was anything that I could improve upon, and found out some very useful tips that I could utilise. One of these was how to direct the crew effectively.  Your crew needs clear instructions for what is expe...