Aurelija's TV production blog

Overall, I personally liked this unit the best as all of the work was split between the three of us so it wasn't as stressful as the previous units and I got to do what I liked the best which operating the camera. I really liked working with my group because we get along well and could do the work efficiently. For the part that I would change would be making sure my alarm was on, so I wouldn't have slept over on the first day of the shoot and would have brought a spare battery which would have helped in a sense that we could have filmed without worrying about running out of battery and maybe could have filmed more as our time with Kayleigh was limited (she had places to be). Also, I would have made sure that the GoPro was fully charged in the morning (I charged it a day before the shoot but it must have turned on in the case) so we would have more than one video to work with. Other thing that I'd change would be to nit have acted like a child when I found the zoom butto...

Lauren had a production book made so all of our papers would be organized and always on hand if we needed something

While doing our transcripts we did a mistake by timecoding them on a regular video player instead of Premiere, which made it a bit more difficult to edit. In the end we went back to the interviews and put the correct timecodes on the paper transcripts. KAYLEIGH HURST TRANSCRIPT MEDIUM SHOT 00:09 I’m Kayleigh, I’m 21, and this is Dartford skatepark. 00:18 I suppose when I first got into skateboarding, my uncle got a skateboard out of the loft that was a lot older than I am, and it was-- it was in pieces, but it sort of went from one thing to another, got a new board and then started here. 00:35 I wouldn’t say skate boarding’s like a hobby I’d say it’s more of a lifestyle. It just takes over your life. You end up seeing skate parks and skate spots everywhere you go. It just runs your life. 00:51 I do, I do like to travel and hit as many parks as possible. I went to Barcelona, recently, and I’m off to Athens in a couple of weeks time, so I am starting to go furth...

In the early stages I wasn't highly involved in script writing, but I would suggest ideas which might be helpful and what sequences could be overlaid on the interviews in the final stages. Also, how it could be structured. The first script was definitely a draft as we didn't exactly know much of what answers we could get and who, aside from Kayleigh, will be in our film, so the script was written trying to predict the final outcome. The second draft was similar to the first in the sense of trying to predict the shoot and what access we'd be able to get (we weren't successful in getting the permission to film her at work) Third draft had included roller derby (we thought we'd get a longboarder from Brighton at first, but she didn't reply to us on time) but still tried to predict the outcome. Also it was written as if for two separate documentaries.  In the fourth draft the skateboarding and roller derby were mixed into one, but still was done b...

Louis Theroux He's best known for getting involved in the action on which he's doing the documentary (eg. he wanted to join the Scientology while doing the documentary about them). He tends to get very close with people in order to gain their trust and get what he needs from them for his film.  On his show When Louis Met Max Clifford, who was a contraversial publicist and a sex offender, Max tried to set Louis up, but was cought in a lie while his mic was on. From that episode it was clear to see that Max had a lot of secrets and that he wasn't a very honest person. I like warching Louis Theroux documentaries because of how well it shows the personalities of people and he's not scared to admit when he was wrong or naive (docs with Jimmy Savile). His documentaries are usualy ddone by using mostly actality sequences and done only on handheld camera, it has commentary in which he explains his feelings about a subject or a person that he's basing his document...

For this we had to film and edit footage from Historical Chatham Dockyard. As someone who likes operating the camera I was the first one in line to do so. During this I learned how hard it's to film handheld (it was very uncomfortable to use a tripod inside the ship so we decided not to do so thus a lot of shots are very shaky) and how hard it is to do a nice pan, I didn't think of holding the shot for longer, which I should have done. There are some establishing shots that were done handheld because we were running late to the ropery, but we could have picked it up after we got back. This was really hard to film as I didn't know what will happen and just tried to film something. In the beginning I was totally lost but then the people from my group started showing me what I could film so I tried to do my best and get as much footage as I could so I kept on rolling the camera for the whole action.

The documentary is done by American filmaker  Jennifer Siebel Newsom  to show how the media missrepresents women, how it's mainly targeted towards men and how this affects young girls. Although the statistics used are mostly American, big part of the facts apply to most countries.  I chose this documentary in particular because we're doing our own documentary about women in sports and I found this to be relevant to the subject. The representation in the media helps to form the society's mainset and the studies show that there's definitely coralation between what we see on TV and what we do/ how we treat others in real life. Thus due to the lack of women in sports representation in the media we have the statistics that show that by age 14, girls are dropping out of sports at two times the rate of boys. I personally love the quote used to describe the documentary "You can't be what you can't see" so eventhough there's lots of talented and stron...

Because I was responsible for the camera work on our documentary, I researched more on it by reading 'Directing a Documentary'  by Michael Rabiger. There was a lot of tips and information with using lenses, but because I knew what camera we would be using I didn't get into that as the information was irrelavent. Notes in brackets were made after the production Notes: Make 'test and test again' your true religion. (because we knew the main camera we were working with we didn't do much testing, but on the day, while prepping, we found out that the viewfinder was on, although a day before I spent some time figuring out the GoPro as we were using it for the first time) Prepare for the worst (we gave ourselves some time to get to the skatepark which turned out to be great because I slept over and we had to make a stop at the shop to get some batteries, so if we hadn't we would have been late and made the contributors wait. Also, while filming in the he...