Leveson Inquiry Essay

This is another Media Regulation Essay on the on-going Leveson Inquiry...

Do You Think the Leveson Inquiry Represents Satisfactory Regulation?

Shot list/Interview Techniques

 

This is the storyboard/shot list for our interview on Sunday 18th. If all goes to plan we should have some good footage. The plan is to ask the interviewee and number of questions, some we have no intention of using in our documentary however this allows our subject to get comfortable with the camera and hopefully means we can get a meaningful response when we get into the slightly personal questions which we intend to use. This is reflected in the shot list as we use long shot to give the view a sense of the 'sucessful' surroundings our subject is in and also to let the subject get comfortable with the camera.

 

This sort of interview style, particularly with the questions asked I noticed while watching Piers Morgan's life story's. He uses generic questions to make the subject comfortable before asking personal questions which he is trying to invoke emotion from. This technique is particularly helpful to me and I intend on using this technique in our interviews.

 

 

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Production schedule

Change in Production schedule, we were unable to do our scheduled interview on Sunday 11th because our interviewee had to cancel, however it has been rescheduled to this Sunday.

Planning an Unscripted Documentary

We came across an article by Tony Levelle (writersstore.com) about planning an unscripted documentary. This help because it gave us an insight into how you can create an effective documentary without a script.

Levelle talks about a well known filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman, who has been making successful unscripted documentaries for 30 years. She gives him useful and helpful advice as to how she goes about creating a documentary thinking about what story she plans to capture in her documentary, how she gets started, where she would like to shoot, the situations and events she would like to unfold in the document and how she wants the story to essentially evolve as we watch.
The key things we took from her advice was:

1. Allowing your footage to tell you where to go
2. Allowing things (unplanned) to happen
3. Let the story evolve
4. Allow yourself to be open to surprises, making necessary changes as you go
5. 'Free association' during interviews (interviewees more likely to share ideas that feel alive to them)

This really changed the complex of how we are intending to film now. This means that the footage we are going to capture will differ from our original plan which could mean we take a different route to achieve the last paragraph of our treatment.

Treatments.

Treatments

 1.                                                 2.

Evaluation so far

Not enough key footage of subjectWe are lacking footage involving the main subject of our documentary. However footage we do have includes establishing shots, interviews and any other footage involving the public, is complete. This means we have to step up our filming schedule and get key material first.

Recording stopped automatically

This is a camera error which has continuously affected footage as the camera (Canon 550D) would stop recording at random points when filming important footage, such as interviews. I have conducted research and I believe the error message may have something to do with the memory card and, to resolve the issue, formatting the memory card is necessary when it is put back into the camera. Searching on youtube for further answers this video helped and confirmed it was a memory card issue.


(This is a different model of the Canon 550D Camera we are using*)

Landscape/portrait camera work

Unfortunately some footage was filmed with the camera positioned incorrectly and it cannot be rotated without a loss of quality, therefore we will be recording the necessary footage again on Sunday 18th November. This is down to miscommunication between me and the cameraman.

Miscommunication/timing

Some miscommunication occurred before our production schedule was accurate and complete which meant footage was not taken as I (Director) and individuals involved with camera work were not in the same place at the same time. This has had a negative impact because we have had to extend our period to film. This further enforces the need for a production schedule as all members of the crew know where to be, when and what needs to be film.

Developing an understanding of documentary (what we want)We are beginning to develop an understanding of the direction we want our documentary to go in to ensure we succeed in portraying the message of it. The shape and direction of our documentary has changed with more information we gather such as 'filming an unscripted documentary'. This means our documentary may move away from our treatment.

Treatment Research

Before creating our own treatments we researched in to A) what a treatment is B) What treatments consist of and C) An example of a treatment.

We found online some help on what a treatment is and what it consists of....

 

 

 

From this research we came up with three main things that our treatment needs to do..

1. It needs an opening and closing paragraph that attracts attention
2. The treatment should clearly state our idea, point of view and convince the reader that we are organized, professional and imaginative
3. Make sure we have access to the people, places and information necessary to complete the film before we propose it.

I believe our treatment will achieve all of these points. Just to make sure we had a clear idea of what a treatment should look like we found an example of a treatment online...

 

 

 



Time to Film

It's that time to get the ball rolling our filming schedule. It's hard to get a set schedule of what days we will be filming on exactly with a documentary, especially when we have to arrange interviews with 'successful' individuals, who have busy schedules as you would assume. To make sure me and my team are extra clear when we can film and what we need to film to for fill our objectives. To do this we will be using Celtex again this year, as we found it useful and effective to be organised. Filming has started and the schedule should be up soon