Documentary- Final thoughts on 'The music of the Street'

The Music of the Street was all finalised and presented today in front of our peers as well as the tutors. The comments were very helpful and mostly positive! The final piece seemed a considerable success compared to what I first expected. I couldn't keep my eyes off the grainy shots throughout yet no one really commented on it to much and looked around it as a full documentary film which was good! As a group I think we have worked very well together although Tom did not help to push the wait as the rest of the group did. I think the only other comment to make is that we were a well rounded up group who 5 of us pulled our weight and put in all the effort we could which overall gave us a successful piece that gave a positive in depth insight into the busking community within Liverpool. I enjoyed working within the team, I enjoyed my role as well as helping within other roles and apart from the visual problems and some of the audio problems we had I would say this project was successful.

Documentary- Inspiration 'Street Books' (dir Travis Shields)

This documentary is a very interesting concept. It is a short but it touches on an issue that is not recognised by the public. Not the street books company themselves, but the homeless people that they aim to help. See see a lot of cutaways throughout the film of shots of homeless people and interviews of them. This is important as it gives emotional depth to the film showing the tragedy that they are in and the way these books are an escape to reality.

Although the issue here is not the same as the one we represent in our documentary, it is the topic that has some relatability. Street books is of a issue that the public does not really recognise yet through showing cutaways we can see that the issue is all around us, on the streets. This is similar to what we have decided to do in our final piece. We use cutaways of buskers on the streets and interview them in the same place as we captured the cutaway of their performance to add this sense that buskers are not really paid a lot of attention yet they are all around us. This will hopefully show in the documentary and if so it will be a success!

Doumentary- Inspiration Pockets (dir James Lees)

http://www.4docs.org.uk/films/show/7/Pockets

I realise that I am revisiting this documentary but I am revisiting it as inspiration for the final piece of my busking documentary. I think that the inspiration cannot be ignored within ou final piece. This is because when filming myself and Lewis took the decision to film every individual buskers performance from a long shot as well as a close up shot of there busking money 'pots' looking straight down. We took this decision after watching pockets as the documentary worked well in the poetic form it took on therefore I think that our decision to use a similar technique gives us a poetical convwntion within the documentary and this has helped in improving the final piece.

Documentary- Pre-production material

The following documents are all the pre-production documents minus the proposal and treatment that we did when organising to film within Liverpool. We used careful time planning to allow us to film worry free and made sure that it accounted for any problems that would arise during the shooting day. Luckily thanks to this material and things like the location planning we all knew what we had to do and the time frame we had to stick to. Altogether this pre-production was essential in the overall outcome of our final piece and specifically to the smoothness of our shooting day.

Documentary- Equipment List

Documentary- Editing

The images above have been taken from our editing process. We have taken a lot of time editing trying to create a structure than is immersing as well as a structure than we can all agree on. After our editing session today we were able to come up and complete a structure that looked great for the final piece. We are going tomorrow to do a final run through as well as colour correct and manipulate all audio and video files to make it the best quality look that we can. A major problem that we have recognised and cannot fix in post production is the grainy, noisy look that the PD 170 has made during our shoot in Liverpool. Unfortunately the gain was switched on during filming resulting in an image that is not the maximum quality we could have got out of the final piece. However if you put that aside and look at the final piece as a whole it is good.

Documentary- Workshop assistance and first day edit comments

After our short workshop today I felt a need to comment on the assistance this has provided within the sound role of the documentary. We were told by Darryl how to 'sweeten' clips within post production, removing things such as the high frequency of the background noise and the compression of sound when trying to fix music recordings. This was very useful as Darryl specifically looked at our clips and gave us useful feedback on how we could improve problems that we couldn't help when recording. We quickly used this feedback and edited the sound improving the quality and giving a seamless feel to it.

Within the edit perspective we are starting to create a piece that we can agree on! We have created two different sequences creating two different ideas that divided the group at the beginning. We are now beginning to merge our ideas into one and create a finalised structure. James (editor) has sucessfully synced the sound to the video clips and therefore tomorrow we should be creating our finalised edit. Unfortunately we have come across some unavoidable problems in post mostly due to the PD170's self changing settings. But altogether we have a strong collection of footage that we hope will give us a good final piece!