Hand in Day!

So we have come to the end, and I have to say I'm a little bit sad! I have loved working on this project, especially being with Jo, and have found that factual programming, is something I really enjoy, and feel I could do well in this area in the future. 


Over the past 15 weeks, I have learnt a great deal, and we have both worked hard to make this project as professional as possible. This has included dealing with a Doctor in criminology, and travelling to the University of Kent to interview him. He was very welcoming to both of us, and even prepared an overview of his opinion he wanted to share with us before we filmed the rest of his questions. I believe he was the best professional person we could of hoped to find, because he was such a warm character, was relatively young in age, and so appealed to our audience, and most importantly gave us lots of fantastic material to include. Since seeing the film, he has praised us on our efforts, and was very pleased to be part of such an accomplished piece of work!

The report we built with both our characters Lauren Sharp and Hattie Mulville, showed through in our interviews, they opened up to us, and gave us some great opinions! 


I really enjoyed the days we went out on location as well, such as Chatham High Street, Tovil council estate, the youth group and Valley Park shops. We were able to get some nice shots and sequences that helped our documentary be more visual and poetic. 


We also learnt how to deal with the public and found out first hand how important it is to get permission from shopping centres, as we tried to do some undercover filming in Chatham's "Chaviest" centre, "The In and Out Shops". We did manage to get a few minutes, before the manager quickly reminded us that we should not be in there... oooppps! But we did get some GREAT shots out side, and of the Highstreet of young mums, and groups of "Hoodies"

I feel that our archive footage was well researched, and glued our whole documentary together. We had a wide range of material we discovered, that was simply impossible for us to film or have in our own archives, such as the Tony Blair speech regarding Bluewater, as well as shots inside the shopping centre that we were denied access to get our selves. We also included a lot of popular music, and music videos such as, Golide Locking Chain, Lady Soveriegn, Lilly Allen, Jessie J, and one piece of original music "Moon Chav", aagin this appealed to our target audience, and gave a greater appeal to a wider viewership. 


Although the subject matter was quite serious, as well as the emotions behind it on both sides of the fence, we included some light humour and made it quite quirky, to help lift the tone, and make it more user friendly.

My technical skills I feel have improved, especially with sound, as I have always found this the hardest. I have also practised my filming technique, and spent time changing settings and lenses to get the crisp picture we wanted. I believe even more after this project that script writing and editing are my strongest points. 


I still feel I need to work on sound, and for next term I hope to read a few more books, to really get my head round the subject. I also must push myself to be more organised when it comes to sorting out clips, as I still haven't fully got into the habit of logging each clip, and recording in an out points, which I know will help be in the long run. 

The only thing I regret about this project, is that we have so much amazing footage of the interviews and sequences that we just haven't been able to include, but I think me a Jo will without doubt make a longer version in the future :) 






All in all I am extremely proud of Jo and myself, and believe "Don't Call Me Chav" will be a strong contender for our professional showreels in the future :) 

Post-Production: Nearly Finished...

The semester is drawing to a close now and Lauren and I are putting the finishing touches to our documentary. I'm so proud of what we have achieved together.

I sent an almost-complete version of our documentary to one of our interviewees over the weekend (Dr Johnny Ilan at the University of Kent) and we have his approval, so it was comforting to get a positive review from somebody outside of the course.

This afternoon we will be re-recording the commentary here at the studios. I recorded some at home on an SM58 microphone, and it sounded fine at first when I imported it into Audacity, but in Final Cut Pro it sounded distorted and kept 'popping'. So today we will be re-recording the commentary using a radio mic to get a clean, crisp sound that hopefully won't distort once it is imported.

We've also been meddling with music, adding an instrumental version of Ben Folds' 'You Don't Know Me' as a bed and mixing Lily Allen's 'The Fear' into the opening titles. Not only do these songs sound good, but the meanings behind them also fit in well with our documentary.

After we've recorded the commentary this afternoon, we'll be making sure our sound mix is of the highest quality possible. We'll do as much mixing as we can in Final Cut Pro itself, but as the programme is primarily designed for video editing rather than audio, I'll import the entire documentary's soundtrack into Garageband where I can compress it and make sure everything is at the right sound level (you can do this in Final Cut Pro but you can only compress individual clips rather than the entire soundtrack, thus making accurate compression impossible).

Once the soundtrack has been compressed, we can import it back into Final Cut Pro as one long sound file. Then - fingers crossed - we'll be finished and ready for deadline day on Thursday!

(x-posted to jo coulson's uca blog)

Finishing Touches

The edit is going great, and I think me and Jo are an amazing team!! We are working hard together to get the finishing touches right now. Our sync is all in order, and our structure is working nicely. So we are currently working on sound, colour correction, music, transitions and titles etc. I think we have created a good pace throughout our documentary, due to the change in subjects, archive footage and soundtrack.
We have chosen to use two female songs for our soundtrack, which we feel reflect the story and female charcters perfectly, they are:





I am happy with the sequences we have chosen, and have now made sure there is a sound bed for all of them. We have also rearranged the Bluewater section, so that the narrative flows more smoothly. We are going to have trouble mix the sound I think, so that Hattie's voice is more like the others, but we will start working on that now. I am pretty confident that we will meet the deadline, and feel that we have done the best we could possibly do! :)