Rookie dot-com

For this module, we were tasked with taking the creative lead on a project with the help of group members. For my final project, I decided to work on a documentary called Rookie dot-Com which I took on the creative lead for. My group members were Nhat Linh Trinh and Alvin Alex-Juderaj and their roles were Researcher and Assistant Editor respectively. Finding what to base my final project on was quite difficult from deciding to either make a music video or a documentary, but I decided to settle on making a documentary because it was easier to source than finding an artist to record for. A documentary is a non-fictional film to educate or inform the audience, which is what I aimed to achieve with my documentary Rookie dot-Com. Rookie dot-Com is a documentary about students with small businesses, I decided to make a documentary on this because I was interested in how students can balance being in school as well as managing a business. The aim of the documentary is to be informative, I wanted to create a documentary that could be watched and would be explanatory. In the sense that, it is a get started video on how to run a small business while still in school.

The aim of this reflective report is to critically evaluate the process of taking the creative lead in a project, the process of working with others, the skills I developed throughout the course of the project and plans for improvement on future projects.

Example of influences:

Website: https://motioncue.com/how-to-make-a-documentary/

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkbZX_ESAV8

Before deciding on making a documentary about students with small businesses, I knew I wanted to make a documentary on businesses but I needed to make it something that was accessible to me so I could meet up with the module deadline. To meet up with the module’s deadline, I decided to ask people I knew with small businesses if they wanted to be interviewed for my documentary and when I got a reply, I started planning the layout I wanted for the documentary. The pre-production of the documentary involved planning how I wanted the documentary to look, to do this I had to watch a lot of documentaries on YouTube to come up with the layout of the documentary, once I decided on the layout, I created a storyboard on how I wanted the narrative to come out when I asked the questions to the interviewees and after post-production. After coming up with a layout all that was left for pre-production was to come up with questions, which involved Linh and I researching questions to ask in the interview, to do this we explored questions to ask business owners to get an idea of what to ask.

Role:

As I took on the creative lead for the documentary, I was involved in every stage of production. The pre-production process involved coming up with ideas to base the documentary on, as stated earlier, I knew I wanted the documentary to be on small businesses, and with the help of Linh who was involved in the research process, we were able to refine the topic before running it by the module teacher for approval. With the idea for the documentary coming together, I was able to involve my team members in the remaining process to make the production process quicker. Because this was a project where I had to take on the creative lead, I was able to take on familiar roles such as director, producer, and editor, taking on these roles helped in building my experience in them and I was able to take on new roles such as being a presenter while conducting the interviews. Taking on these roles allowed me to showcase the skills I have learnt throughout the course.

Working in a group:

Forming a group to participate in the documentary involved finding people I would work well with to avoid dropouts or removals mid-production. So, I decided to work with people I had worked with previously which were Linh and Alvin. During the production of this project, communication with my team members involved meeting up physically to discuss and communicating through texts because we could not meet physically all the time due to living in different locations. This did not however hinder production because this allowed us to accommodate everyone’s schedule into production. As part of the production was remote, the roles to be involved in were limited and mostly comprised of researching, coming up with questions and giving feedback on edits. Working in a team made production efficient as we were able to split the tasks to meet up with the module’s deadline and work on other members’ projects. Splitting the tasks allowed for the production to be finished by March taking 2 days to interview the participants and post-production to be done by April. For post-production editing, the software used was Adobe Premiere Pro, the reason for this is because this is a software, we were all well versed with from using throughout the course. With post-production getting done by early April, I was able to edit the documentary and collect feedback from my team members. Using the feedback received from my group members, I was able to find problems in my edits that needed to be improved on.

Problem Solving

Finding who to interview:

During the pre-production process, an incident that occurred was finding who to interview, as mentioned earlier, the base of the documentary was to focus on businesses to do this I had the idea of interviewing small business owners in Brighton. Trying to find these small businesses was difficult, so, I decided to use the Brighton Instagram page to find who to interview. I narrowed down possible businesses I wanted to interview and sent them emails and direct messages asking for interviews. However, to meet up with the timeline I gave myself for pre-production and the module deadline, I had to scrap this idea as I had not gotten a reply yet. Because of this setback I had to come up with a new topic to base my documentary on, Linh then had the idea of conducting a virtual interview as this was a concept we had worked on before. I then decided to make the documentary focus on students with small businesses instead to meet up with the module deadline.

Post-production:

Another incident that occurred was during the post-production process. As this was a virtual interview obtaining b-roll to match the interview had its complications, I had to ask the people interviewed to send b-rolls I could use and had to ask my group member Alvin to shoot some b-roll in Brighton to add to the documentary while I edited the footage I had from the interview. However, the footage I got sent from one of the interviewees was above the resolution I was working with for the overall footage, which made the footage come out as over-exposed but fixing the exposure was not fixing the issue, so to fix this my group member, Alvin, had the suggestion of downscaling the video using a software called HandBrake, which helped to fix the quality.

Before feedback

After feedback

Use of Handbrake to fix resolution

Another incident was with the footage sent, they were sent in portrait instead of landscape, so I had to ask for new footage from the interviewees but because they were busy with final projects for university, I had to incorporate the portrait footage sent into the edit. The b-roll was important to the production because I used it to mask cuts in my edits and to make the narrative of the documentary progress. Considering the feedback from my group members, they noticed the audio in the video was crackling, this was most likely due to the internet connection being bad during the interview which might have affected it so to mask this, they had the suggestion of using music, which helped to cover this fault.

Portrait footage

Incorporating portrait footage to edit

Overall thought:

I feel this project was successful in general. With the help of my group members, the project was able to run smoothly, and constant communication with Linh and Alvin helped in making a great informative documentary. Through this project, I believe I was able to learn how to take the creative lead on a project while working hand-in-hand with others. Through this project, I was able to work on communicating and organising tasks for my team members so that the final project could come out satisfactory. I was able to measure the success of my documentary through feedback, by incorporating the suggestions into the project during production I was able to come out with a positive outcome for the documentary. There were many difficulties during the stages of production. However, to avoid some of the incidents that occurred for future projects, like the incident of finding who to interview, I will learn to allocate more time to my projects to accommodate late or no replies. Nevertheless, the schedule I created for myself allowed me to be able to work on my solo project and my team members' projects as well, so, my time management was successful to an extent. To address some of the incidents that occurred, I have learned to adapt to any incident that might occur during production which will become useful for future projects. But overall, I believe the project to be successful through the contributions of my team members. Working on the project was enjoyable because I learned to look at my work with a creative and analytical gaze which allowed for the creation of an appropriate informative documentary.

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