Filming!!

Filming Our Documentary

This lesson we did a test interview for our documentary, this was to get used to the new equipment and how to frame the interview correctly. The interviewee was Don Muir:

Although the framing of the interview was good, we noticed that as when answering the questions he looked up, this would mean for our actual interviews, we would have to make sure that our interviewer was eye level with the interviewee. Also, the lighting on this interview was not 100% correct, so we would have to consider this a lot when doing our actual interviews.

In today's lesson, we tried to film a stop-motion sequence, which is how we will make the title sequence for our documentary. The videos we created were a pair of shoes walking on their own.

For the first attempt, we did not put the camera in a static position, so the camerawork was not good.

In our second attempt, we placed the camera on the floor and kept it in the same place, this improved the final result of this attempt.

For the final attempt we did in this lesson, we put the shoes on the table and made the shoes walk in and out of shot. Shooting this has really helped us to understand and develop our skills in creating a good stop-motion video, something we are considering a lot for our title sequence.

Next, we did the interview with an older person, Joan Turley:

For this interview we did three takes, this was to make sure the lighting was correct and also to make sure she was comfortable in front if the camera. For the first take, there were mainly one word answers, by the third take we had a lot more information that we could use.

We then interviewed an independent shoe designer, Natalie Warren. We also did cutaways of the shoes that she had designed.

This took us two takes for the interview, we managed to get good answers from the questions, especially when she talked about her favourite pair of shoes she had designed. This gave us a good chance to get cutaways of the shoes she was talking about that we could cut over when she's talking about them in the interview.

Today, we interviewed Claire, the Podiatrist, Brenda, the Shoemarket employee, and Hannah Thomson, the younger person.

For this interview we only did one take, as the content was really good and she had a lot of information to tell us about.

We did two takes of this interview, but there were a number of things wrong with it. The framing was not good as there wasn't that much room in the aisle where we filmed and also Brenda did not give really good answers, meaning we will have to go back to film this interview a second time.

For this interview, the framing was not right, as she is too face on the camera, there was some good information in this interview but we will have to film it again.

We went to Liscard and got a couple of voxpops mainly just to get the framing of them correctly. We also did another interview at the shoemarket.

We only did 3 voxpops, but this was more of a test to make sure the framing was right, we will be filming more voxpops later on.

The second shoemarket interview was much better as we filmed in a different part of the shop, we also got really good cutaways inside of the people working.

Today, we filmed shoe shop fronts as part of the cutaways for our documentary. This involved us going to Liverpool and filming a range of different shop fronts, ranging from small businesses through to well-known brands. Below are a few examples of shop fronts we filmed:

We also went to the Dr Marten’s store in Liverpool for an interview with Grace Watts who works there.

We did a few takes of the interview and managed to get loads of information from her and I think the mise-en-scene is really good as we filmed it in the middle of the shop. We also got great cutaways from every type of shoe in the store.

We then got had an interview with a shoe hoarder, textiles teacher Debra Freckleton:

We did this interview twice and I think the framing on this shot looks quite good, I like this interview as it is quite humorous which is good for our documentary.

Our final interview was with Fork Lift Truck Driver, Phil Squires:

We did three takes of this interview and although the interview was quite short, the information was straight to the point and really useful in our documentary.

For our title sequence, we finally decided to film people’s feet walking. For this we used the tracking dolly.

I think this worked really well as the camerawork was smooth and the finished result of the filming looks really good as we filmed many people’s feet.