2. • The first and most important aspect of my production is that I did a lot of research about the
space exploration, since I was interested in the concept but didn’t know all too much about
the topic, I was in a unique and powerful position, I was in the position of someone who was
asking the simple questions. Something that most of the audience would be doing. This
meant the research I conducted was relevant to the target audience. As well as creating a
product that would be interesting as the audience would understand and follow what I was
talking about.
• Most documentaries will use this recipe, a good documentary will educate you about a
certain topic without the need of you knowing anything what so ever about it before hand.
They will setup a premise, spend a short time giving you some information about to topic
which will work to allow the audience to feel somewhat grounded where they are and what
is being talked about. I think that I achieved this quite well within the first half a minute of
the factual. Specifically with the line
‘ This is sputnik the first man made object to orbit the earth, since the day of its launch humanity
has not stop pouring billions of dollars into the exploration of the cosmos, yet, in America 1/3 of
the surveyed public felt that the government should stop funding space exploration…’
• This paragraph gives the audience all the information they need, they know how long this
has been going on, they know the scale and they know what the episode will be about. It is a
relatively long sentence but it works very effectively at setting up a premise, giving some
bacground information and grounding the audience.
Characteristics of factual Production
3. • The Idea of the topic originated as a result of a conversation that I had with a
friend, this friend believed that space exploration is a waste of money while I
thought it was beneficial and I thought this dialogue would make for an
interesting factual piece. This was why I decided to attempt to make the
documentary as unbiased as possible, so that I could ‘re-create’ the conversation,
voicing both opinions and beliefs. This idea also played a small part in my
decision to not include myself visually and If I had, had access to a professional
narrator I would have used them rather than myself, however since the project
was small scale with a production budget of £0 I decided that voicing it myself
was my best bet.
• I think the idea of using sourced footage came naturally as I felt it was the best
way of illustrating what I wanted to put across verbally. Furthermore since I live
no where near a space center nor do I have access to any rockets there was no
chance I would be able to capture any footage myself.
Explain your decisions regarding Context and Characteristics.
4. • The choice to use text elements was not exactly planned, I had intended to use
motion graphics to illustrate statistics and facts, however after I began editing I
felt that it would not work stylistically so I made a judgment call and decided to
use text elements to illustrate and emphasize the facts and figures I was talking
about. I think this was the right decision and helped to give the piece a style of its
own and made it more digestible and easy to understand.
5. • I think the first professional product that my project draws similarities to, is the
documentaries of Adam Curtis.
• Adam Curtis is a British filmmaker who has a unique style of documentary filmmaking.
He uses sourced and archived footage to illustrate what he is talking about, sometimes
the footage used is true to life, for example, of the event he is talking about, but
sometimes he uses footage to generate a sense of hyper-realism, using the footage to
emphasise what he is talking about, even if it may not directly relate to the topic at
hand, but it works to evoke a certain feeling or emotion.
• Similarly, within my own project I used some footage that agreed directly with what I
was talking about, and sometimes I used some ‘creative license’ to use footage that
represented the emotion or feeling that I wanted to evoke. However of course there
are areas where my style differs vastly from his. Generally speaking, within his work,
the footage will be very uniform, that is to say the style of footage will be very similar,
so if he starts of using 4:3 film footage, chances are the documentary will keep this
style throughout. Of course, there will be some slight changes in style here and there
where he uses newer footage etc. Compare this to my factual and the difference is
night and day. Within my project there are vast changes in not only video quality and
aspect ratio, but also in time relevance. This is not necessarily a bad thing but a clear
difference.
Comparison and Contrast
6. Adam Curtis: HyperNormalisation Sam Schoettner: Economics and Opinions | Space
Representative footage:
Directly represents what is being
talked about.
Illustrative footage:
Illustrates an idea or
emotion that is being
discussed.
Narration: Yes Narration: Yes
https://youtu.be/7SYn4UZbdBkhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/ada
m-curtis-hypernormalisation#
7. • Another quite apparent difference is that he does not use texts and titles as
much as I did. I used the texts and titles to emphasise certain questions or
statistics, making them more digestible or apparent. However, Adam Curtis firstly
only uses them sparingly and often only to indicate ‘chapters’ within his
documentaries. So why did I use them so much more than he does?
• I used them out of necessity, Adam Curtis’ documentaries are 2 to 3 hours long,
this means he has vast amounts of time to go through and explain opinions, facts
and ideas. Compared to the 5-minute time limit I was given, I had to be a little
more resourceful, which meant I had to use every tool that was available to
convey my message. Which include texts and captions.
8. • The second Professional product I think my work shares some similarities to is the
videos produced by ‘Business Insider’ these are short form videos that focus one
subject and explore it, usually it’s a fairly simple, but interesting concept such as
how baked beans are produced or what its like to grow up in the playboy
mansion.
9. Business Insider Sam Schoettner: Economics and Opinions | Space
Representative footage:
Directly represents what is being
talked about.
Illustrative footage:
Illustrates an idea or
emotion that is being
discussed.
Narration: Rarely (often Non) Narration: Yes
Rarely/Non
https://youtu.be/G6O2zTuGOVQ https://youtu.be/7SYn4UZbdBk
10. • The similarities are few but significant, the first one and biggest one is that both
my video and their videos are very short, generally 4-5 minutes. So, they and I
both had the pressure of time to explain and look at the topic at hand.
• This is unfortunately where the similarities start to limit, Business Insider tends to
use exclusively text and imagery to convey their message. While I used both text
and imagery as well as a voice over narration. I think my product could have
benefited from a similar approach as the Business Insider videos, not by cutting
out the voice over, but by adding some more text elements as I feel it is easier to
absorb information when it is read and when I did use text within my project I
think it worked very successfully.
11. • Weaknesses:
I think my product could have definitely benefited from a being cut down a little bit
as it felt a bit rushed. Cutting out some of the talking points could have created a
product that was a little more cohesive and easy to digest. It would have allowed me
to unpack each section with more detail and thought. Another weakness was that I
feel the product would have benefited from better sourced footage. This was a
problem that I couldn’t really help too much, as firstly, I didn’t have access to funds
that would allow me to purchase footage, nor did I have enough time to search for
the perfect clips, this meant that I had to use some clips that weren’t exactly what I
wanted but close enough to it.
I wish I would have been able to include more quotes and conversations however
since there was a 5 minute time limit this was not feasible. I think it could have made
the product feel more organic If there were more ‘real world’ quotes and
conversations from professionals in the Aero Space industry.
Strengths and Weaknesses of my production
12. • Strengths:
I think my product achieves what it is set out to do, I wanted to create something
that took a fairly objective look at the topic of Space exploration and whether it is
worth it or not, and finally giving my own opinion to close out the Factual piece.
Which is more or less exactly what I did.
I think it is quite coherent and understandable to watch and take in, I feel that
content flows from one subject to the next quite well and there are no ‘jump cuts’ in
terms of radical topic changes. I believe I did a good job of setting up arguments and
ideas and then elaborating and unpacking said idea or argument.
In terms of stylistic choices I think my product worked quite nicely, aside from not
being able to get all the perfect clips that I wanted in an ideal world, I was still able to
create something that was stylistically very close to what I had set out to make. I
think the Narration in combination with the text elements worked effectively, even
though sometimes I think I could have used a little more text/captions to emphasize
certain things.
14. • I think the biggest factor by far that would have allowed me to improve my product
would have been more time (both production time and run time of the product) It
would have allowed me to create a factual video that was more in depth as well as
more articulate. As mentioned many times before I would have been able to spend
more time unpacking different ideas and opinions as well as dedicating more time to
the research for specific sections. It would have allowed me to look into finer details
and given me more control when it came to fact checking and using multiple
information sources as I would have had more time to look at and read different
books, articles, websites, videos etc.
• I don’t think better equipment would have changed much since all I needed to record
myself was audio and I was relatively pleased with how the audio came out. However,
a production budget would have made a mile of difference as I would have been able
to search more specifically for not only music but also specific stock/sourced footage
for which I could have then paid to use. This would have given me more creative
freedom which at the end of the day is really what you want.
What would have changed If I had, had:
More time, access to better equipment, a production budget.
15. • My organisational skills where more or less there. I never felt as though I had
forgotten to gather something or do something. I’m sure that I could have
probably been a little better organised however I feel that I definitely didn’t lack
any organisational skills, I knew what I wanted to do, when to do it, what I
needed etc.
• I think the only point where I lacked organisational skill was when it came to the
voice over, I finished my script later than I would have liked to, and I went back
and re-draft the script multiple times until it was at a point that I liked. This
however, was unavoidable as I knew from the start that I would need to re-draft
and re-record some or all of the audio. So I allowed myself some buffer time to
get it right.
Development: Organisational skills
16. • My time management was fine, but not perfect. I finished everything except for
the evaluation on time. Often with time to spare, at the start I thought that the
editing of the or factual would not be too much of a time consuming task as I
‘only’ needed to gather the footage and layer it over my voice over. This however
proved to be more challenging than what I expected. Finding the right clips was a
very time consuming task, luckily in production schedule I allowed myself more
time for gathering and searching for footage than for the editing process (which
truly was a relatively quick task).
• The reason the evaluation took longer to complete was partly to do with private
reason that caused me to be away without access to a computer, however, I
should have prepared for this and managed my time accordingly, as that is the
pure purpose of time management. So I did slack of a little towards the end of
the production and for future productions I should learn to keep the same energy
till the end of the production.
Development: Time management
17. • I think within this project my editing lacked meaning. When cutting the piece
there was points where I forgot to cut with meaning I did mostly correct this
however originally there was areas in the cut where I simply used footage that
resembled what I was talking about without any emotion or thought behind it.
• For future projects I definitely need to remember that when editing regardless of
how ‘bland’ of a story it is, an editors job is to take footage that has no meaning
or objective purpose on its own and combine it with other footage to give it the
meaning and emotion it needs to be something we recognize as a story.
• I was very focused on making it look nice and ‘professional’ while forgetting to
give it depth and emotion, personally I feel that you can very easily find and see
the areas where more thought was put into the production and areas that serve
simply to illustrate with no direction or purpose.
Development: technical aspects
18. • The concept of this production felt quite strong. It was quite a complex topic with
lots and lots of variables, however it was definitely a topic that with some
research and initiative would not be too complex to tackle.
• Since there is already a fair amount of information on this topic fleshing the
concept out was quite an easy and arguably quick task. It did require a lot of
reading and sifting through different websites and different news articles etc. But
all of it was productive as I wanted to represent both sides so almost any spec of
information I found would be useful, as it would represent either one, or the
other side.
• I think in terms of ease of production, this concept was a fairly safe bet as, again,
there was already a lot of information out there. In terms of creativity however, I
felt that this concept was quite poor, there wasn’t all to much that I could do with
it the only things I could do with the topic were stylistically. Though this really is
more of a trait in factual production as a whole rather than it having anything to
do with the concept.
Development: Conceptual
19. • Though I did conduct quite a fair amount of research for this production I feel as
though I could have improved on this by doing more structured research, I tried
to find out as much as possible, about a very broad topic, but not about anything
specific. This meant I gathered lots of information about lots of topics that
related to the concept of the factual piece, which lead me to know something
about a wide range of things rather than knowing a lot about a few specific
points, I believe if the research had been more focused and less general my
product could have felt a little more sophisticated and professional as well as
more comprehensible. It could have given my product that extra bit of ‘umpf’
that would make it stand out, as well as adding those few kudos points. A product
that wasn’t ‘good for a student film’ but simply ‘a good film’.
Development: Research
20. • I think overall and as a rule of thumb when I work on these college projects or
next year university projects. I need to think about whether ‘is this going to be
enough to stand out as a good film, or is it only enough to stand out as a good
student film. ‘
• I believe this will give me extra motivation to create better and more
sophisticated products. Products that reach beyond aiming for a grade to get me
to the next place of education, but rather to create products that others will see
and be inspired or entertained by. Stuff that has meaning and that will be good
enough to persuade someone to hire me or employ me because they believe that
the stuff I make is good and worth their time and money. Not something they
look at and forget about because it was good but not quite good enough to make
them look twice.
Overall
