Monday
Personal Reasons
Although it was my whole group that came up with the subject of teenage traffic accidents I myself have a personal reason to want to produce a documentry to inform people of the problem we face of teenagers driving. On 25th may 2008 one of my best friends ages 17 died in a car accident while was on his way back from a party, he was going too fast and came to a sharp corner and lost control; because of this I have witnessed first hand the emotional trauma that such accidents cause to friends and family. I have also learnt that such accidents teach you what is important in life and due to this when I was learning to drive I took great care in making sure I was doing everything right to become a safe driver, and still now two years on I dont take any risks while driving. Having been through it myself I hope that our documentry teaches teenagers not to take stupid risks while driving because its not just you it effects its so many others.
Sunday
research
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=69FF3E8BA4E5055A&search_query=kurt+and+courtney+documentary
For research in order to gain a vague idea of the type of documentary we wanted to produce we watched already existing documentaries from producers such as Nick Broomfield, Louis Theroux and Michael Moore.
Nick Broomfield's way of delivering important messages and information through his documentary's are subtle and unobtrusive, he rarely uses voice overs, allowing the audience to make their own assumptions and dig a little deeper to discover for themselves. He has a hands on and economical approach to filming, often using only the bare minimum in terms of crew and equipment, and a handheld camera style which creates a strong feeling of reality.
Broomfield engages the audience into feeling empathy with characters featured in his documentaries, by capturing them in situations where they appear strongly emotional and vulnerable, some scenes could almost be looked at as 'uncensored', This technique can be seen in 'Aileen', which really gives it a shock factor .
Louis Theroux's documentaries are quirky and unorthodox, many of his films have an unusual subject matter and this is one of the qualities that makes him such a successful film maker. 'When Louis Met...' is one of his most popular series documentaries, Louis meets and lives with different characters and families with extraordinary lives. Although these are documentaries, Louis' outspoken character and biased opinions which are voiced so strongly throughout each program become something of a novelty. This controversy is a clever technique of reverse psychology, creating media hype encourages viewers to have their own opinions.
Michael Moore is a strongly controversial character, who tackles taboo and important subjects head on. These include his attack on George Bush, the American Healthcare system, and the issue of gun possession in the U.S. Moores documentaries are usually very lengthy, but appeal to a wide target audience as he cleverly balances strong hard hitting facts with comical scenes and an artistic approach. This technique allows the documentaries to be entertaining as well as informative.
Nick Broomfield's way of delivering important messages and information through his documentary's are subtle and unobtrusive, he rarely uses voice overs, allowing the audience to make their own assumptions and dig a little deeper to discover for themselves. He has a hands on and economical approach to filming, often using only the bare minimum in terms of crew and equipment, and a handheld camera style which creates a strong feeling of reality.
Broomfield engages the audience into feeling empathy with characters featured in his documentaries, by capturing them in situations where they appear strongly emotional and vulnerable, some scenes could almost be looked at as 'uncensored', This technique can be seen in 'Aileen', which really gives it a shock factor .
Louis Theroux's documentaries are quirky and unorthodox, many of his films have an unusual subject matter and this is one of the qualities that makes him such a successful film maker. 'When Louis Met...' is one of his most popular series documentaries, Louis meets and lives with different characters and families with extraordinary lives. Although these are documentaries, Louis' outspoken character and biased opinions which are voiced so strongly throughout each program become something of a novelty. This controversy is a clever technique of reverse psychology, creating media hype encourages viewers to have their own opinions.
Michael Moore is a strongly controversial character, who tackles taboo and important subjects head on. These include his attack on George Bush, the American Healthcare system, and the issue of gun possession in the U.S. Moores documentaries are usually very lengthy, but appeal to a wide target audience as he cleverly balances strong hard hitting facts with comical scenes and an artistic approach. This technique allows the documentaries to be entertaining as well as informative.
lighting
These are exaples of lighting shots we tried out in order to find the perfect lighting for our interviews. We tried to create a depressing, secretive, taboo atmosphere in order to show the impact that the stories being told about teenage traffic accidents have caused. such lighting effects are popular in shows such as crimewatch on bbc, however they use it more to hide the identity of the person being interviewed be it victim or criminal. The technique is very simple to do however the effect is dramatic and makes it easy for us to portray difficult subjects easily.
Filming Cars.. october - december 09
Before Christmas we started practising and trying out new techniques of filming and discovered the best ways to do things such a film moving cars.
We went out during a lesson in November to try out different techniques, we did things such as shaking the camera as we filmed to produce a hand held effect as well as using a tripod to create a steady shot. In our documentary we want to include some shots of moving traffic perhaps of a motor way from a car or looking down from a bridge, we would like to get this shot so that we could write over it with statistics in our finished documentary. So far we filmed out of Josh's car window in order to demonstrate which of these positions would gain the best shot of traffic, soon we will be filming from a bridge in order to compare. We also want to be able to portray speeding in the best possible way by using a mixture of shots, this made us start to experiment with midshots, distance shots and close ups of the car to enable us to make sure we were using the best possible angles.
Thanks to our storyboard we are now aware of the basics of our documentary meaning we are now able to continue experimenting ways in which to film. Filming a moving car is something we focused a lot on to make sure we make the most effective shot we tried filming inside and outside of the car. We have decided to back up our own filming with relevant archive footage, making sure it is current so we can really link it into our project. We will continue this research, looking for better archive footage in order to create the right tone and atmosphere for our documentary. It is strangely difficult to find archive footage as a lot of the footage on the internet is not real or exaggerated, however we will continue our search as it is a very important component.
Interviews
As everyone knows Interviews are a main part of documentary and therefore we plan to include two or three main interviews. My group and I rung up Jon Snow the popular channel 4 news presenter and asked if he would be interested in being interviews by my group about the topic of teenage driving accidents; he said he would be delighted as story's are always coming through the news about teen driving tragedy's as well as the fact he has two daughters and has been through the worry of them learning to drive. I thought That Jon snow would be a good interviewee for two reasons, firstly as he has a lot to do with youths due to his work with the 'new horizon' charity. Secondly as he does a lot of work behind the scenes of channel four news, including going through hundreds of news stories that get sent to him everyday about a number of different topics so i was sure he would have a good and valid opinion.
http://www.nhyouthcentre.org.uk/
Another source that we looked at to be an interviewee was 'drive alive' an organisation produced in order to educate young teens in the danger of reckless driving and what damage it can cause to them and others around them. This organisation travels around on tour to make sure that teenagers all over the country get a chance to see their presentation, It includes many talks from people who have been directly effected by traffic accidents including family of victims of car crashes. It had a huge impact on our year when we went to watch their presentation last year and therefore we thought that it would be a good place to start when doing interviews. Unfortunately we haven't been able to get through to them on account of them being on tour but we hope for them to reply to our email soon.
Tuesday
storyboard
The point of making a storyboard is so that we can put down a brief plan of our production as something to follow while developing it. By including narrative describing camera angles we are able to imagine fairly accurately what our documentary will be like once finished. Storyboards are a good idea as they breakdown the bulk of the product in manageable chunks.
We made a draft storyboard by sketching out what we imagined our still photos would look like. once we had done this we went out and took still shots of what we believe would sum up that shot, we then uploaded them onto the Mac's and placed them into Imovie where we edited and added captioning to each photo. These captions explained the camera angles along with the plot of the Documentary.
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