I'm Back (pt. 2)

 So, what else have I done in media studies A Level? The distribution project was one of the big fun ones, but there's other things that filled up my time in the class. I wish I could talk about all of them (especially postmodernism, but that might take me 5 blog postings to fully divulge my thoughts on that - and it may break my brain). So... not doing that. Instead, I'll talk about something else that was really insightful for me and an experience that will help me greatly going into the final project.

We did a documentary project, just a short doc that couldn't exceed 10 minutes and that had to focus on something specific. my group ended up doing the project on another part of my school life: marching band. We decided to focus it on the marching percussion section, and the hardest part might have been just deciding how to format it. And I have never realized just how hard it is to write good voiceover narration for a doc. My original ideas, long since deleted, were absolutely terrible. And it just sounds so unnatural, robotic, monotonous, however would be best to describe it. Even the final project was a little bit weird to hear, but that may be because I reviewed it hundreds of times. It might be the one kind of writing that I don't enjoy as much. And before we could even finalize a format or a script for the voiceover, we needed interviews. 

The interviews were hard to schedule, especially having my group of three together at the same time for them. And we've learned that we have to be flexible, not the interviewees. Though Tstok emphasized that point before we even began the project, that was hammered home to me constantly while arranging interviews. We did end up getting good stuff out of the interviewees, including some emotional moments. Hopefully they felt comfortable, and my group did try to make the situation seem as natural as possible. The clips we got reflected that, so I'm proud that we made do with that. The only real issue was that the band room was noisy at points, so there was some background noise, but it only helped to reinforce the actual focus of the piece. There were some points where I'd get a little distracted because of all the commotion, but it helped to capture the chaotic energy of the percussion program. That was something we especially wanted to emphasize. 

And now to the good stuff: the filming of b-roll.

 For percussion (to compliment the chaos) and to have a unique look to the piece, we decided to film using a GoPro. I had to trust the percussionists to use it, since we wanted POV shots to capture the feel of playing on the field. The GoPro also captured good audio, so it worked for both aspects. If not, we would have just edited in some other audio captured during a rehearsal, but I'm glad we got the audio in the moment. As seen above, we also got some, what we determined, "chaotic percussion" footage. We wanted the doc to be playful as well, and these, uh, unplanned shots added that humor and that dimension of percussion. 

(This is the POV shot that we got a lot of for the doc - inspired by a lot of the Drum Corps International Snare Cam or Drum Cam videos)

Piecing it all together was another hard part of this project. There is a lot that we could have improved, since the doc did segue away from the main topic of marching percussion. We also could have added some more b-roll, but the editing was a little down-to-the-wire.

This project did teach me about patience and the ability to be flexible. It also taught me some more project time management skills, something that will be imperative for the final project. I also got a little deterred from choosing to do an excerpt from a doc series because of this project. That maybe something else would be more preferable for me.