Commission: Rough Cut Critical Reflections

Yesterday Alex and I had a tutorial with Helen on our current rough cut. Her advice was really helpful and gave us some valuable advice on how to improve our film.

There are some key points which Alex and myself can learn from and better our work in the future either of us decide to make another documentary:

• We must remember to set our framing for the interviews. The shot type we were looking for is a Medium Close Up. In some of our interviews we did this well and came out really well and others not so great. So we need to make sure we focus on framing and not be distracted, especially when pressed for time. Helen raised a good point that its better to get 10 mins worth of good footage rather than 30 mins of poor footage.
• We needed to get more actuality with Sam however due to being so pressed for time we were unable too, something that we will try to organize as soon as possible.
• We needed some commentary or a way to introduce interviewees and an explanation of their profession and relevance to the documentary.
• There was a little too much jumping around in the narrative of Sam and other interviewees, so we should use Sam's story as the timeline and move off from him to others and then back to his story.

Some of this will be able to be done before our final draft however there are some areas of which that will have to learning curves for next time as we simply do not have enough time left to do them.