People and Places: Filming and Editing

 Preparing to film:

Begin by scouting out locations and work out what angles I wanted shots from and basically do a full location rekkie as my documentary was quite dependent on the shots of the locations to give the full effect of being transported to the 1940s.

Challenges during the shoot: 

• The week I went to start filming, almost all the locations I went to got shut down due to COVID-19 regulations and I was only able to shoot 3 locations out of the 10 or so that I had written down before.
• I did not have all my lenses as a relative had borrowed them a month prior and was stuck abroad. So everything was filmed with my kit lens which had some sort of scratch on it that appeared in all the corners of my outdoor videos.
• I also did not manage to finish my script on time due to my grandmother and mother, who were the main sources for my story, being in bad health which is why the writing was pushed back to the very last minute.

Tackling problems:

• I added in an intro filmed in my own house with a vintage feel to it to counter the lack of footage as I could not visit more than half of the film locations.
• For the issue with the scratch on my lens, I added a black aspect ratio to the footage and made the colour grade a dark and grainy one and decided to make a more poetic documentary since I couldn't interview my grandmother due to her depleting health.
• I decided to do a rough version of the script with stories I knew and after I received proper guidance from my mom and grandmother, I fixed the mistakes in my initial script and recorded it on the night before the deadline.
• I managed to find non-copyright music for the background after an hour of searching. 

Post Production:

I found that the audio I had recorded was very low and I did not get a chance to fix it before the first review session as I had managed to finish the script and recording from 1am to 8am on the morning of the screening.

As I am a complete novice in regards to Premiere Pro, I was figuring out everything on the software as I went along, meaning I was binge watching videos on YouTube while editing it. I was pretty incessant on the yellow subtitles from before I started filming, so I watched a tutorial for almost every aspect of the video editing-wise.

Other equipment used:

I filmed with two cameras:

My GoPro and my Canon 1300d.

I used a Gauge ECM-80 mic for my narration.

Review:

My eldest uncle told me that the video took him back almost half a century and a lot of people with whom I shared it mentioned that they really enjoyed the narrative and the overall vibe of the video after the audio was fixed.

I was told by my teachers to add in more interviews despite it being a poetic documentary and that the narrative was weak. Despite mentioning that the audio issues were going to be fixed, A majority of the complaints from my university instructor were about the lack of audio made the viewers focus only on the subtitles which automatically made the film boring.

Takeaway:

• Start earlier,
• Practice on the software more often,
• Don't lend out your equipment anymore,
• Finish the script before filming,
• Choose a more basic documentary style and topic next time as that is what the instructors wanted,
• Make sure to have less mistakes for the initial screening.