19th -23rd April

Monday 19th April
In my FMP group, I practiced laying out meeting minutes, which is a word template used on Microsoft word and where can you put what you have discussed in your groups. The people in my FMP group were Richard Alder, Greg Clarke, Dan Schroeder and James Blackburn. We selected our job roles, including camera operator and sound assistant. Also we were told what we need to do for our presentation next week. Also the group shared contact details as this would be important in case anyone was absent from group meetings. I was asked to do research on the RSC, also we selected a group name for our production which was switch productions and Dan was designing the website for it on Adobe Dreamweaver.


Tuesday 20th April
How we would get the behind the scenes access of the RSC in Stratford and we would get a behind the scenes access. Then there was plan b in case we couldn’t do the RSC documentary, which was Reverb, as it could be easily done in time. The name of this documentary would be Reverb off the record, as we going behind the scenes of Reverb. In Johns’ lesson learnt about the importance of narrative for documentaries. The narrative would include exposition, complication, development, climax and resolution. Exposition introduces characters and settings. Complication disrupts the equilibrium. In the development we can learn more the characters featured in the documentary and the resolution is the return to a state of normality. The narrative structure of our Reverb documentary, the exposition of the documentary would be the bands as they are unsigned. The complication for Reverb off the record would be the technical difficulties; this could include the communication problems with the equipment and producer s talk to the key crew. We need to arrange a meeting with the HNDs. People were also assigned by James on what research they needed to do for the presentation on Monday. I was to research Reverb on Stratcast and PRS.

Thursday 22nd April
Today in John’s lesson we looked at different types of documentary including expository and observatory. An expository documentary exposes the truth about something, this includes Supersize Me as this exposes the truth about MacDonald’s food and fat content. In an expository documentary both the presenter and voiceover are the same person.
An observatory documentary observes life in close up and often has a voiceover. An example of this can be Planet Earth, which is narrated by David Attenborough, who describes the observational things the viewer can see.
Another different type of documentary is ‘Fly on the wall’, this captures on film the reality of life, an example would be The Family, and this looks at a daily life of a family.

Another different type of documentary is ‘Reflective’ is Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man , this reflects on the life of Timothy Treadwell who had spent most of his time in Alaska with grizzly bears without realising the dangers he was in and getting killed for his stupidity.

Another type of documentary is interactive which allows the audience to make their own choice about what they see; an example of an interactive documentary is Oxfam’s online interactive documentary that showed the damage of cyclone Aila, as it affected the community in Gabura, Bangladesh. The audience had the choice to see where they could go and what to see though the medium of the internet.

There are also two types of audience that view documentaries, this can include subjective and objective. Subjective is when the audience are taking and agreeing with the point of the presenter because they have a pre-formed acknowledged view.
Objective is when the audiences have no view and will make their decision about their view from watching the documentary, but may not agree with the view or the subject.

While looking at different types of documentary, we analysed different types of documentary including Supersize me and Touching the Void. Later that day James has asked me to do some research on the hypothetic budget, which would show the importance of cost for crew. Matt Olorenoshaw gave me a detailed sheet of costs of Sony cameras and audio mixers to give an idea of the outline for the hypothetical budget.

Friday 23rd April
Continued my research on the hypothetical budget and looked at various camera rental sites and made my budget in Microsoft excel. Then it was emailed to James as it would be put on the Microsoft PowerPoint for a presentation.