I am pleased with how the edit turned out, on the whole. After some issues with structure, I think we were able to work them out to form a coherent argument, as well as having some funny and key moments.
Unlike my last few projects, I have not had any major issues with during post-production so the edit, although it took a while, was not as stressful as it could have been.
Collating all our work on Google Drive made the entire project a lot easier in terms of sharing with everyone in the group.
I had never considered presenting something like this before, but I am proud of myself for being able to stand in front of the camera for a change. I have room for improvement, but for my first shot at presenting, I think I did rather well.
I am also very pleased with most of the sound design in the finished edit (except for a few quiet moments in the interviews). The music and buzz tracks really added a lot to the tone of the documentary.
What didn't work?
Overall, I am not happy with our documentary and this is down to a number of reasons.
For a BBC Three documentary, car insurance for young people is not the right subject area. I feel that we did not consider enough ideas as a group, since we only fully looked into this idea together. Car insurance is a fairly dull topic anyway, yet our attempts to make it more light-hearted distracted us from the brief which said our documentaries should be 'edgy' and 'serious'.
As a group, we also had a lot of difficulty in distributing the tasks in a balanced way during the pre-production and shooting period. I feel that I rose to the role of producer/director, but naturally that also led to me taking control of many other tasks as well. On the whole, I led most of the pitch, conducted the majority of the research, wrote the script, directed the shoots, presented the documentary and had the final say on the edit. Since I took so much creative control, I think the other members of the group did not feel obliged to add as much input. During post-production, however, I feel we really banded together and each put in the right amount of work to get the documentary finished.
We lost a lot of potential contributors, including a driving instructor and student, which would have been perfect.
Some tasks also became very difficult as some members of the group could not attend certain shoot days, or could only commit to a short amount of time to get things done, which led to a lot of frustration, especially during the planning and shooting period.
I learned that I like to be in control of a team. As I have said in my previous projects, I feel unusually comfortable in the director's chair and having a production team throughout the whole project has shown me how to take control of difficult situations, distribute tasks, and ensure everyone is contributing a fair amount.
I also learned that there is a lot more preparation and planning that goes into a documentary than I had initially assumed. I did not realise how much input a director can have on the interview process and how much footage is cut away in the editing process - one of our interviews, for example, was cut from 20 minutes down to around 2 minutes, to the point where I found it difficult to remove sections that I felt were important beforehand.
I learned of the importance of transcribing and scripts whilst making a documentary, not just for pre-production, but for shooting and post-production as well. The transcripts were became very valuable assets when it got the creating the sync assembly.
What could I develop?
I did enjoy being the presenter for our documentary, but I feel that I need to develop my communication skills so that I am more comfortable when speaking to the camera.
Time management is also something that I could develop, as we ended up running out of time to shoot the vast majority of the documentary. This includes trying not to leave shoots too late so we lose natural light, as we did in our closing shot - however, I have looked into the plugin that Gavin showed us, 'Neat Video' and seen how that can be used as a last resort to fi grainy footage.
Going back to the first point, better communication with other contributors would also be a good thing to improve upon. If we were more confident and assertive in this project, we may have been able to acquire some more interesting and colourful characters to interview which would have added more layers to the narrative.
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