Documentary Evaluation

Documentary Evaluation

Now that my documentary is complete, I've had time to look back and evaluate what went right versus what went wrong, and where improvements could be made in future attempts at factual filmmaking.

Let's start with the negatives. Overall I'm unimpressed with the third interview that was conducted by myself. This all comes down to severe mismanagement with planning, as originally I was supposed to interview a child psychiatrist in order to gain both a professional and experienced opinion in my documentary. Due to unforeseen circumstances and a pushed back schedule, I was unable to reschedule an interview in time, for me this was the crux of the documentary and to see it fall through was very disappointing. Instead of leaving the documentary short of an interview, I decided to attempt an interview with a fellow classmate who has experienced bullying via social media. Unfortunately due to a lack of time and ability to plan, I was unable to assess how the interview would go and how he would respond to the types of questions I would ask, resulting in very long, awkward answers that (for the most part) relayed barely any new or valuable information for the audience. In the post production process I had no choice but to cut the entire interview down, leaving me with a very short and choppy interview. A plan for the future would be to make contingency plans for important aspects of my projects, in order to avoid being caught of guard and risk the project.

I was also very unimpressed by the framing of certain angles during the documentary. Those on camera were inconsistent with the framing of the subjects for each interview, but ultimately it's my job to check these things and make sure - which I didn't. This resulted in me having to adjust the framing in post, which as we all know, is something you shouldn't do in the editing process unless you absolutely have to due to it's effect on image quality.




Speaking of the editing process, I enjoyed putting the documentary together and I believe the introduction is very strong thanks to the voice over and visual cues. The inclusion of real statistics and information sourced from multiple studies let me add valuable information relevant to the audience.