Reflecting back on our documentary project, I feel we learned a lot based on documentary making especially on how to impact the audience. We did have a last minute change to our original idea, deciding to go for a more interactive documentary style with Sam being the main focus point being the middle child in the family. Looking at the final piece it paid off massively changing style as we agree as a team it has more of an effect on the audience as we are able to get more of an insight to how the disabilities effect the entire family including Sam, instead of a basic overview.
One documentary that was of big interest to us was 'Louis Theroux: Extreme Love - Autism' as it shares a lot of similarities with our 'Middleman'. It is an interactive documentary where Theroux visits families with autistic children and interviews them to find out what it is like. The documentary as a whole has a lot of similarities to our documentary including the content and the filming style. The major difference however, is that because Sam is our presenter as well as part of the Cahill family (being both presenter and focus point), Sam actually has inside knowledge into the subject which played a key role in perfecting our final documentary.
In general, we as a team are fairly experienced in film making all being in our second year with all of us also doing film making outside our course and at sixth form level as well. We have all participated in documentary making before, with the main example being in first year, so this is nothing new to us as a team so experience definitely played to our advantage. We started off by just bringing ideas to the table on what we wanted to base our documentary project on. Our original idea was to create a documentary on the recent decline of Monarch airline and how it went from one of the UK's most successful airline companies to a bankrupt mess overnight. However we struggled to find a story within, and discovered we would have a hard time getting key material needed for a Monarch documentary to work such as archive footage. Our poetic documentary however was smashing expectations regarding feedback we received, and we even had to leave a lot of good material out for the poetic piece to match the time given on the brief. This is where we got the idea to make a longer piece on Jack as well as his sister Dara who suffers from a similar condition.
In terms of feedback, Our tutor recommended that we made the last minute decision to make Sam the focus point and having him interact with his family, being the middle child of the family and growing up with siblings with special needs means he has a good insight as the presenter to what it is really like, would make it more meaningful for the audience. One thing I did feel during filming was how intrusive documentary making can be, especially if it's a sensitive topic. The documentary overall is intended to give off the feeling of closeness, family and love, so I personally think that putting Sam as the presenter takes away any intrusive feeling for the audience.
When it came to production work, I was doing cinematography on the filming day. Cinematography is a production skill I am always aiming to improve, so I thought this project gave me a good chance to achieve that. The issue with documentary making when it comes to cinematography, is there are no second chances. Documentary is actuality, same with live TV. For example, if your production team was filming a game of football, you can't get a second take of a goal, as the event is actuality. If the cameraman missed it, tough luck, you'd have to use whatever footage you had. The same concept applies in documentary making, so it was definitely a challenge to make sure I caught every important detail (such as the reunion with Jack and his family) on camera first time around. The people you are filming are not actors, so to film an emotional moment like all three siblings together couldn't be acted out again and again. Using teamwork, this is exactly why we used two cameras when filming, so if one camera missed part of the action, the other camera would have been there for backup. Although we can't get second takes, at least with two cameras we would still have a choice to what shot to use.
In terms of overall professional skill, this module has been a great overview into documentary making as an industry. We researched into all different types of documentary making, from short documentaries, to feature documentaries for Channel 4. This has given us a great insight to what documentary making is, and what to include in our own. I think the most important thing I've learnt about documentary making is that the message it delivers to the viewer is everything, so it is very important that the message the viewer gets is exactly what was intended by the director. For 'Middleman', we wanted to give a positive one, and judging by all the positive feedback we received, I think we have certainly achieved that. Not only are we happy with the documentary we produced for the module, we are also now intending to enter it into festivals as a way to get our names out there to network with others in the industry. Overall creating this documentary has helped by develop my teamwork skills and also shown me how to make documentaries outside of the course, which overall will help me to create a strong portfolio to show potential employers.
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