Documentary in Liverpool : Take 2!

We have fortunately been granted an extension on our documentary until next Thursday which will allow us to do a re-shoot and save our documentary from total disaster. As many of the performers we interviewed last time are very busy and have a number of gigs and other things going on in their lives, we have only been able to arrange to meet with one, Vanessa Murry, which means we will be altering our original pitch idea quite considerably, and a unanimous decision was made, that we will focus the whole documentary on the life and story of Vanessa Murray's passion with music and the career she is building for herself in it.

 

The email that was sent to re-establish contact with our interviewees

The Treatment
Our 5 minute documentary will be on the life and story of Vanessa Murray, who is a young, aspiring musician in Liverpool, and her slow rising into the Liverpool music scene. We will be focusing on her past and how she fell in love with music, as well as how and what she is currently doing to live her dream and fulfil her passion to be a professional musician. We will also reference past achievements, her opinions on her career in relation to the city itself, and the pubic/worlds opinion on it as a way of life.
We will be doing this by doing an extensive interview with her asking her pre planned questions which will hopefully allow her to open up and give a passionate, honest, and interesting response to each of them and we will also inviting her to give us a few live performances of original songs that she has written and performed herself before to many people, and get the background on the making of them.
The purpose of this documentary is to investigate and observe Vanessa's life and what she puts in and has put in to building her career as a young musician in Liverpool.

Plan of Action
As we would only realistically have one day to shoot and save our project we all planned like mad and really drew out as much as we could from lessons learnt last time (checking equipment first and always having spares) as well as are previous knowledge of Liverpool from our last shoot there. The first problem we arrived at was the weather. Due to availability of kit and the lifestyles of the crew and contributors, we could only go and shoot on the Saturday, and it was scheduled for showers and grey cloud all day. This is very problematic for the Z1 as it struggles in low light and can give dull colours if the framing isn't right in terms of lighting so we decided it would be best to book out a DSLR and Z1 together, so we could see which one worked best on location. Unfortunately, we couldn't book out a DSLR due to it not being available from stores at our requested time so we had to stick to the Z1. To negate the negatives as much as possible, we decided to familiarise ourselves with the gain function on the Z1, as well as paying close attention to zebras and IRIS levels throughout our shoot. We also adapted to the weather by bringing an umbrella and plastic bags to keep the camera dry and make shots as clear as possible.

That being said, we had no further issues with booking out kit or preparing for the shoot. We also had written ourselves guidelines, a list of shots we wanted to capture and a thorough set of questions to make sure we did everything right this time.

Even though the shot list is quite vague as you can see (above) in terms of structure and order, there is a lot of different ideas and key locations which we agreed to film at various different angles and in various different compositions to get a core of establishing shots that we could cut away to in the film if the content we got from the interview wasn't substantial enough.

 

The set of questions we asked Vanessa.

We all designed these questions to get Vanessa to elaborate as much as possible and give us very deep and interesting answers which would make an entertaining documentary to watch and our thought process was the the more questions we asked, the more usable answers we would get. In hindsight, we should have given the questions a better and more careful order, and built on certain sections a bit more to really squeeze any information or memories out of Vanessa as possible.

We once again transcribed as much as possible on the train journey home to cut out some time we would normally do it in later and also to make sure we had got enough content to use along side the establishing shots and previous footage.

All in all and despite the horrible weather, we had a very good day re-shooting the documentary and got 56 minutes of tape filled up with a 30 minute interview so we are feeling very confident that we have to content available, now its down to me (as the editor) to get cracking on and start to put together the film.