Many people would ask, what is a documentary? Well for those of you that don’t fully understand the phenomena of documentaries. Here is a quick and plain English explanation.
A documentary is a movie that attempts, in some way, to capture reality. Even though the scenes are carefully chosen and arranged, they are not usually scripted, and the people in a documentary film are not usually actors. A documentary film may rely on voice-over narration to describe what is happening in the footage, in other films, the footage will speak for itself. Often, a documentary film will include interviews with the people in the film.
My lecturer Mr Ken Fero set me and my army of four other fellow comrades the task of creating our very own 3 minute documentary with the theme of Coventry people. And I’d like to express that the three minute time limit was extremely important to meet.
Our film was going to document the success of one man. That man being Mr Asgar Ali a successful local business man. He is a one of these rare cases of “Rags To Riches” or in our case of 21st century education, heavily structured on terminology. “Social Mobility”. Our working title was “Addicted To Success”, which soon transformed to “Up The Social Ladder”
Why do people make documentaries? Well forget some oxford dictionary scholar explaining it to you. Let me tell you from my understanding. Well from my conception a documentary is a manipulation tool gone wild. You can’t be pure any more everyone is bias one way or another, we can’t be in denial. Even the BBC is bias at times. Well manipulation can be used in a positive way, or as some may refer to as for the greater good.
Our way of manipulating of people, or young people I should say raging from 11-25 is to show them a life which they have been made to believe over the years is the way to lead your life and what is the social norm. We would be showing our viewers a story that progresses through three phases. “The Bad”-“The Reason”-“The Good”. These ideas can be applied to anything referring to social cleaning. These are ideas and structures I think I have discovered, and I applied this to the documentary we produced. Our viewers are made to believe that they can all be like Mr Ali and change, this is only hope given to them to carry on with their lame lives.
Enough of my evil twins influence and let’s carry on with showing you what I got up to and what obstacles I faced with the group as we were progressing n this expedition. I’m not sure who is reading this but if you know me I can be a lazy at times. And the first few lectures were missed by yours truly. This put me at an awkward position as I had to find a group, I was lucky to find a group willing to take me on board. Thanks guys! Well I came, I saw, I concurred. I introduced my-self, showed my ideas and they took it on board, and that’s where the Mr Ali story began.
Don’t think this was going to be the end of my laziness. It strick’ed back again. Leaving me slacking, once again. I got back on track Thanks to the group for moving the meetings to my house. I showed the group that I am capable of doing this project. PDX10 nothing like a Z1, but still works wonders. I went to Mr Ali’s Restaurant and filmed him and asked him a series of questions. Never (well not never but still…) think you can be a one man film crew, as I thought I was that day. I thought everything was going perfect, id only have to forget to set the exposure to ruin the whole shoot. I am afraid that was the case that day and I’ve learn t a lesson, well as the saying goes. “You learn from your mistakes”.
I was highly upset with my performance that day so I arranged another shoot with Mr Ali, this time it would be a full group effort meaning that the exposure wouldn’t go un-noticed. Well PDX10 were all out, capturing some creativeness. We were handed a Sony Handycam and told take it or leave it. Being media producers, low tech equipment alone would not stop us from expressing our wacky ideas. We steamed on with what we had and captured some great footage. Using a tie clip mic with the Marantz was a good way of capturing a very high quality sound which we then synced with the video.
We captured over two hours of footage which was then cut down to 12 then to 6 then to the all important 3 Minutes. It took us about 15 hours of editing to come to our final outcome. Don’t think those 15 hours were plain sailing. We came across many encounter were lack of software knowledge meant we had to delay our process while we researched on how to do a something like doubling a sound track. Because your “Command + C” doesn’t work.
I felt highly important in the group as I captured a lot of the footage and made the film practically throw my eye piece. I hope unique traits are visible to your eyes. Through this project I boosted my knowledge on group work and time management. This project regardless its size, also helped me learn how to do in depth research. What I gained in knowledge during this process, I feel I can easily adapt into a work atmosphere.
In conclusion I feel me and my fellow comrades came home after a successful mission, even though we lost blood, sweat and tears we all came back stronger and ready for more. This project was a success even though we did have a bumpy ride. But who said it was going to be easy? I certainly didn’t expect calm seas when I left port.
Creatively Evaluated By Abu Mukid
