Today we previewed the rest of the documentaries. I thought that I learned quite a lot from watching other groups documentaries because I could compare it to ours and see differences in where they did well and where we could have improved on. I thought having a good title sequence really set the mood and tone for the rest of the documentary and subsequently it really put the standard up high for the rest of the film. In particular Wilson's title sequence with the drop of water which really connected well with the topic of the film and I really liked that. I learned that it's really important to do research, because that really shows up in the film and it also makes the film a lot more knowledgeable, which is good if it's applicable to the topic.
Some criticism I had while I was watching our film was the shaky camera, the unfocused footage at some parts, the sound, sudden audio cuts and the entire length of the film. We went for the personal approach, adding the feel of us being a part of the film like a participatory documentary style. That's why a lot of the film is shot with us hand-holding the camera, instead of setting it up steady with a tripod. One of the reasons we did that because it was also very inconvenient for us to carry around the tripod everywhere in the school. Even so I still think we could have tried to make the camera more steady when we went around shooting because there's a really big difference between hand-held footage and footage shot with the tripod, creating a big contrast during the film, which sometimes affects the way the viewer sees the film. Because we used the school camera which doesn't give very good quality, which isn't a big deal, but when the footage is unfocused it ruins the overall effect of the film. We had a bit of trouble with focus when filming, because it was turned to manual focus and we weren't really sure how to work with that. We only realized that after we had shot some footage, which we couldn't go back and shoot again. But we can learn from that and next time improve :) All groups had the same problem with sound, the wind noise and it really bugged me when I was editing that I didn't know how to soften that noise and make the audio clearer. I think that would be a really useful technique to learn, whether it is something to do with the mic when we're out on the field shooting or afterwards during the editing process.
Another thing was the length of our film, which was pretty long. I think to cut that down we could have used some of the sound of the interview footage as voiceover for parts during the classes to make the footage less boring. An issue with that is the interview sounds have a lot of wind noise, so it would probably be very disruptive if we overlaid it over the footage of class time. We also wanted to have a bit of sound from the classes so if there was interviews at the same time there would be a lot going on, probably making it very confusing.
Nevertheless, I think we did pretty well :)
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