Documentary Evaluation

For the Documentary strand on the Moving Image Project module this semester, the brief was left open for us to discover our own story and create a documentary film on a subject that we feel passionate about. This module has been very enjoyable, as well as beneficial and productive, in terms of the learning process as well as creatively.  Taking on the role of Producer on a film project left with a very open brief was an exciting concept and I have enjoyed the process, as well as learnt a great deal throughout it about works well in documentary storytelling and how to approach certain elements with a clearer vision in future film projects.

For the module, I worked in a group of four and believe our key strengths as a group throughout the entire process have been our teamwork, communication and complete commitment to the project from the start. We decided on roles together from an early on point in the module, based on our interests and where our individual strengths lie. I offered to take on the role of Producer, as I produced another documentary in the first year of the course and found this to be a job role that I really enjoyed and was keen to try out again. I also wish to carry on with documentary filmmaking in future as this is where my main interest lies. I enjoy the organisation and the planning process of filmmaking, whilst the other members of my group prefer to work on the practical and technical side to productions. The other members of my group were Sarah Cooper (Cinematographer), Emily Spokes (Sound Recordist/ Sound editor) and Heather Hall (film editor), who all chose their individual roles as well, based on their interests and what they were keen to experiment with in this Documentary project.

Coming up with a concept initially for the film was enjoyable, as we discovered a lot of potentially interesting stories that could make great documentary content through searching online news articles  as well as through making and comparing notes on topics which interested us all as individuals. Throughout a series of group production meetings, we found our story through a current local news article that was present on quite a few different websites, and one which was very current and relevant to Sheffield.

The story is that part of the Devonshire Quarter area of Sheffield, that has always been the city’s independent area, is under threat of demolition plans and that there is an ongoing struggle to save this unique part of the city. After researching this further, we found that the story and the reaction from people was actually on a much larger scale than we initially thought it would be. We sourced comments and interviews from famous Sheffield born musicians backing the petition to save the area as further research on our subject. We also researched and collated comments taken from local people who have grown up in Sheffield and have positive memories of the independent area which they have shared. An early and on going inspiration for our film has been Sound It Out (Dir. Jeanie Finlay, 2011.), a documentary about the last surviving record store in Teesside. Having this as an inspiration throughout the process has been helpful, as have been able to go and look at this as example when we were struggling with a few structural issues even up to early on in the edit stage.

From this point onwards, our focus was to gain contributors for our documentary film. Whilst at first we anticipated this to be a positive experience which would gain lots of interest as our chosen angle was to support the campaign to save the area, throughout the pre production process this was one of our first difficulties with the project. The owners of two out of the three stores under threat of demolition were not willing to be involved in the film or give away any extra information on the subject, which although we completely respected, was a bit of a shame to us as we were beginning to get excited about our idea. Luckily, the owners of Syd & Mallory expressed a keen interest in being involved so we worked with them onwards to at least be able to gain one interview and follow on focusing a story of one particular business who this will affect the most in our film.  However, only having one contributor who this story will directly affect was a bit of a disappointment overall in our group, and as Producer at first I did not feel too confident with where this one small store’s story alone would go in terms of the bigger story we wished to tell.  However, to get around this, as a group we had a rethink in terms of our story structure and how we could break the film up into smaller sections, and about who we could try to contact in terms of extra contributors to strengthen our film. The decision to meet up as a team to work around this was a positive and helpful learning process, as we all contributed our own ideas and it enabled us to ensure our vision for the film was still kept clear at a very early on stage in the filmmaking process. From this, I contacted some of the other main independent businesses within the Devonshire Quarter area to try and raise awareness of the fact we were making a documentary film and gain any further interest from potential contributors. Within a few days, I had heard back from The Forum, a small independent shopping space on Devonshire Street as well as The Green Room, an independently owned and run bar on the corner of the same street which the stores under threat stand.
After this initial contact through email, I also spoke on the phone to Kane Yeardley, the managing director of the Forum, to discuss the film in further detail and exchange schedules to arrange an available time for an interview. I also emailed a list of pre interview questions over after this, as requested. I decided it would also be a good idea to spend  some time visiting  the Green Room in person to get to know the interested member of staff and confirm availability so as to not disturb the needs of the business during the run up to the busy Christmas period.  

The pre - production and planning process took up a lot of our time as a group, however we worked well  and consistently at this as a team during this time and I think the amount of work we put in and our commitment from an early on stage was a strength of ours.  Whilst I was focused on sourcing and remaining in contact with contributors as well as filling in the project forms, Sarah (cinematographer) and Emily (sound recordist) went out onto Devonshire Street with my camera to collect a series of cutaways and establishing shots of the area which we knew that we would need to include at some point during our final film in order to manage and distribute our time well throughout the course of the production scheduled weeks.  We also went out to try and gather some voxpop style interviews around the Devonshire Quarter area to try and get a sense of what people liked about the area and capture some of the ‘community’ side to our film, which was a main theme we had in mind. However this was not as successful as we initially imagined it to be, so we decided to put this idea to one side from quite an early on stage. Instead, we chose to include news articles and spoken comments to show the story in a more literal visual way and add a bit more of a unique element to our film.

 

 

In terms of moving on to scheduled production filming days, one of the most successful of these was in Syd & Mallory, when Sarah and I went inside to take some close ups with the intention of capturing the finer details which make the store so individual. Whilst doing so, we had a chat with the owners about any updates on the proposed plans, signed an in store petition and were given permission to spend as much time as we needed around any area of the store to collect as much visual content as we could. I think this was another early strength of ours, as we managed to form an established working relationship with our main contributors from the very beginning of the project’s planning and kept this continuing throughout the process.

An area which began less positively but which we built upon throughout the filmmaking process was our interviewing. Each of our three contributors had very different reactions to being in front of camera and so our approach had to be adapted through learning what worked well and didn’t during our earlier interviews. This did however mean that some aspects to our interviews were weaknesses, such as remaining a steady line of eye contact and the consideration of background noise in interview set ups. In the Forum, the background sound in particular was a huge issue which we did find difficult to get around, as the location was chosen and set by the interviewee in terms of ease of convenience for the venue which we had an understanding for. After attempting several ways to work around this issue such as using an audio clean up editing software, we discovered that the quality was affected and collectively decided we would rather finely cut down the interview to the parts that the background sound was less noticeable in and have less content than affect the overall quality of the film’s content. Although our interview approach in terms of keeping a consistent eyeline and taking our time to set up to visually frame the interview as well as carry out tests positively developed throughout the production process, there were still areas of this which we were disappointed with and can identify as weaknesses to our final film. As Producer of this film, I do feel that this was on quite a large part my responsibility, as looking back on it after reviewing footage, I recognise that I could have focused more on certain finer elements whilst setting up, such as asking the contributors to turn down background venue music, as well as ensuring our interview questions were a bit more varied between contributors in advance. However, I see these as mistakes to learn from when creating future films, and do think that in part this comes down to the nature of documentary filmmaking in terms of the unpredictability of situations and adapting to change during the documentary filmmaking process.  

 

Whilst another group strength was organisation, during the last few remaining weeks of our production schedule we seemed to gain a larger amount of people interested in helping us out with the film and becoming involved as they heard about it from other contributors. This was challenging for us in terms of knowing the best way to approach this at such a late stage in the process. Although on one hand we could have just apologised and explained that it was too late to become involved to the interested contributors,  as a group we felt a stronger interest in trying to gain as many contributors and opinions on the story for our film as possible to strengthen it. We understood that this was going to make our schedule extremely tight, however thinking about how the value of the extra content would add to our documentary, we decided to go ahead and film further content which we left space for in the current edit, which we worked on simultaneously.  
For this particular film, it was a positive although brave decision to reach, as it had the potential to not add much to our story and instead purely be time consuming, however it did the opposite and added a new and interesting element into our film in the form of bringing in memories told as stories, which added a reflection theme into it, strengthening the overall film.

On the whole, the finished documentary is a film which we feel does tell our story well, but that has more of a campaign film style and approach than we initially imagined for it to.  Although our story does lend itself to a standard, short and almost promotional type of film, we do feel a little disappointed with the overall result, purely due it feeling quite standard and nothing out of the ordinary to us.  However,  we did challenge ourselves with form especially when producing content for our earlier poetic documentary, and we were extremely organised as a group and worked well together during the process of creating the film.

The learning process has been extremely valuable to me as I would still like to continue with documentary filmmaking in future and have tried to find outside of university opportunities relating to this since, such as applying for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Youth Jury and visiting video installations in my own time such White Hole (Dir. John Smith, 2014.) at the Tyneside Cinema.

Whilst there are areas we don’t feel come across as well as we initially intended to in our film, I think this is partly due to us having spent so much time on it ourselves without having a fresh pair of eyes viewing the content and having someone watch it who don’t necessarily know anything of the story. The positive feedback from contributors in the past few days to the film has made us feel more confident and positive about the film as they have expressed to us that the film has done a great job of showcasing their part of Sheffield, which was the heart of our story and the main thing we wanted to achieve from this film.