Seeing Green at last

So in my earlier posts I mentioned the Documentary we were creating called 'See Green' which we finished editing and submitted on the 10th December 2012.
This is our final film: Vimeo Link

Lights Out! from Emma Simms on Vimeo.

Creating this film has been a very interesting experience, one which I am very proud of due to my team and the lessons we have learned in not only designing such a film but time management and the development process. It has also showed me the importance of quality, sound and the time taken to edit. I have also vastly improved my team leader skills and communication skills with the public and negotiations with the professional industrial to get the material we wanted.  

Once we came to the editing process we did have to make some adjustments to what we had originally wanted due to the material we had collected. We instantly recognised that we didn't have enough cut away's which caused a few problems and makes our video less exciting than if we had filmed more material. This was lesson one that we learned during post production. Lesson two was that the material we had filmed later was of much better quality than our first interview we filmed. This was mainly due to experience and becoming more familiar with the equipment but it did affect the final quality of our work. For instance Dawn has a softer appearance than the background behind her. Unfortunately this was un-fixable. We also had to zoom in on Chris' interview due to a light stand being in the way and the background of Victoria's interview has smudges and looks somewhat dirty. This was lesson 3, interview location and camera placement. We were quite proud of our cinematography and choice of angles but many of them could still be improved on.

The sound was the hardest thing to sort. Much of the time the sound was louder in one speaker, this was due to our lack of knowledge at using a Marazte. Again this improved with experience. We also had to have the sound at the same level which was hard due to the different locations we incorporated when filming. We also decided not to use any additional music and work from interviews. However looking back this could have made our film slightly more exciting. 

We wanted to begin our film with an exciting opening, like a stroke advert. However in practice, getting our volunteers to film this was too difficult so we settled for a more drama dramatic opening of an unwanted call. We changed it into black and white so it stood out from the rest of the film's interviews, then the narrative followed through to discuss not only scams in the industry but what can be done to avoid this and still save energy. As mentioned before we needed more cutaways but the cut away's we did film and used were placed to back up the narrative and in force what was being said visually. 

I feel our team have worked effectively together and I'm proud of everybody's efforts. I have a lot to develop and improve upon which was the function of this task and I want to thank everyone that agreed to be involved such as Dawn and Chris our interviewees and Victoria from National Energy Action.