Overall I am very happy with how our documentary turned out. However, there are obviously aspects of the pre-production that worked well and others where there was room for improvement. This is the same for the actual production of the documentary itself.
In our pre-production we gathered lots of research on different type of documentaries, this gave us an idea of what type of documentary we wanted to create and how other documentaries were successful.
Are storyboards were one of the harder parts of pre-production to create, this was we weren’t sure what was going to occur during the production. We decided to storyboard the beginning of the documentary by showing the title sequence, the starting interview and the first morning. From then we just had to leave gaps and explain that the camera would be left running to capture any necessary clips for the documentary.
Are contact sheets turned out to be incredibly useful, without them we would never be able to contact all the members of the crew and get everyone on set at the same time. Are contact sheets also included a list of required materials. For our documentary we only needed a camera, a tripod and a microphone, we used our own camera and tripod so the only thing we needed to hire was the microphone. It wasn’t particularly necessary to keep checking what materials we needed because the only three materials we used were always in use during the production.
We managed to stick to our production schedule to a certain extent. We managed to film and edit when we had decided. However, because we couldn’t predict how long our subject would stay awake for, our filming overran and we had to continue filming a day later than planned.
We didn’t use many scripts, but what we did use helped our documentary move at a swift pace. We planned out all the questions for our subject and specialist and answer, and then they gave us their views, opinions and facts on the matter. One disadvantage of making a documentary like this is that because you have no script, you have no idea what is going to be said, and could quite easily end up with no relative footage. But I believe the questions we used worked well in regards to the production and did help gather footage that was vital for the documentary.
