Planning our documentary... further

CONTENT:

News flash headlines, showing how the climate is effecting people around the world. Having more recent archives would be important for this. This would work well in the introduction, highlighting how big global warming has reached out around the world.

Green screen, to show us being in Antarctica, and if it looked good, we would use in final, aslong as we have the correct lighting. It would be a short clip, to show whats coming up next in the programme, no longer than 10 seconds.

Night vision effect, would be used inside a tent, as if we are actually in Antarctica. This will be used to show how challenging and demanding the environment is.

Further content notes:

• Us training for the Antarctica, getting fit, and having the right equipment.
• Voice overs of natural disasters occuring (Poetic approach)
• Filming from inside a plane as we are about to take off (We thought about contacting a local museum who have planes etc)

Location:

The gym - To show us training in preparation of our trip to Antarctica, as-long as we can get permission from local gyms to film. We want to include a slight bit of humour in this scene.

Brooklands College - Here an army cadet base is held. As they where the correct uniform of the military, this would be another ideal place for us to show our training in prep. for our travels.

School drama studio - This would be the best place for us to film our green screen scene, as it has good lighting for us to use, which is very important when using a green/blue screen.

Brooklands Museum - If possible, we would like to use one of their planes to show us about to take off for our trip to Antarctica. We would use this shot at the end of our documentary piece, portraying our excitement and fears of whats to come ahead.

Equipment:

- Cameras (2)

- Green Screen

- Ski equipment

- Mountain gear

- Torch

- Tent

- Training wear

Green Screen:

Green Screen?

We wanted to try and get as technical as possible with our documentary. So I came up with the idea of adding in a green screen into our idea of Antarctica. We have all the equipment to do so, therefore we thought that we would give it ago. By adding in a green screen, it will allow us to be very creative with our documentary.

We had a basic go at using a blue screen. It was only a sheet of fabric as we were doing a very rough test as our first attempt. With green screens, you have to take into consideration, the location you are filming in. You must have correct lighting and obviously a good screen. In this case our screen was too thin, colour wasn't what we wanted but with what we had, we made the most of it.

Here is two examples of our first attempt.



Edited in Final Cut Pro





Edited in Sony Vegas


As you can see, their are several issues with these clips. The wind was blowing and creasing our screen in the background, but due to lighting we had to film outside. The lighting from the sun also effected its colour, as every now and then the sun was brighter. Obviously from this we know that filming in a studio is the only suitable option, however as a test it came out better than expected. From this, we have have become a lot more clearer on the factors which we will need to consider when filming on a green screen. For example, we didn't have enough space, as you can see by the first video. And you can also notice on the second video, Calum (in green) was wearing colours which clashed with the screen, therefore him being 'invisible' at points. Although, this was a pretty successful effort as we had learnt a lot!

Planning our documentary.

Now that I have studied the ins and outs of documentary, I'm a lot more aware of the styles and types which work well together. Me and my group (Consisting of Zoe and Calum) have now decided to start early planning for our documentary. By doing this we started off brainstorming quick ideas of what we wanted in our documentary, to see if we had some good suggestions!

Me, Zoe and Calum

As we had a lot of ideas collected together, our first solid task we set ourselves was to produce mini documentaries which will we have their own forms and types. So far our plan is to produce a Mockumentary which would be Observational and Poetic. A reality documentary which would go along the lines of a more serious approach, filmed in a Expository/Poetic way. These mini productions would hopefully help us give an insight in what we may think works well and what doesn't, ultimately helping us choose what we may produce for our final piece.



Although we planned the mini documentaries, we also came up with what we thought could be a really strong idea. We chose a topic which we would be interested in doing. This topic was specifically on global warming and the ever changing climate we live in. From this basic idea, we then thought, how could we make this into a documentary? We ending up listing several general techniques we could use. We thought of ways in which we could be relevant to this topic. Our final idea was to create a documentary on Antarctica. With the documentary being limited to around 3 minutes long, we had to have a well constructed plan. It was as follows:

- As an intro? News flash headlines, showing how the climate is effecting people around the world. Having recent archives would be important for this.
- Us training for the Antarctica, getting fit, and having the right equipment.
- Voice overs of natural disasters occuring (Poetic approach)
- Using a green screen to show a background of Antarctica like we are there. (short clip, i.e Coming up... then us in Antarctica)
- Filming from inside a plane as we are about to take off (We thought about contacting a local museum who have planes etc)

Word Cloud representing Documentary

This is a world cloud I created to show some of the key words which I have discovered through my research. They all link in and are relevant to Documentaries.