This semester in media we created a documentary about water. We are incredibly proud about how we created the documentary and we believe we created in the end a high quality piece of work. This is the story about how we went about creating it.
Pre-Production:
Ideas Creation
To create our documentary we were first asked to brainstorm different ideas that we had about what the documentary could include. When brainstorming I thought of the idea about water, which I thought was especially relevant in this current drying climate and I was interested about following and looking at more. Following this we talked as a group about different ideas that we were all interested in and we decided that we were as a group interested in pursuing a documentary about water. We decided our documentary should be about getting people to change their behaviours so that they would use less water as we are running out of water in WA.
For the documentary I took inspiration from Craig Reucassel especially his Big Weather and How to Survive It, War on Waste, and Fight for Planet A, among others. I enjoyed how his TV shows involved a lot of pieces to camera and thought that throughout the show these pieces were very well done. I also enjoyed how he did demonstrations about different things he talked about throughout the show, went to a variety of places (rather than just talking about them), and consistently had interviews with various experts in the field. I was eager to recreate the documentary in this style, and wanted to include a lot of various pieces to camera throughout the documentary.
To this end we decided that we wanted to create a documentary about water, convincing people to use less water, that combined expert interviews with pieces to camera.
Pre-production
Given we wished to include expert interviews in the documentary we decided that one of our first tasks would be to look at getting people on and then record interviews with experts. To identify which experts we needed to record interveiws with we first needed to plan a idea about how the documentary would go:
Our first real plan for how we wished to put the documentary together is located on the right, and on it you can see that we started to work out how we wished for our story to work. For us we wished to convince people about the importance of preserving water (as seen in the message), and we created a story which we believed would help convince people of the message.
We also started brainstorming where we could find different experts to interview from. We decided it might be appropriate to look interstate (as well as in WA), because of the lockdown which was going on their, we thought they might be more open to the idea of having a meeting and talking about their research topics. We then used google to find various different experts which we contacted. Amazingly for us all of our requests were successful for interview and we ended up interviewing 6 different people (we contacted water wise for an interviews as well however due to time constraints we ended missing the opportunity to have that interview.
Over the course of 2 and a half weeks we organised and then recorded all of the interviews. This meant the whole group was much more knowledgeable when it came to the topic of water, and with a lot of great content to talk about. These interveiws went for roughly 30 minutes in duration, and we made sure for them we then did a recording through zoom (the platform we used for the interviews), and also had another external camera which we used for additional recording.
After editing this footage and recording and sourcing our own we had finally finished the video, a completed video can be seen below: