Pre-production
In order to come up with a final idea of what to do for my documentary I had to come up with heaps of ideas (brainstorm). Some of my ideas for the documentary were environment, social media, peer pressure, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, mental health issues, animals/pets, ocean life, celebrities, art and true crimes. Then I underlined the ones that I would enjoy doing which were peer pressure, drug abuse and true crime. Then compared it to the people in my group and narrowed it down to animal testing, true crime cases and peer pressure. We didn’t know what ones to do so we did research on them to see which is easier to research and find information on it.
When it came time to choose an idea for our documentary, we all decided to do a true crime case. We started looking at famous murderers around the world. We than agreed to do it on the Chris Watts case and started researching about it. We made a one note page where we could gather and share information on the crime. The information that we put in the one note was victim’s ages, dates of deaths, videos, photos of family and text messages. These were helpful for us before starting the documentary as we could use most of this information for our documentary and would help tell the story of the case. Then we just planned how we would tell the story (information order).
Production/Post-production
The technology we used to create the documentary was premiere on our laptops and computers (editing and making the documentary), internet (photos/evidence for the case/music), Facebook (old videos that was posted of their family). However, we didn’t film anything ourselves as it was all sourced online. We used premiere to put all our information into the software and edit it all. We use the internet to get background music, find videos of Chris Watts, pictures of their family and many other things that help improve our documentary.
I believe we made good use of technology because we were able to find many resources on the case and had a wide variety of music to use through various websites. What worked well was using a computer with two screens so you could set things aside and have more space. What didn’t work well was that when we wanted to use family photos and videos most of them were a little blurry or had poor quality as we found them on YouTube and google. some things that my group found challenging during the editing process was the music as sometimes it wouldn’t suit the emotions/feelings of the video or photo, so we had to keep searching for the right type of music something that we could improve on in the documentary would be making the documentary more intense as it shows how serious the case is and makes the audience more engaged.
I’d say that we all spit the workload evenly as we all found information. Some individual roles were that Jasmine would make the edits in the documentary, me and Caitlyn would make suggestions on what should be edited and how it should be presented (order of information). We use the cut function in Premiere to shorten the clips, dissolve images and videos so that it would fade in nicely, text boxes to add in subtitles. Some things I learnt while putting together the documentary was adding a circle outline to the picture, zooming in and out on videos and photos which all would fade in nicely as we used a stopwatch for it. Also, I learnt how to adjust the audio on videos to that it would be too loud or quiet and it would make it more enjoyable to watch.
Final Evaluation
The best aspects of my documentary would be the background music as we made sure it fitted each picture and video really well. Another thing which was good was the flashing images as it helps make it seem more dramatic and intense. Some areas that need a little more improvement was adding in some more information as some of the things move fast so it’s hard to keep up with the story line and it would make the documentary longer too. Another thing that could be improved would be using maybe more b-roll not using similar images as it can make the audience not be engaged as much. When making the documentary I learnt how to use Premiere as I’ve never used it before. Something I’d do differently next time would be adding more detailed information about the case as it wasn’t as detailed as I thought it would be.
