For our documentary task, Jet and I decided to produce a film on the topic of WNBA vs NBA, specifically female representation in the NBA. We came up with this idea after brainstorming several ideas with other members of our class. This was useful as it let us quickly rationalize how each of our ideas would work in terms of producing a documentary on them.

Pre-production Planning

As far as pre-production goes we didn’t have much organized plans. Our planning consisted of 3 main parts: random brainstorming on onenote, creating a timeline and creating a script for each topic we wanted to cover.

These planning methods (whilst disorganised) proved beneficial in preparing for our documentary. It helped with our thought process, made sure we didn’t forget any good ideas and gave us a good idea of how the documentary would turn out. Because the most important part of what we wrote in our planning was the idea it meant that each part was subject to change (this can be seen as our final production doesn’t follow the script 1:1).

Production

To produce our film we used many resources that were easily available to us i.e. cameras + camera equipment, green screen room and editing software all provided by the college. We used the green screen so that we could have various background footage behind the reporter that related to the information being explained. We used different equipment such as tri-pods, hidden microphones and lights to improve the overall quality of our production. However, we made some mistakes regarding lighting & the greenscreen, meaning the lighting was off in certain parts of the camera + a shadow making it more difficult to edit. What we needed to do was evenly spread the light and have the producer stand further away from the green screen to avoid a shadow interfering with our green screen.

Post-production

For our post production we found that it would be too difficult to have both people editing at the same time so instead we split the roles: I would do the main editing of the film & Jet would find b-roll, music and images. Splitting up the roles proved beneficial as each member just had to focus on their job instead of 2 people doing the same thing (& therefore being less efficient). I ran into many issues during editing, as my computer would crash/restart randomly and auto save didn’t work so I had to restart a number of times. Other than that we learned from our past mistake of having all our documents on one person’s computer & we shared everything we got (although admittedly the main film file was on my computer as I was the main editor + I was here most of the time). The main function we used in premier pro was the greenscreen as apart from the interview, we always had b-roll on.

Final Evaluation

I really like how our film turned out. Even after all the road bumps I am still happy with the work we produced. Although a lot of things I wanted to edit in got left out due to it being random and unnecessary I am truly proud of the work we have done on this piece. I have learned through this task how impactful team work and planning is in regard to the outcome of a production.