Expository

A doc in which someone is speaking behind the screen (unseen) and they explain the images on the screen. E.g. Wildlife documentaries.

Observational

Possesses an invisible filmmaker. It appears to have been filmed in real time where the camera does not impact the events. There are no interview or questions nor voiceover which allows for a more subjective meaning of the images.

Participatory/interactive

The filmmaker has a big presence and interacts with the people/events. Participants respond to questions and are given a voice. However, this can produce a situation where the participant is undermined and portrayed in a specific light.

Reflexive

Looks at the seams of its own construction. E.g. Behind the scenes camera.

Performative

Takes attention away from the world and moves towards the dimensions of the film. There are subcategories to this: Creative – Not tied to quest for truth. Rejects objectivity in favour of emotion. Paradox – Evokes the mood more often found in fiction film. Aims for the audience to become more involved with the subject matter.

Poetic

Subjective interpretation, visual rhythms, little or no traditional narrative.

Key light – Main light that shines directly on the subject. By putting the light to the side, it makes it more dramatic. The strength, colour and angle of the key light determine the overall lighting design of the shot.

Fill light – Shines directly on the subject but on the opposite side of the key light. Helps to balance and soften shadows created by the key light.

Back light/Rim light – Used to light the subject from behind. If you move it to the side into the kicker position it adds a highlight.

Film lights and electrics:

The more watts a light has, the more light output.

Tungsten lights – Most film lights are this kind. They come in various strengths. There are two types: open face and Fresnel.

Open face lights only have a protective cage between the bulb and outside. They have limited capabilities to spot and flood the light which gives harder and maximum light.

Fresnel lights have a lens in the front of the bulb to give more control when spotting or flooding the light. The light is still hard but slightly less than the open face lights.

HMI Light – Gives twice the light output of tungsten lights. Its colour balanced to daylight. Takes a few minutes after striking to get to full brightness and colour temp and needs a few minutes after turning it off to turn it back on.

Make sure the trip switch on the ballast is on before turning on and off. Turn on and off from the ballast, not the lamp head.

Dedolights – Small lights. Hard source of light. Have their own ballast and built in dimmer. Warmer in colour due to the dimmer. Come in sets of 3 lights.

King flo – Lightweight. Soft lighting seems like an artificial sauce of light as opposed to sunlight, flame and natural sources.

LED – Lightweight, warm to touch. Low power consumption can be battery powered. Soft light source, create artificial feel. Closer to daylight in colour balance. Can replicate studio lights and have changeable colour temperatures. Come in various sizes.

Bullet points

Check for permissions for filming in places that you want to film

Create a mock A/V script

What the documentary is about?

Assigned roles?
Who are the participants?

Make a storyboard of what kind of scenes/shots are going to be in it.

Where is it being filmed?

What kind of colours are going to be filmed? The tones and why they would be good tones? Colour grading…

What style of documentary is it?

If there is going to be a narrator or not? Will the subjects in the film be talking or will the narrator speak? Will there be an interviewer in the shots?

What kind of music will be in it?

What is the title?

What wardrobe will there be?

What films can you compare it with in order to represent the vibe of your documentary?

Which type of cameras would be used in the filming?

What will be involved in the postproduction process?

What kind of questions do you want to ask the subject (give examples)?

Organising schedules, location agreements, health & safety, budgets, release forms, copyright agreements, risk assessments etc.

Must consider ethical and legal considerations etc.

After the idea for the documentary is built, you must plan the shoot. Including schedules, call sheets, script breakdowns into locations, scenes, participants, props etc.

Create an A/V script

Scene location breakdowns – Creating a table with the scene number of shots, day/night, pages/script, participants, props (what props are needed), special effects & notes.

Schedule – How many days it will take to shoot, what days you are going to shoot, blocking key dates of shooting, include location, book equipment for it and create a call sheet. Include cast & crew details, address (consider weather and if there needs to be an inside option), scenes being shot that day.

Call sheets – Dates, contact details for everyone, address, travel arraignments, weather forecast, schedule lunch break etc, identify who is responsible for kits, attach risk assessments, think about where people can go to the toilet, responsibility of who is going to look after equipment and return it after the day is over.

Shooting schedules – Breaking down the shooting script, create time allocated shooting slots, decide how to organise the days, list all locations and settings to be shot in the day and requirements for each scene, count the likely number of shots and work out how many set ups there will be.

Factors to consider – Lighting/dressing/timing it takes, location, number of cast, camera movement, tech requirements.

Budgets – Put budgets together for equipment, participants etc (most of it will be £0), sample budgets are on blackboard. Above the line (Script, producer, director & cast) and below the line (costs needed to make the project), travel, lunches.

Consent & Permissions – Participants must sign release forms at the time of filming. Need release forms for people in sensitive places (e.g. hospital waiting rooms, law court corridors etc). Anyone under the age of 16 needs to have one signed by parents.

Copyright – If something has been created by someone not within your group you need to consider the copyright of it.

Reki – Make sure there are no issues in locations, is there power, has access been agreed with the owner, does the council need to be informed, any audio issues? is lighting required. Any place that you want to shoot you need to check it out first. Keep a signed letter of agreement from anywhere you film.

Location – Get permission for some locations. http://www.filmapp.org  – most boroughs are signed up to this online filming application http://filmlondon.org.uk/filming_in_london

Risk assessments – What are the risks, likelihood of something going wrong, severity, who is at risk, measures put in place to prevent it, every member of the crew needs a copy of the form.

Our roles:

Me - Producer

Felicity - Lighting & sound

Tara - Camera

Kai - Director & Soundtrack

Shafi - Editor

The idea - Interviews with regulars and staff in local Harrow Pubs (Wetherspoons & Trinity) in which we will explore their perceptions of what they think makes the establishment feel like 'home' and what provides them with a sense of comfort and contentment in that pub over others.

Interviewees include: Regulars, managers, waiters & bartenders.

Felicity will be the narrator of the documentary and will not be in the shot.

Location release form:

https://universityofwestminster-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/w2059273_westminster_ac_uk/EWGRkJYqvFtFjhSjjJONlmMB0BbRP8plm0zVLWv4G5gPjQ?e=MiSBBL

Participant release form:

https://universityofwestminster-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/w2059273_westminster_ac_uk/EX_QRakcTmZJsLLYL8YWoV4BC_2OLEMjMAZXqBlujFtqQg?e=B1bJZK

Risk assessment form:

https://universityofwestminster-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/w2059273_westminster_ac_uk/EQQIdm4I3dpKjMjFRnhYWjUBLdLqHsowgc4fIpK3ssiC3g?e=gDx9h3

They always aim to serve food in under 10 minutes. Some call it a McDonald's type of brand because you could see anybody in there that you know.

The layout - The narrator is behind the camera, there is no interviewer asking questions, just scenes where people are talking about the pub. While scenes of pints being poured and people being served etc, the narrator states quotes and facts regarding the pub and doesn't mention what the interviewees have been saying.

Questions that came to mind:

- Are there any specific techniques as a company that you use to get people to buy more or stay for longer? (Staff at Wetherspoons)

- What makes you come to Wetherspoons for dinner as opposed to having a home cooked meal? (Public from Wetherspoons)

- What do you do to ensure people come to your pub over chains like Wetherspoons? (Staff at trinity)

- How would you feel if this pub closed down? (Public at either pub)

Shots in the documentary - Pint cheers, pouring pints, kitchen ringing bell for food service, a time lapse of the general public walking past the pub.

There is a blurred background when the camera is on the interviewee and lots of clips of random actions being carried out in the pub between different interviews.

Something special about the chain - People that aren't in the pub can order you drinks & food via the app. People sometimes use this to play pranks on people and order a pot of beans or something silly to the table. This gives Wetherspoons the persona of being fun and being a place where you can have a laugh.

What makes Wetherspoons feel like home?

There is carpet in every spoons and each one is different. Some people have said that having the carpet there gives it a homely vibe as if you are in your grandparents house. Most pubs have hard wooden floors but Wetherspoons use carpets as a buffer for the noise so it's not too loud in there at busy times and you can still hear what people are saying.

Older generations have been seen to move from there regular pubs to Wetherspoons because they get more for their money there as its cheaper than most places.

'Wetherspoons: How do they do it?' (2021), Directed by Libby Overton, Elephant House Studios, Channel 5.

In this meeting we set about a date that we would begin filming and what we would get done during that time.

During this session, we successfully gathered lots of shots and also spoke to some regulars and staff to organise some interviews for our next shoot. We also decided that we were no longer going to have a VoiceOver in the documentary and instead would write the questions we asked on the screen for the viewers to see.

After reviewing the shots afterwards, we realised some of them were of poorer quality than we expected, which meant we had to fit in another time to shoot some more.

We also used the day as an opportunity to test the mics and make sure we could hear the output well. This took a few attempts, so it was a good idea that we tested the mic before the proper interviews began.

My aim for independent study after this is to watch some documentaries to do with pubs and find out what kind of questions they ask the interviewees and how they avoid creating leading questions.

On day 2 of filming, the interviews began. We spoke to around 8 staff/regulars at the pub in various locations around the pub and asked them a variety of questions to do with our topic. Me and Felicity were in charge of finding people that were willing to be interviewed and finding good places to ask them their questions. Felicity and I then asked them questions and filmed their answers. We also gathered any photos that the regulars had of them at trinity with friends they had made there in the hope to put them in the documentary somewhere.

We worked really hard this day and got lots of good shots. Although, some of the shots weren't to as good quality as we had hoped, so won't be in the final project.

The plan after this is to make sure Felicity and Shafi have all the audio and videos accessible so they can start the editing process.

Britain’s Toughest Pub – Aberdeen

Showed lots of shots of the local area. Writes the name of the person speaking down with who they are below, e.g. ‘Landlord’. During the interview with the landlord, the narrator does a voiceover while looking at other shots and explains how long the landlord has been working there and some other information about his relevance to the pub.

The documentary shows informal conversations in which the interviewees freely say what they think and are free to use whatever language they like to express themselves. I think this would be a good idea for our documentary; to show how comfortable the people are in the environment there and to ensure we are getting the most honest responses. I think we should emphasise that it’s an informal chat.

In the documentary, it doesn’t show the specific questions they ask the participants, but rather just uses shots of them speaking.

One thing I think isn’t so great about this documentary is that some of the participants accents are quite strong and difficult to understand, so I think it would be better if they had some subtitles, at least for the trickier parts. This is something we should consider for our documentary.

Filming techniques:

Lots of shots where the camera goes from the bottom of a room to the top.

Uses a variety of close-up shots of people smoking outside or drinking and wide pan shots for the moments where people are talking to the camera.

Shots of people laughing.

Includes a shot of the exterior of the pub in the day and then fades to a shot of it at night.

Involves lots of action shots of the staff naturally interacting with customers.

‘Britain’s Toughest Pubs (2004)’, Zig Zag Productions, Sky TV.

This is more of a formal documentary in which participants are sat down when they are being interviewed.

In the documentary, they use videos of pubs in the past along with pubs today to compare what it was like.

In this documentary, they aren’t showed to be asking the interviewees specific questions and allow them to freely speak.

During the interviews, the participants are the only people in the shots and are sat down inside the pub.

The audio in the documentary is very clear and the microphones they use are not in the shots which makes it appear as a very professional and series documentary. I think our documentary will be more of an informal discussion, so it doesn’t matter as much whether the microphone is in the shot or not.

Throughout this documentary, the people being interviewed are all mostly the same kind of people. Most of them are very well dressed and well spoken. I feel that in our documentary we should be filming people from all backgrounds and get opinions from lots of different kinds of people.

The narrator in the documentary discusses some facts about pubs and how they are important in history. The man being interviewed after this shot then discusses this topic in further detail regarding pubs as a part of the war effort.

At some points, there are voiceovers of historical people speaking about the pub. This is then credited on screen.

‘The History of Pubs’ (2004), Timeshift series, Directed by Kate Thomas, BBC Studios, BBC four.

Link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b079rt5l/the-hairy-bikers-pubs-that-built-britain-great-fire-of-london

Notable shots:

Shot of Bartender pouring a pint and then placing it on the counter as if serving someone.

Presenters walking into the pub.

Shot of the outside of the pub and people walking by.

A significant amount of the information you receive in this documentary is from the presenters themselves, whereas our documentary will be predominantly interviews.

Most of the interviews have the participant standing up with the presenters while speaking and them all having a conversation. Any questions asked are shown in the documentary and are answered then and there. It seems like the interviews are informal and the questions are conversational. This is something I think we should think about for ours.

During the interviews, some of the things they discuss are then shown on screen while they are talking over the top. I think it would be a good idea to do this in our documentary to give the viewer more insight into what the interviewee is discussing.

‘The Hairy Biker’s Pubs that Built Britain (2016)’, Directed by Graham Dixon & Sharon Adam, BBC, BBC Two.

While filming mission impossible, she had different crews in different countries around the world, and it was her responsibility to coordinate those people so that they are working together.

She stated that “Part of the job of the producer is to put together a group of people that interact with synergy”.

She explains that it’s the role of the producer to help everyone work together to make an idea turn into the end goal.

Paula says producing is like putting together a whole company designed to do one thing and it’s the producer that gathers all the people that are then in the long list of credits that plays at the end of the film.

The producer oversees everything. From the movie concept to the development of the screenplay, to the marketing post-production.  

Her tips for aspiring filmmakers:

Know everything you can know about making a movie.

Know what you love.

Know what your strengths are.

‘The role of the Film Producer – Paula Wagner (2018)’, ImageNova, Spotlight, Youtube.

There are different types of producers including:

Creative/Film Producer – Oversees the project from start to finish.

Line Producer – Responsible for the physical aspects of production.

Showrunner – Lead producer and often writer on a television series.

Field Producer – Mostly for television and documentary, and foes into the field to get interviews.

Transmedia Producer – Responsible for long-term planning, development, production.

Executive Producer – Often involved in financing and distributing the project.

Associate Producer – Often a junior role.

Co-Producer

Producers often collaborate with directors and other key creatives to develop a script and shape the vision of the project.

During pre-production, the producer is responsible for gathering the team for the project.

Producers find the right studio or soundstage, as well as real-word locations.

Film producers are critical in finalizing the budget for the film and making sure the crew gets the gear and locations necessary to bring the film to life.

They create budgets, financial plans, negotiate contracts and manage financial aspects of the production.

They are in charge of getting permits to shoot in locations as well as insurance to protect the cast or crew in the event that someone accidentally damages the location or rented film equipment.

A producer coordinates the auditioning process for films or employs a casting agent.

It’s the producer’s role while shooting is happing to make sure everything stays on schedule and on budget.

Postproduction – Producers work with the director and post-production team to oversee editing, sound design, visual effects, and music scoring. They may also provide input in create choices and make sure the final projects reflects in the initial vision.

They are then involved in the marketing and distribution of the film and work with marketing teams to create promotional materials such as trailers.

‘The Role of a Film Producer: Their Responsibilities in Filmmaking’, New York Film Academy, 2023, NYFA.