Final Cut and Evalation

Under The Gun Documentary Final Cut


Under The Gun [Short Documentary] from Liam Atkinson on Vimeo.

Evaluation

Under The Gun is a 5 minute documentary about tattoos and the discrimination that comes with tattoos. The Documentary is shot well in terms of camera angles and lighting, edited well with good transitions between interviews and cutaways with good clear audio. The feedback we received and what I would give for this documentary would be to add some breathing space between audio to allow the audience to digest the information as well as create smoother transitions between audio by not speaking over the interviewee and allowing some space before and after the interviewee speaks to give room to edit smooth transitions between audio.

The process we took to this production was to research what idea we wanted to base the documentary on. Then we discussed the narrative options we wanted to take and scouted interviewees that could be in our production. Once we had our interviewees we planned interviews around the contributor’s schedules and then I shot the interviews as I was the cinematographer. The footage was then passed to Natalie that edited the footage with little help from the rest of the group to create the final cut of our production.

The issues we faced was simply technical such as; not turning the sound on the camera for a reference when syncing the non-synced sound, Avid crashing and not saving half the work Natalie produced twice and issues creating smooth transitions between audio as we did not leave enough space before and after the interviewee talking.

My usual role in a production would be the editor, but for this production I was allocated the role cinematographer. I feel that this was a good choice for me as it gives me a break from editing and to try something  I didn't feel was my norm role and practice my skills as a cinematographer. I took on this role with a strong professional idea of what I wanted to do; I wanted to create shots to professional standard with full lighting, the correct camera angles and use of tripods and sliders. I wanted to get a strong mod shot for interviews, tight close ups for cutaways and a smooth track shot with the use of a slider to give a more artistic and advance look to the production.

During this production I have learnt how to set the bit rate/resolution to 1920px x 1080px, 50mbp, 25fps, I also set the shutter speed to 1/50 as allows the right amount of light into the camera in regards of the frame rate with is a ratio of 1:2 (this would be 25fps to 1/50).

The group worked equally and fairly throughout the production. Harry was director, Carly was producer, Natalie was editor and Francesca was sound recordist/editor. Everyone worked to their best efforts and produced strong work within their roles. This made the production run smoothly and effective in reflection of the quality of the documentary. The strengths of the production is that we worked extremely well together and the documentary had a nice visual style with the credits and colour correction that gave the documentary as professional look. The weakness’ of the production was the problems with the sound and how it does not flow as cleanly as we planned.