Task 2: Purposes and content of other documentaries: need to finish

Rona Boakye

Task 2: Analysing the purpose and content of other documentaries

Is Croydon Racist?

This documentary was made by a production called Generation 3.0. This documentary set and is about the community of Croydon.  Croydon is a large town in South London, England, in the London Borough of Croydon. Croydon is known for their large shopping centre 'Whitgift' and ' Centrale'. Croydon was also one of the location that the riots were in and we are now seeing a divide between the community and police. This documentary was put on YouTube as it is a short documentary. This documentary introduces the Croydon area and show the different ethnicity travelling around Croydon. This documentary tells us by 2020 white people will no longer be the majority in this Croydon but saying this is Croydon still racist. We get different types of people interviewed about what they think about Croydon and they think it's racist and have experience any racism. People have accepted that racism will still be around but we can bring the community together and make it less common by doing activities like a group like street athletic which bring all types of cultures together to do some positive especially for the younger generations.

The purpose of this documentary is to one create and strengthen because in the documentary they talk about how we can bring all enthinicies together becauase that is one thing that is lacking in the community. One of the school child that got interview said even in school 'all the white girls hang around with each other and all the black girl hang with each other' so it is trying to create less segregates between different race. Also to bring a local change, the documentary gives us one example of how we might be able to decrease this problem by aiming at the younger generation and by doing community events. This documentary is more expository type, the director is not apart of the documentary we only hear the voiceover. The documentary tries to be non-bias as possible and asking questions and rhetorical question and let the people that are being interview share their views without the director pitching in.

I think this documentary is aimed at a wide range of people but mostly the younger generation because they are trying to stop this problem but educating the younger generation. This is documentary is target at both genders, the topic of this documentary has nothing to do about you gender but about race. This documentary is aimed at the people in the croydon borough, it is trying to change a local issue. I don't think this documentary made a major change in the Croydon area but I think the purpose of this was to raise awareness about the problem and hopefully do more about it.

The style of this documentary is expository documentary because the filmmarker is not shown or heard in the documentary and most of the questions

What Do These Scary-Looking People Have To Do With Child Abuse? The Answer Is Pleasantly Surprising.

This documentary is about breaking down the stereotypes of what a 'good guy' looks like and also these stereotype 'bad guy' looking people are helping young children that have experience abuse with their charity 'Biker against child abuse'. The organisation name of documentary is Biker Against Child Abuse International. The narrative of this documentary is just a group of male and female bikers telling what they do through interviews about the things the do in this organization and showing some footage of them welcoming and supporting these young kids that have been abuse. Also making the children feel like they are apart of a massive family and "empowering children when they need it the most".

This documentary I felt had more than one purpose. One of purpose of this documentary was to raise awareness of this charity so that more people would donate and also for children in this situation to also join to group. Another of purpose of this documentary is to change attitudes and to challenge dominant representation of the community towards bikers who are stereotypical seen as the 'rough' and the 'mean' and show that these people are good people. The style of this documentary is that it's a performative documentaries because we see the people who are involved in this organization experience and we even hear about one of the biker also being a victim of abuse which can cause a emotional response for the audience watching this.

I think that this short documentary has two target audience which are children who have been abuse to reach out so they can help them. Even though this short documentary was set in american they have other organisation in Canada, Europe (France, Italy, Germany) and Australia . It isn't at a particular gender group. The second target audience is people who are interested in helping the cause and what to help child in need. We see in the documentary that this charity has already helped some children already. In one of the scene we see the organizers meeting one child that has been abuse and introducing themselves to her and also giving her a biker jacket to feel apart of the group. This is just the beginning of the things they do but that was just to make her feel comfortable within the group and to make her know that there are people there to help. This has helped some of the communities open up about some of the abuse that is going on and also have gotten some of child in their charity to go and testify in court against their offenders. So this organisation has already made an impact but they want to help more people out their not only in America but worldwide.

South African Students Grow Veggies to Feed the Local Children

The name of the organisation of this documentary is 'Sustainable Brother'. The Sustainable Brothers is a student-based community-driven organization who goals are to promoting a sustainable ethos and to stop negative impacts. The narrative starts of with Thomas the Co founder of the Sustainable Brother growing his on crops outside his house with his friends and are cooking up the vegetable they just grew. Next we see Thomas talking about the different actives they do in this charity for example they play football and the crop are surround the the football field so after they are finish they can go and learn how to grow different crops. At the end they grow crops to help feed the poor local children.

The purpose of this documentary is to raise awareness of the problems that persist in the current world, and providing practical solutions to tackle these problems. The gathered other students to help farm so they could give them food and they want to do bigger things so by doing this documentary they can get others to join and help more people. They also want to bring local and global change for example they said that they have a project called ‘Secret Garden’, a two-acre student house in the heart of Stellenbosch. They have turned this unproductive piece of land into a productive organic farm from which all organic produce has been donated to the local children. The style of this documentary is Performative because we are watching Thomas and what company do and we follow him to interact with the local children and also to give them food.

I think this documentary is aimed at people who are interested in the environment and who wants to make a change in this world. I think this documentary is aimed at both males and female even though in the documentary we mostly see males but I don't think it matter about gender as long as you are interested in making change. This is mostly aimed at student and young people because we are the future of the world and also to get young people interested in improving the environment. Even though this was set in south africa, I think they are trying to appeal to a wider audience. The impact of this documentary is to make the world more sustainable and to help people in need. The impact is global but it is helping local kids get something healthy to eat.

Bill - Genre Evaluation

Bill - Genre Evaluation

This evaluation I am going to be talking how we incorporate different technique to make our short drama a parody and contemporary western genre. We called our genre 'Mexican Stand Off' because it is based on a westernise version of a mexican stand off. The Mexican Stand Off is about a 'drug' dealer (Josue) who show a friend (Jazz) where his drug stash was then Jazz ends up telling the rival 'drug' dealer (Barney) where the drugs are. They take the drugs and Josue finds out about it and they have a Mexican stand off outside of the college, at the end they all end up dying and Tyree comes and take the drugs.

The first scene starts of with a pan shot from the sky to ground where we see everybody died on the floor then did a flashback to where it all started. We started off doing the scene like this because it shows what the storyline is going to be building up too and also makes the audience interested in what happened for this happen. The next scene is of Josue showing Jazz his 'secret stash'. In this seen we used exaggerated acting for example when Josue was leaving the room he turned around and warn Jazz not to tell anyone by shaking his finger, which gives us a bit of the parody aspect. The next scene also shows the audience that this is a parody is when Jazz called Barney on the phone to tell him where the stash and when they hang up you see Barney pop up from nowhere and you hear a non diegetic whistle sound which we got from 90s cartoon shows. We thought that it would be quite a funny aspect to put in out short drama. The scene cuts to Josue going back to the stash and finding his 'drugs' missing he goes looking for Jazz and spots him playing rock, paper scissors with Barney. When Josue gets to the car park to pulls out a spoon (replacement for a gun) and then Barney pulls out his fork. We had a wide of Jazz throwing the drugs on the floor and then it cuts to a close up shot of the drugs aka skittles on the floor. Barney throws his weapon and use his guns (fingers) to point at both Jazz and Josue then Jazz pulls out his gun on Barney and Josue. This is when the mexican stand off is shown. The next shot we did a 360 shot of the three people in the mexican stand off then it cuts to an extreme close up of their eyes which is another convention in a mexican stand off. It goes black and shoots goes off and we see everybody dead on the floor and Tyree comes and steals the drugs aka skittles.

My role in this film was camera operator and also director. I filmed most of the shots alongside Tyree. I also made sure that we were following the storyboard and that we had every shot we intended to do. We receive positive feedback saying they like the storyline and that it made them laugh especially our ending which was a tribute to a fellow member of our class who left. If I was to doing something different for next time I would have record the audio of our drama on a microphone and then sync it in because when we use the camera microphone it was unclear and it didn't sync in properly when we upload it up on the desktop.

Single Drama Evaluation

Single Drama Evaluation

For my single camera drama I made a short drama about a girl leaving with schizophrenia which is a long term illness that many people suffer with. I wanted my short film to be dramatic as well as educational. The plot of this film was originally suppose to be two roommates called Afiyah and Serena.  They are moving into a new house because of previous events that had happened in their old house so every time Serena  mentions about the old house Afiyah starts to cut her off. Serena goes for a walk and some 'unknown people' start chasing her. Eventually she ends up tripping up onto the floor and these people are now in front of her. Serena has a flashback of all the time she thought is was speaking to Afiyah when in reality she was talking to her self. She comes back from the flashback and she sees  a figure like Afiyah above her and Afiyah demands the necklace that she has on her and then disappears.

This was a solo project. So I did the directing, camera operating and also the editing of this movie. When shooting this video, I already had problems because most of my actors had dropped out last minute so I had to replace one of my main actors with my little sister and because my little sister is under the age of 13, I had to change the characters from roommates to sister as it would have made more sense to do so. Before I even started shooting I planned the different shots I wanted to have because I wanted to it to vary to make it visually interesting. The first shoot was a panning from the sky to my two main character walking towards their two main character walking towards their 'new house'. Then we get a close up of their face so we can see their face expressions and see what they are talking about. One of my favourite shots is when Serena was waving at this mysterious boy and when Afiyah comes and asks her who she was she waving at, she points at the 'mysterious guy' and it cuts back and the boy was gone. I got a close up of her face reactions then it cuts back to where the boy was standing and then it cuts back to her face again and her walking off. Another shot I liked is when we see get a wide shot of the bystander walking and we see her confused then I did a eyeline match shot of Serena running and looking panicking and no body seems to be chasing her.

The editing process was a little bit new to me because even though I had use after effects before I didn't really experiment with the different types of effects I could do on this software. The single camera drama was a chance for me do to this. I added a ambient soundtracks to my work because when I cut some of the clip the background sound didn't match up so I added the soundtrack so you couldn't notice when I did the cutting. There is a scene where Afiyah is about to lay onto the bed and because I film this scene twice, Afiyah was sitting is a slightly different position so when I edited it, the laying down bit didn't look natural. Also I added special effects to the bits where it was Serena point of view looking at the people chasing her, I used the motion blur to make it look like Serena had a distorted vision because one of the symptoms that you could have in schizophrenia is that you have a distorted visions. I had some trouble because the sound stop playing in my film on after effects. Another problem that I had is when I recorded some of my scenes inside my house it looked really dark and when I tried to edit it the quality of the clip was really bad and the clip became grainy so I decided to re shoot them scenes again to make it clearer. 

When doing this single camera drama I had a lot of different challenges that I had to go through and because this was a solo projects I had to do everything myself. The end result wasn't how I imagine it was going to be but for my first solo 5 minute drama I thought this was a quite a success. If I was to do this next time I would probably get reliable actors, I would also make sure I watch the clips before I finish recording so I know which bits I need to re record. When I showed my peers this film they said they like the concept and the actors where good but when editing I need to make sure that everything flows. 

Treatment - Bill

Treatment

My short drama is about two roommates called Afiyah and Serena. The scene starts of with Afiyah and Serena walking towards their new house. Afiyah is a but worried about this new place because of previous events that had occurred in there last house but every time Serena wants to mentions about the old place Afiyah starts to cut her off or shout at her. When they get to the new house Afiyah is still about skeptical about the place and goes to check out the house. While Afiyah is looking around the house, Serena checks out her new neighborhood then she sees a small mysterious boy across the road. She waves and him but he just stares back. Afiyah comes and asks her who she is waving at? when Serena turns around to show Afiyah who she was waving at, the same boy disappears. Serena is confused but walks inside the house with Afiyah. Afiyah burst into Serena's room and finds her tablets on the table and forces her to take them in front of her. Afiyah after about 10 minutes finally leaves and says she is going over to a friends house. Afiyah looks out the window and sees walk out the door. She looks at her jewelry box and finds her grandma's necklace, and starts to cry. She leaves her house and walks towards the alleyway. 2 unknown people starts to follow Serena. Serena doesn't really notice until she walks out the alleyway and when she crosses the road another two unknown people joins the people that were following her before. She get's a bit nervous now and she begins to panic. Serena starts to run frantically, the 4 unknown people are trying following behind her. Serena trips over onto the floor and the 4 unknown people are surrounding her. Serena gets a flashback of all the times she was talking to 'Afiyah' but in the flashback she was having a conversation with herself. She snaps out of the flashback and sees a dark figure walk towards her, when she looks proper she realise it's 'Afiyah'. Afiyah demands the jewelry, run of and disappears.  

Sound Bites

Rona Boakye

Task 4 - Soundbites

Soundbites are short snappy provocative answers that normally politicians use to advertise to grab viewers attention. In class we did a task where we had to try and get these soundbites for our documentary. My documentary is about stray dogs, it took me quite awhile to make up these questions. When I finish making up these question we had to ask people in our class questions answers while recording them. This process was a bit difficult because everybody was talking at the same time so you had to be loud and also be quite close to the person you was asking the question to.

My first question was 'Do you think that Dangerous dogs should be killed?', I got mix response with this questions. My two favorite responses that I think would be good sound bites and would grab the views attention are 'There only dangerous or harmless if their owners are the same towards them' and ' Yeah because I am not a fan of dogs anyways, so if they are dangerous then I feel that they should be killed'. These represents the two views on this topic.  My other two questions were 'Would you be scared of people if you were abused?' and 'Would you like to be homeless?' I thought that I could have phrase these questions differently so it would have been more provocative and I could have got better responses. Some of the responses were very similar or very short. But some of these responses could be very usefully for my interview and when I do my documentary I will be include this technique. I think the best way to get a good response from the interviewee is to ask them a controversial question and to get a controversial response. I think this is the best way of getting people to talk about documentary even if it has some negative responses. To have a controversial soundbite in your documentary will catch the audience attentions and make them want to know more about the documentary.

When researching about soundbite I found a video of the reelections for the president of USA. I don't find politics interesting at all especially American but some of these soundbites made me want to watch and see who wins even though Obama already won that elections. One soundbite I like is from Michael Obama, this soundbite is regarding the election and she says 'This elections will be closer than the last one that we can count on' the way she said they statement was punchy and short, also got across her point. Compared to my interview, her statement seem a little bit thought, she sounded more confident to answer the question and she knew more about the topic that she was talking about whereas my interview people had to think fast , they didn't really know about the topic and were pressured the answer correctly. There was also a series of soundbites from the news presenters saying 'The mad dash for campaign cash',  'cash dash', 'The battle of the bundler'. This showed me that news presenters can also have catchy soundbites not only the interviewees.

Journal - Sound Track Production

This is the non diegetic sound track that I created for my 'Harry Brown' soundtrack. I looked around listening and playing different instruments to create a sound that would convey a tense scene.

Task 1: Moving Image Soundtrack Quiz

1a) The three main elements of moving image is sound effect, dialogue and music.

1b) Diegetic is audio/dialogue which the characters in the film can hear for example in the movie 'Honey' there was a club scene where you can see the people in the dancing a long to the music and it also shows a shot of the dj playing this track. Whereas non-diegetic is when only the audience can hear the audio/voice-over. By doing this it gives the audience the mood and meaning so the audience will know what the director was trying to convey. For example in 'Boyz N The Hood' the scene where Ricky gets shot and you hear a soundtrack slowly fading in. The soundtrack was slow and quite high pitch, this show the audience that something bad had occur.

1c) Synchronous is when you can hear the original audio without any editing being done for example in a web series called the 'The 3 Olodos' the three main characters are sitting in the park and you can hear the ambience wind and car sound in the background, and you can hear the dialogue which was not edited in. Non- Synchronous is when sound effects is added to for example emphasis the sound in the film, this is done in the post-production stage. For example in Kill Bill fight scene with Vernita you heard glass breaking, jumping on sofas, falling on to glass, punching and etc but it was very over exaggerated so the audience could hear as well a seeing how extreme the violence was 

1d) Dialogue is one of the spoken word in film audio this is something the character in the says it could either be a conversation or maybe talking to themseleves. An example of this a scene in 'Inbetweeners' where Neil, Simon, Will and Jay go camping and they start discussing about ways they could 'cure' how bored they were. Second spoken work used in film audio is narrative or voiceovers, this is when you have a non-diegetic person describe or telling or explaining what is happening in the film. An example of this is in the 'The Great Gatsby' when Tobey Maguire was narrating the story about Gatsby. The last spoken words in film in interviews which is normally taking place in interviews for example in the documentary 'The Lift' the directors has a informal interview with the people that get inside the lift so he can know more about the people that lived in the estate.