Final Major Project Evaluation

When we were first given our final major project I was happy to have such a free reign when it came to deciding what I wanted to do. Having always previously been giving briefs for our projects, I was unsure what to expect.

 After looking at the paperwork we were given to accompany the task, I decided straight away that I wanted to create a documentary. I had tried twice before to make a successful documentary and neither project went particularly well. Never a person to shy away from a problem, I saw this last final project as a chance to overcome my difficulties with this genre of film.

 To start with I looked at my favourite documentary directors such as Kurt Kuenne, Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield and their movies , Sicko, Bowling for Columbine, Dear Zachary and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. I felt like all of these documentaries had something in common - a personal touch.  This gave me the inspiration to create a documentary about something that was important and personal to me. I started to draw a mind-map of all the things that meant a lot to me, Snowboarding, the USA, my friends, ice-skating and my family. I also looked at the interesting people  in my life such as my parents who  want to emigrate to America, my unusual pets (ferrets), my grandfathers history and my step-sisters history of being adopted.

 The first idea I came to was a documentary about my grandfather, he had a very interesting life and although I never met him, I always felt that we would have gotten along really well due to similar interests. After his death, my grandmother discovered some family secrets on his side and shared them with us. I wanted to create a piece about the discovery of his secret life however my Grandmother was not happy to share everything on camera and therefore that idea was pushed to the side.

 The next idea I looked at was a documentary about my adopted half sister, Jackie. My father offered to raise her and her brother Paul as his own at the age of 4 and whilst she still has contact with her mother, she feels closer to our dad as he was always present in her life. Recently she discovered that her mum had been keeping secrets from her and she had another brother. I decided that for my documentary I wanted to follow my sister, who lives in Southampton,  as she found out more secrets about who her real dad was, if she and her brother were alike and more.

I started to storyboard the idea, but realised that to get a good feel to the documentary that wasn’t too acted, I needed to just create a general feel for the piece. So instead of storyboarding I decided instead to write a list of questions that I wanted to ask her.

·         How old were you when your mum left?

·         Did you ever ask about your dad?

·         What are your expectations?

These are a few examples from the list.  I sent Jackie the questions before I went to visit her, to see if she was happy to answer them all and also to see if there was anything else she wanted to include.

 Whilst conducting my research on different editing techniques, I watched a series of episodes called “weird weekends” by director Louis Theroux and was really intrigued by the way he involved himself in the situation and made it personal to him, therefore making it personal to the audience. I think that way that Theroux does this is by putting himself on camera with his subjects and really immersing himself in their daily lives.

 This personal feel is really what I was looking for in my own documentary so I took inspiration from Louis Theroux, and asked Jackie if she wouldn’t mind me accompanying her when she went to see her mum, and more poignantly to meet her real dad for the first time.  This then brought me to the title of my piece “The thing about my sister”, I feel like this allows the audience to know that the documentary would be as much about my relationship with my sister as it was about her finding out about her past.

 I travelled up to Southampton in April to see Jackie, and spent the first day of filming with her reminiscing about our dad and the silly things he gets up to. These stories made me realise how much me and Jackie had in common despite never actually living in the same house together.  I then tried to work that into filming as much as I could so as to add another aspect to the documentary.

 The set-back to this documentary came when Jackie mentioned the project to her mother. She was unhappy with the view of the piece and assumed that I would perceive her in a bad light. This unfortunately meant that unless Jackie’s mother was in a public place, there was no chance of us filming her, and so the project seemed to have hit a dead end.

 Without an alternative storyline to follow and with time running out, I decided to abandon the idea and start fresh with a new documentary. However, because of the extent of the research I had done on family dynamics and personal documentaries I wanted to keep within the same subject area.

 This is what led me to my family, and the view of families in the media. After speaking to a few of my friends, I realised that each one of them had described their family to me as odd, different and weird. I then thought about the perfect, Mum, Dad, and two children dynamic that we always see in cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad, and movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Matilda. With three siblings, two half siblings and two parents, my family seemed a complete contrast to these characters and with that realisation came my next idea.

In a very “Dear Zachary” type style, I wanted to create a documentary that showed audiences that although they may think their family is incredibly weird and different, all families are in fact the same. To do this I had to put my family, and the dynamics we have, in a spotlight. I was more excited to start on this documentary than the previous one due to their being no potentially awkward situations to deal with, and I think that this really showed in the piece.

 I asked my family to be featured and they agreed, so again I started to film. This time however I storyboarded and I feel that this was the wrong thing to do, because as I had previously feared the footage became stiff and acted. I then went back to just asking light hearted questions such as “What annoys you most about mum” and “what are Josh’s best traits” ect. I think that this method worked better, and the improvements between my storyboard and the finished piece are noticeable.

I decided to take the name of my piece from the well known Madness song “Our House” because not only was the song a favourite of my parents, but  the lyrics and beat really matched the friendly and silly nature of my family.

 I had a few set backs during filming that included older brother Sam deciding that he did not wish to be featured in the piece. It was hard to re-create some moments between my siblings that had been previously captured when we had to reshoot due to Sam being in the background but I feel that because of the nature of the piece, a few potentially “stiff” moments, went unnoticed.  Filming went quite well, with only a few minor problems like dark lighting and camera shyness from the youngest member of the cast.

 When it came to shooting the cut-away footage, I really wanted to capture the personal nature of this piece and so asked each member of the family to choose five things they wanted me to include. This allowed them to feel included in the making of the piece, and in turn made them more willing to participate in extra interviews.  I also think that this personal feel comes across in the documentary, giving the audience something to relate back to their own family.  

 When I started to edit I was unsure about how the project would be perceived, and therefore decided to add a few small titles to outline the objective of the documentary. After a couple of hours editing I encountered a problem with the computer. It decided to wipe a lot of footage and sound from the editing software I was using. This was a major problem because a majority of the footage was now unusable. After taking five minutes to decipher how it had happen, I decided that to fix the problem, I needed to just re-capture the footage. Being able to come up with a solution for the problem was a new step, one that I had previously failed to overcome when creating the other two documentary projects that didn’t go very well.

 Overall I think that my piece turned out really well, I am happy with the message that it conveys and think that it does what it was intended to do.  If I were to make “Our house in the middle of our street” again I wouldn’t storyboard at all because the difference in free-filming footage and scripted footage is very noticeable. I would also look more into different editing techniques before editing the piece,  I became very focused on the style of Kurt Kuenne in “Dear Zachary” and taking inspiration from that when my piece could possibly have benefitted from a different style.