Evaluation

 Here is the evaluation section for my short documentary, "30 DAY FITNESS".

The task was to create a 5 minute long documentary, focusing on a topic of our choice. I chose fitness at home. This was because we were filming the documentary in full lockdown rules, and so had to be filmed at home. Creating a documentary at home was the biggest challenge I have ever undertaken. Of course filming on location is always a challenge in itself, at least you have a crew to rely on. Filming a solo project was tough for me. It meant that I did not have a camera man, no location manager, no supervision. Because of this, many issues were often overlooked, and many ideas did not come to me until after production. All filming equipment needed to be set up by myself, and all the imagery had to be handheld. 

This was not ideal if I am honest. I wish to shoot my doc with a shot order of - handheld, steady, handheld, steady -  and so on.

This is a very conventional trait in documentary filmmaking, and it was the style that I had previously intended. The reason this was not in the Pre-Production was because I knew that the shoot would be in lockdown conditions and so would have to be a solo shoot. This was actually good for me. I had experience working with a production team and needed the experience creating a piece on my own. It was an interesting eye opener for me. Not having a second perspective on the narrative, not having a helping hand at all. It made me come to a realization that these shoots require more work than I thought. And that was why the project failed. I had massively underrated the workload, and bit off more than I could chew. This was an issue in a coursework sense, but not physically. I am now aware of the importance of teamwork. And this was a realization that came to light during an early stage. However, by the time the realization set in, I had already invested my budget on the project. This is where I realized the importance of first ideas. Instead of jumping headfirst into a project, I needed to weigh up my initial ideas and fully develop them. I now know that thinking about the oncoming issues beforehand is a useful step in the planning process, and will help avoiding them so much easier.

The preexisting negative opinions on the doc were addressed, and so I am currently unaware of the audience opinions. I am hopeful that it is positive, but I cannot say for sure. I am not happy with the outcome, and I wish that the audience do not feel the same way. However, I would understand why there may be further criticism. I admit that the last half is a lazy attempt at a conclusion. But, even so, this took me a lot of work to accomplish; And I spent many sleepless nights working through the edit. This is mostly the blame of my computer. Render times were extremely slow on my system, meaning that there was a 10 minute wait between the render of items. Lets say I was importing a text header. It would take a 30 seconds to drag the effect into the timeline, and then would take a further half an hour to render all the necessary drop shadows and animations. Davinci Resolve is a powerful software and even a mid end computer struggled to render so much at a time. I think that next time, I will edit the piece in stages. Every scene will be edited in its own project and all the exports stitched together in another. This way, my system will only be rendering the tracks that I am working on a time.

Do I wish I chose a different Idea?

Yes, I do. Even though I learned a lot during this one, I believe that a different project idea would have been much easier, cheaper, and overall successful. I put an unnecessary amount of time and money into the project. I feel that an easier project would have gotten me a better result with less work involved.