For this subject, I was the main camera operator, which meant it was important for me to work closely with the director and producer in order to fulfil their vision for this documentary.

 

Prior to doing this project, I had not had as much experience of being a camera operator, as I would have liked. I had done bits here and there, but for the most part, I had previously taken on other roles of production. This played a big part in why I wanted to take on the role for this project, and I think it has worked out well for me. I found that the biggest help for me was having Jordan in the group. He’s a lot more experienced than me and gave me tips on things like setting up the camera as he has a great technical understanding of how cameras work. Taking on this role has helped me broaden my knowledge of cameras and has made me a bit more confident with operating them. I do however realise that there is still a lot for me to learn about the role, but I feel this has set me up well for future projects.

 

During Pre-Production, I had quite a few ideas on what our group could do for the documentary. I thought it would be hard to come up with ideas at first, but when I started to really think about it, I realised that there is a lot potential for a documentary everywhere you look. I’m quite fortunate in this sense because I still live at home, and I work two jobs, which means that I’m in contact with a lot of different people all of the time, and I’m not as confined to a small bubble as a lot of other students are. At first, I wasn’t quite thinking ‘outside-of-the-box’ enough, and I was of the mind set that our documentary had to be hard-hitting and controversial. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it meant that some of the ideas were a bit predictable and lacklustre and didn’t give enough consideration to whether or not it was possible to be done by an inexperienced student group.

 

My original idea was to interview my neighbour Wilf Mbanga, who is a well-respected journalist and also a wanted man in his native country, Zimbabwe. Being that Robert Mugabe was reinstated as the president of Zimbabwe earlier this year, I thought that it would be quite relevant to interview Mr Mbanga to get the educated views of someone who was once a friend of the tyrannical president, and who has since been labelled an enemy of the state by his homeland. I soon understood however that this was a subject too big to be undertaken by us for a number of reasons, not least of which, we wouldn’t be able to do this documentary to the best of our abilities as we do not have a lot of the required resources. Most of my other ideas had a half decent subject that hadn’t ever really been done before, for instance, the story of Edward Renyard, but I didn’t really know what we could do with them.

 

It was my idea that we eventually settled on as a group, and that was to do a documentary about ‘Bronies’. Bronies are essentially a group made up primarily of men, who are avid fans of the cartoon series ‘My Little Pony’. For me, this isn’t necessarily a new thing as I’m a fairly regular visitor to websites like Reddit, where you can find out about a lot of these strange sub-cultures. However, I soon realised that I’m in the minority, and that doing a documentary about this group would open the door and show something that a lot of other people don’t know about. With this strange group being predominantly American, I thought I would see how popular it was in the UK. After a quick search on the Internet, I found that there was a rather large UK fan base for it and saw that there were regular meetings that we might stand a possibility of attending. When we started to work on this as a group, Harry and Michaela picked up the ball and ran with it, to great effect. They instantly started networking through social sites like Facebook and Twitter and very quickly got some positive results back. I’m really happy with the documentary idea and also how well the group took to it.

 

It wasn’t long until we got an invite to go to the season 4 premiere in London. We were really pleased, and quite fortunate, that we had this invitation. We knew that we had to prepare well to make a good impression on our subjects, so we instantly started to think about the kind of questions we would ask them, and also the kind of information that we want to get back from them. I think we did well to prepare so quickly as the event was not too long after we got the invitation.

 

On the day of the event, I was initially quite nervous, as it was something I had never done before. There was a bit of pressure to do my role well as we wouldn’t get another opportunity like that. Getting there early and setting up before most of the people arrived helped me to calm my nerves. Also, with Johnny being the main editor of this piece, he didn’t have a specified role for the filming, so he was able to help me throughout the long day and we shared a bit of the load. I think the majority of filming went well. A lot of the people events attendees were told before that we would be filming them there so they were more than welcoming and were patient with any interviews. I feel that that was a major help as it allowed me to feel more comfortable when filming. I was really happy with this days filming and I feel we worked extremely well as a team. All of us were very professional and joined in with the event, which reflects the fact that we were able to make primary contacts for the larger documentary next semester.

 

For our kickstarter pitch, I believe that we should have put a bit more thought into planning it out. I think Harry did a great job of putting together a script in next to no time, but as soon as we had the script, we went straight into filming it that day without having all of us have at least one read through of it. By rushing into this, it made the whole process take much longer than it should have been. We all needed multiple takes for a lot of our lines and I think this would have been remedied if we had simply just had a read through beforehand, so that we at least had a general idea of what we were going to say. In all though, I think the idea of the pitch was quite good and after eventually getting the filming done, we had a fairly persuasive pitch presentation.

 

Throughout this whole project we have obviously been creating our own website for our production group. I’m very happy with the group pages, as they are all very informative and look professional. As for my own pages, I am pleased with what I have done with them, but I know I could have done a lot better as there are a lot more things that I could have included in there. When I first started doing my pages, I basically dedicated every Monday to being my ‘Website day’. I did this because with my timetable, it was the only really free space in which I could knuckle down and work on it. After a couple of weeks where I found this was working well for me, It soon be apparent that I couldn’t do this every week as I hadn’t taken into account the amount of other work that I had to be doing. If I was able to do my website again, I would break it down into much smaller chunks where I’d be able to work on it for an hour or so every other evening. I would have gotten far more done if I had done this from the start. I do however feel that the work that I have done is of a good quality as it is quite in depth. There are some things I know that I may have written too much about where it perhaps wasn’t necessary, but I feel this helped me to understand better what it was I was talking about. I had a lot of fun researching for this website. It introduced to some photojournalists that I instantly admired, and I have written about some of them in my photojournalism page.

 

In all, I think the work that I have done on this project has been of a pretty good standard. I have learnt a lot from this module and I look forward to doing more of the same in the future. I will hopefully take what I have learnt into other projects, as I need to make improvements on managing my workload and giving everything the time it deserves. When I start doing this correctly, I feel as though documentary could be a good way for me to go in my third year, and possibly further.