For our documentary I am the director and the research, this meant that I worked very closely with Harry, the producer, as well as the rest of the team, telling them what it was I envisioned for our VJPJ.

 

            During all of the pre-production I took a lead role with Harry to help him with all of the organisation and research into our documentary. Our first idea was about competitive eating within the UK as it is growing. This meant that I had to find someone who takes it seriously in Britain like they do in America. This proved to be very difficult, as there is yet to be someone who seems to be truly into the sport. After all of my research our idea changed to the world of Bronies. This gave me a lot more to research however this time Harry became much more aware of how much we needed to find out about them and helped.

 

            With our research I found that Bronies are strongly featured all over the Internet, this meant that the easiest way for us to contact them would be through social media. Once again Harry and I took control of the creating, designing and posting on the pages. We made a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. Later on Joe created an Intagram account.

 

            At first I made sure I posted on our Twitter every hour on weekdays from 10 till 6. This kept up a continuous full of information, which was more likely to be seen by our possible primaries, unfortunately over time this became more difficult and we haven’t posted anything for a long time. I wish we had kept it up. Our YouTube looked very bare, as the only thing we had was a short soundtrack video for drama. I then thought it would be a good idea to post our Master Class projects onto our YouTube as well, so that our audience could see our work and believe that we are constantly making new things. For Facebook I found it best to all get a small following of people who are interested in us and perhaps not our topic just so that it looked like we had a fan base building for others wanting to know of our film. I then took this into account for our Twitter and got in contact with someone who could give us up to 5,000 followers within a few hours. For twitter I also started to follow Bronies so that they saw us. This included following an account called ‘Brony Retweet’, which re-tweeted anything to do with Bronies. I tried to get their attention as they had 3,955 followers. This meant that whenever our tweets were re-tweeted by them we were reaching a massive audience.

 

            After this we started to get a small following but still enough for us to understand more of their community and what we could possibly film. With all of this contact with the community I started to get a vision of what I wanted from our documentary. My first impressions of Bronies were that they were quite strange and odd people however with my research and communication I found that they were not as they are first seen. They do a lot of charity work within their community and have a strong opinion on friendship. I therefore wanted to capture this within our short documentary. As my vision grew for the documentary I told the rest of the group so they knew what it was we were concentrating on when filming. I believe I conveyed what I wanted well to the group as the film we needed up with reflected what I wanted.

 

            Over time Harry managed to get us into the Season 4 Premiere of My Little Pony in London. This meant the possibility of meeting over 150 Bronies within one location doing something that they love. This was a huge break through for our documentary, as at this point we did not have a strong primary that could take our film forward, which means everything. With this opportunity we knew that it meant we only had one chance to film and had only one day to get everything we wanted. To do this correctly we needed to portray ourselves correctly and make sure we were organised with our questions and what we wanted to film.

 

            Harry and I wrote the questions we wanted to ask and on the day we would mingle with everyone as much as possible and then take it in turns to interview people. I’m not an extremely confident person so I was both excited and terrified for the day.

 

            We got to the location before the event started. This was to get ourselves set up and to have a short meeting with the organisers. This meeting involved a list of questions. I took the role of writing up all answers to the questions while Harry spoke to the organiser about the day.

 

            By the time people started to arrive we were prepared, having put our fliers on every table explaining what we would be doing during the day. These fliers were extremely useful as it pointed out who didn’t want to be apart of the film and people who were more than happy to be interviewed.

 

            The beginning of the day was extremely hectic with lots of extremely excited people. At first I fault slightly useless. After giving the crew some direction and going round collecting release forms from people the crowd took control and left me with little to do but wait for the correct opportunities to talk to people. With the crowd it was also extremely difficult to get to the other members in the group as we were all constantly on the move to get a nice piece of footage or photo. I had a lot of faith and confidence in the roles the group were playing so I knew they would get what I wanted and make good decisions on their own. This does not mean to say that I left them full control on the day. Whenever I was near them I told them to create the shots I imagined.

 

            As the day calmed down and the crowd became quieter Harry and I were able to take people to one side and interview them. The questions we had came in useful as a guideline for what we wanted to know, however when interviewing them a lot of it came to you from their responses. I think that this made them more comfortable with us as it was not a strict interview but a smooth conversation. With them being more at ease we were able to get some great responses from them. I really enjoyed this part of the day and believed this is where I was most useful.

 

           When it came to editing Johnny took full control. He is an extremely confident editor and had an idea in his head from what we had discussed with each other. I left him to sort through all of the footage while I sorted through the images and edited 40 that I wanted to use.

When the VJPJ was in a good place we got together as a group to discuss ideas for the ‘KickStarter’ video. As a group we came up with some really good ideas. When the script was complete I looked over what was written and made a few changes to make it seems more like it was coming from us personally than a written essay.

 

            When it was filmed I took the role of editor due to Johnny still editing our VJPJ. I enjoyed doing a bit of editing for this project, as this is something I enjoying doing yet could be better at. While I was editing, Johnny was on the computer next to me therefore helped me with any questions I had. For the ‘KickStarter’ I also got to edit together a montage of footage from the day as well as try out the Ken Burns effect, which I had yet to use personally.

 

            The Red Cherry Production website was made by Harry, however as soon as the website was up and running I wanted to get something on each page. Knowing that I had a lot of deadlines within Week 12 I wanted to make sure my website was at a good standard before meeting the mad rush of work. At first I attempted this by adding one thing to each page at a time. I later found it easier and better to concentrate on a single page at a time. Doing the work quite early on for the website made things easier for me in the long run however if I could do it again I would not be complacent by the fact I was so far ahead of the rest of my group and instead would keep adding until there was nothing else to say.

 

            I believe I executed my roles well. If we could go back to the day of filming I would have a lot more input to what exactly was being film instead of feeling out of my depth. I would have liked to have more control however due to the situation I simply couldn’t and this made me feel a little bit lost in my role. However in the end I believe our final project came out really well and I’m really pleased with them both. I’m looking forward to the next semester to film more of the Brony community with my group.