Sunday, May 17, 2009

Evaluation of the final product

Teenage Binge Drinking Documentary

 

Our teenage binge-drinking documentary is aimed at 16 to 18 year olds. Our mission was to shock, teach and show teenagers what binge drinking can cause to you’re brain and body, thereby, if possible, stopping them from doing so in the future. I am the editor/producer of our product, I was the cameraman for all of our interviews and I made sure that the sound was being properly recorded. I used my IMac to produce the documentary, the focus group, both of our commentaries and the making of/out-takes, and then I burned it all onto a DVD using IDVD.

 

I believe that we have managed to fulfill our mission brief because the documentary is gripping and sad due to the music and the choice of downloaded videos and our audience response showed us that we have achieved our aims: teaching teenagers about binge drinking, aiming at 16-18 year olds and we showed them all the consequences that we found disturbing, we did this through graphs, images and through our interview with the doctor. We highlighted the useful information to make the images clear and we always stated where our resources came from. We researched binge drinking all over the Internet by searching the key words.

 

I found that the interviewee’s were perfect because of how they expressed they’re own experience and knowledge on camera, specifically the doctor Brian Heasley and the ex-chief of police. I learnt that its not so easy for people to do this, but Giacomo and I made it easy for the interviewees to express themselves in a good way, we were as helpful as possible.

 

Brian Heasley was a great help with our project because of what he knew, he’s had to deal with drunken teens over and over again and he taught us a great deal about binge drinking. Zak Day as an interviewee worked out perfectly because we didn’t want the documentary to get boring, his stories and feelings, I find, help persuade the teenage audience that things that happen, could have been hindered. Since he is a teenager it shows another side of binge drinking. The extra footage that we filmed at a bar/restaurant of the actors drinking was a spontaneous idea, which was a great help to completing our documentary, I think it works well because they get drunk and take drugs which is exactly what Brian says will happen, and it causes the most deaths.

 

The re-enactment of the car crash was well done, it was one of our first ideas and it turned out to be perfect. We could of filmed it much better if we had a camera with a light attached to it or if the camera was on a tripod, also it would of looked better if we could have driven the car right into the tree, but since it was our friends car and he was kind enough to fake the crash we didn’t ask for more, in addition to that it would have been to expensive to crash the car. Under the circumstances I think it looks as realistic as possible. We couldn’t have done what we did without the help from Adrian Thomson, Jackson Vogel and Volker Kaufhold, mainly because they were our transport, but they also were actors and helped us find useful footage.

 

A weakness is the first clip of Zak Day in the casita, it is the only clip that has bad quality sound, and this was because we had forgotten to turn on the microphones, an avoidable mistake in the future. Also, in some interviews, for example when the ex-police is walking along the pier, you can hear Giacomo say “si”, we couldn’t take the sound away because the interviewee was talking at the same time, next time we know that we should both never talk while the other person is talking even if you feel like you should acknowledge what they are saying.

 

Another weakness, the second clip, which is the CCTV footage of people fighting in the introduction, is too long; a couple students at our school commented on this after we screened it and passed out questionnaires. Once we received the questionnaires we realized that the students still didn’t completely understand the definition of binge drinking, therefore we added the definition at the very beginning of our documentary. We were also told that when the long-term facts scale inwards and rotate that it was hard to read, therefore we decreased the amount of rotation. The comments we received from our peers are presented in unit 2. As well as this evaluation I have recorded myself commenting on our product, you can find it on the DVD that came with these Portfolios.

 

We also wanted to cut out the images of the car and bike crash in china out since it was not really related to our subject, another reason for doing this is so that we can send it to BBC, it has to be shorter and we would also have to cut out the BBC News extract. When we filmed the doctor at Can Misses we had to use the camcorder from school as camera 2, if you look closely you can see there are lines on the side of his face, this is when the video file is interlaced. We couldn’t get rid of it. Next time I would make sure we can use one of our own camera’s as a second camera.

 

As a team, I find that Giacomo and I work very well together, we have different minds but we know what we want and we know that together we can achieve our goal; if I had to do this again I would do it with Giacomo.

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