On Thursday the 13th of May I presented my complete and final piece to the class. My original intentions were to create a documentary style short film where we explore the possibility of a fully electric future of motoring, and in my opinion I think that I did this successfully, and by looking at the results of the research survey that I carried out, this seems to be the case from the audience’s point of view too. In part one where I originally outlined the concept for my FMP, I stated that “the concept is to part the video up into different segments, this will allow me to mix between different segments while keeping them separate.” and I believe that I followed this throughout this project. The video was segmented into four different parts/sections: Rory Reid Interview (Personal Questions), BMW i3 Review, Car Cinematics and finally Rory Reid Interview (Economic Questions). I informed the audience after showing them the documentary that it had been deliberately sectioned in this way to help improve viewer retention and the majority agreed with this statement and said that it worked well.
My original intentions were to keep the production quality of the video very high, by this I mean using the best equipment available to me, also keeping the editing process to a high standard. Sometimes you see films which have been well shot but then when it comes to the editing process they lack, so I wanted to maintain this to the best quality I could. I used the best and the most high-tech equipment I could as I believed that this would best show off my capabilities. By ‘using the best equipment’ I mean for example using the Canon 800D (DSLR) on a DJI RSC2 (3-axis gimbal) instead of my mobile phone in a stabilizer. This aim and intention were met in the production process and worked very well.
I also think within the video I showed off my own style within this unit because it was a completely unrestrained and we were permitted to create whatever we wanted too.
One person within the audience had concerns about its documentary genre which I completely understood and took on board, I had always planned for my short film to be a documentary however, from the very start of this project I knew that it would loosely fill the documentary form of filmmaking, but also at the same time it closely follows it closer than it does any other form of film. I think this is mainly because of the interview sections which is the main make-up of the film and this is commonly seen in documentaries. I acknowledged this within the first part of research and planning for the FMP, I wrote; “I would class the video I am aiming to produce as a documentary as it will document the different reasons to and to not purchase an electric vehicle and how accessible they are, and will contain many key elements of a documentary (interviews). It will be of the talking head/participatory style and will border between an advert and a commercial.” As you can tell by what I previously wrote I stuck to this theory of it loosely fitting the documentary form throughout.
An obstacle that I had to overcome is that I was unable to interview anyone in person as this would be an issue with Covid-19. So instead I opted to only have one interviewee throughout the whole documentary, this was because of complications because of coronavirus but also, I believe that it was more effective only having one person as it kept the focus on their opinion, also Rory Reid the interviewee is very knowledgeable and its his job to review and research cars so he had extensive knowledge within this industry. Whereas I had originally planned to interview at car dealerships too, but these opinions would have been firstly hard to get because of coronavirus but also very opinionated from a brand standpoint as when interviewing a sales person they are still going to be trying to do their job and put the brand in a good light.
As I mentioned in Part 4, I want to produce a piece of work that I am proud of and that I am happy with and I work as hard as I can until this condition is met and this is still the case with my FMP. I would say that I enjoyed working independently too, this meant that I was able to work to my own schedule and I was never waiting on someone else before I could do something else which I found the case when working with other people, it also means that I can film on my own and do everything ‘in-house’. I kept going back to it and changing certain elements until I was left with a final product I am happy with and one that I am prepared to show and present to other people to represent the skillset I have built up. I am very happy generally with my FMP and it is a piece of work that I am extremely proud of and that I will remember for ages. The only issue which is very minor that I have with the production side of my FMP is that during the car review section there is some water on the lens of the camera, however in the conditions that we were filming in this wasn’t really possible to avoid and re-scheduling when the weather was better would have meant missing the deadline for that section, but as I just mentioned this is a very minor issue and it doesn’t take away from the content within the video and is only a very minor distraction, this was also uncontrollable from my behalf because I wasn’t the one shooting/recording. After spending over two months working to produce a video it has made me realize the amount of effort that is needed to produce a top-quality piece of work and makes me even more proud and happy because in my opinion this time and effort has paid off as I am very pleased with the final outcome.
Below you can view the feedback survey for my FMP and fill it out yourself if you wish to. There is also an excel spreadsheet with the current responses within It which you can view, I will be going through this within the evaluation section in part seven.
‘The Electric Future’ Feedback Survey
‘The Electric Future’ Feedback Survey Results
Bradley Smart 