Production Notes

Working on my video portion of my portrait of Janet allowed me to learn about how I've grown as a media maker. It also helped me better understand the pre-production, production and post production stages of media development. 

My Preproduction Story Board

            I am very proud of the work I did on this piece. Compared to my video piece in media 150, my portrait of Janet was much more successful.  In this piece my edits were tighter, my sound was cleaner, my video was steadier and my shots showed more variation.  However, there were some things I could improve upon. In this piece I relied on a good amount of archival footage to tell the story of Janet.  However some of my archival footage was at a lower resolution quality than the footage I shot. I realize now that this could be jarring to my audience thus taking them out of the story I am trying to tell as a filmmaker.

A portion of the archival footage I collected over the course of this project

            Looking back, I think I could have made my video better by working on the visual shock caused by the drastically lower quality archival footage. I could have done this by cuing the audience visually, that what they were seeing was an archival shot. I could have done this in many ways. Some examples of how to deal with this problem include: Shrinking the video and putting a border around it, setting the video to black and white, putting up a date/location of where and when the footage was shot.

            In the making of this project I learned a lot about the process of non-fiction filmmaking. I now know that a large portion of the process of such a production is not only shooting and editing material but also finding and gathering material. During this process, I tried to push myself to use open source material to prepare myself for what I would have to do as a professional filmmaker in order to avoid copyrighting issues. I learned that finding such archival material is actually a very long and complicated process.