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Individual Critical Reflection

   ‘Fragile Focus’ is a documentary film company based in Winchester, Hampshire. Containing 6 crew members we have each taken on a specific role within the group, however when researching our idea we worked together as a whole, yet also working individually researching topics. When planning a concept to focus our documentary on, we all wanted to create a topical project that would be relevant to our audience. Some of the idea’s we came across were ‘Human Euthanasia’, ‘A Life at the Docks’, Mass Commute and ‘A Life of the Homeless’. When pitching our idea’s to our lecturer, unfortunately he shot down all of them apart from ‘A Life at the Docks’. Therefore we went straight ahead at researching this topic. We wanted to find out about the day to day lives of the workmen at the docks, and the daily situations they have to deal with. As the majority of the docks are owned by the council, we had to get permission from them to film there. One of the e-mails we sent is applied below:

Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Natalie Markall and I am writing on behalf of my production team Fragile Focus. We are a student film producation team currently based in Winchester and we're second year students. For our second year, our coursework is to produce a short documentary on a project of our choice, and after reading your website, we are very interested in creating a documentary on the 'Life on the Docks'. The documentary would consist of filming employees on their day to day jobs, the trouble they come across and what they enjoy about the docks.

We really hope to hear from you soon,

Natalie Markall
Student of University of Winchester

   Sadly, all the companies we contacted at the Southampton docks were not willing to participate in our documentary. We then tried Portsmouth docks, yet got the same reply. At this point in week 7, we really started to panic. We had a group meeting to discuss other idea’s and sent our lecturer and e-mail stating our new idea’s and to our relief, he liked them all. However the one that stuck out the most to the group was the concept of taxi drivers. Martin Wilde had been into contact with his local taxi driver, a Pakistani man named Mohammed who had come over from Pakistan to England to become a taxi driver, so we put all our efforts into researching the lives of taxi drivers. We met up with Mohammed in week 9 to talk about the concept and style of the documentary, asking him questions about his background story. Although Mohammed’s story is highly interesting, we would incorporate his story as a background story into our documentary, focusing the main concept on taxi drivers as a whole. As Mohammed has his own taxi company, we already have permission to film with secondary subjects. To be more productive as a group, It would of been best to research a backup plan when investigating into the docks, as when we were declined from the docks, we lost a lot of time researching into more topics.

   As mentioned above, we could have managed our time better by having a back-up plan to start off with. As a group, we were so focused on researching one concept; we weren’t prepared when they declined our offer. On the other hand, we were very good at keeping on time when set deadlines for research. As a group we kept into contact with each other 24/7 by creating a Facebook group to transfer all our ideas and work into. This was a quick and easy way to communicate which worked well with our group. After meeting with our primary, Mohammed, we were able to get a grasp on the structure of the documentary. Most of his journey’s take place late at night, therefore we would really need to think about lighting and sound as filming in a taxi at night time may cause many problems. We also need to consider the ethics within our documentary, starting off by looking at Ofcom rules. An example of one of the rules we have to follow is: Rule 2.3 Context and Information/ Offensive Language: We have to ensure that within our documentary, offensive language is kept to a minimum and we do not discriminate the ethical challenges are documentary may pursue.

   My role within the group was Marketing Manager. It is my role and responsibility to aware the public of our documentary by creating visually interesting sources of promotion. For example, creating posters will be the first promotion material the public will see on the documentary therefore I need to make sure it is consistent in showing our theme and style of the documentary. Other promotional material I will include will be: A short Trailer showing short clips from the introduction, and middle of the documentary showing the genre and style of the documentary and also making the viewer want to find out the conclusion to the documentary. Although my role is mostly independent, I will also be working closely with the producer to ensure we keep the same traditions throughout the stages of production. Altogether, we worked really well as a group. With regular group meetings, and group discussions on Facebook we were able to discuss the issues with our documentary and we worked as a team to get these solved as quick as possible.

   By meeting Mohammed in Week 9, we were able to talk to him about the style of the documentary. We asked him many questions about his youth and why he moved over to England so we can prepare the questions we want to ask him when filming, and decide on where we want to film to best represent his answers. From researching the different modes within documentary, i.e. observational, participatory, we were able to pick a style of documentary to focus our documentary on, therefore incorporating this style into our promotional material. For example, as you can see in the poster below, the ‘Cabbie’ is in the bright yellow colour, referencing to New York Taxi’s. The grey background colour goes alongside the colours of our production logo and also represents the seriousness of the documentary. This is also representative in our YouTube page.

    To advance our technical skills, we looked at various documentary films, analysing the different technical skills such as sound, lighting and camera angles. As most of our filming will take place in dimly lit areas, we would need to use small, low lights to lighten up the subjects faces as these are the most important to capture. We want our documentary to have a very stylistic look. To create this look we want to use gliding shots to show the movement of the car, which will also introduce a location to the film. When looking at sound, it’ll be important to use a boom microphone to avoid losing the subjects voice to the ambiance of outside the car.

For our 15 minute presentation, I will be taking on the role of introducing our sources of promotion to the audience. I am going to bring examples of the drafting process of the on shoot flyers and posters which I will hopefully get feedback to create the final project. Also, I will explain the themes and style behind our promotional material, talking about why we chose this design.