LO6.2 - Final Evaluation | Jwhiteual132024

LO6.2
Use evaluative and reflective skills to make decisions for a creative media production

Intro

To begin my final evaluation for the final major project I would first like to reflect on what this project has meant to me. For the last 16 weeks, this has been all I’ve been thinking about, day in, day out – it’s been a lot. Despite it being a lot of work, and over the longest period I’ve ever had to work on one thing for, the outcome has been something to be proud of.

Though this proudness is obviously linked to the final product, it is not just that. Looking back at where I was at the start of these 16 weeks, my confidence is the biggest thing that has changed. I have had to work with external people, on a sensitive topic, representing those with a disorder not very well known about, all whilst still trying to remember the basics of filmmaking and produce something comprehensive to watch.

I think two other core skills that I have improved upon over this time are organisation and the ability to structure both my work flow. Due to the duration of this project, and the volume of work needed to be complete, I would say that I have done very well to keep myself organisation and controlled with what I do. Even when I found myself falling behind, I kept working hard, logically completing specific tasks before others, and overall thinking everything through with a logical mind.

This project has meant a lot to me, specifically due to what I produced, as the skills I learnt as a consequence of this are priceless: they will mean so much for me and my progression as a filmmaker.

To begin the full evaluation, I’m going to start before the final major project even started, in unit 12 – specialist study…

Impact of my specialist study

The purpose of unit 12 was to help inform the decisions I make in unit 13, particularly the initial ideas stage. It make sense to research and produce an essay around a specific topic or format that you may want to take forward into unit 13 – so this is exactly what I did. I have always loved the world of visual effects and the immersive effect they can have on an audience member, so this is what I focused my essay on. With this, I had the idea and concept that I was going to be including VFX into my final major project. To some extent this is definitely true.

Having completed a whole study on VFX and learnt an unbelievable amount of information about the subject, I went into unit 13 under the impression that this was going to be my main focus. It played a huge role in directing my initial ideas mindmaps as this was what I was trying to focus the project around. Whether this is the correct/most efficient thing to do is another matter, but nevertheless, I really wanted to use VFX. My initial ideas mindmap can be seen in image below, or by clicking the link to see it in more detail. https://xmind.app/m/NuKtPL/

To prove how much VFX meant to me at this stage in the process, an entire node was dedicated to it when thinking about how I might be able to use it in a film format. The reason I decided to drive my film ideas through VFX is that common uses for VFX are to create fantasy effects (such as superhero powers). Though this wasn’t what I actually ended up doing, it’s interesting to look back on the approach I took with my thinking. After creating this mind map I picked my favourite 3 ideas and thought about these more in depth – this is where I came across the capabilities of the idea I ended up choosing.

What I ended up finding is that there was actually a way to bring VFX into a documentary, not for fantasy effect, but instead for representation effect – allowing me to visually show the effect misophonia has on those with it. Though I understand that there are no literal visual effects that occur in real life, by using them in my documentary, I could dramatize it and express the negative effects it has, inducing my audience to feel the intended response from watching. This is evidence of my specialist study impacting on my FMP – it influenced the decisions I made regarding the content of my piece and how I might want to express what I want to say.

Despite saying all of this, the end result of my documentary doesn’t really reflect this so much. I ended up changing the concept of my documentary from a visual effects heavy documentary to one more focused on the personal stories told by interviewees – more like a conventional documentary style. The reason for this switch was honestly due to the fact that VFX took too much time and I had better opportunities with the people I was able to meet online and have a part of the documentary. Though this change was made, as of writing, I just want to say that this decision was probably the best decision I could have made for the production as a whole: I think it turned out better than I could have imagined. Through learning about how long VFX can take in my specialist study, but still wanting to produce it, I made the compromise to use it in a specific area of the documentary, and only for a short amount. Getting the opportunity to create a documentary for 16 weeks meant I couldn’t not take the chance of including something that I had a passion with, so this was important for me. This is another example of my specialist study impacting my FMP – it influenced the logistical decisions I made regarding the creative capabilities I had.

What I will say is that though the specialist study may not have had as much impact as it could have had regarding the influence it had on me and my FMP, it has provided me with a lot of information that I can take forward into the future. This information will be particularly useful for me because I am studying Post-Production and VFX at university, so there’s a high chance that I will be a step ahead of others on the course, further being able to develop my skills to a high standard. A specific example from my specialist study that I think will be useful for me in the future is that I was able to learn a lot about the professional practices those working with VFX use. Keeping up to date with industry techniques is a vital skill that employers will be looking for – they’re not going to be wanting to explain what to do to just another new gear in the machine of filmmaking.

Impact of Specialist Study

Your intentions

My Intentions

After coming from unit 12 into unit 13 FMP, my original intentions for the production were that I wanted to include visual effects in some way. However, looking on from this fact, there was another factor that drove my initial ideas too. This factor was that, though it might sound very vague, I wanted to create something with purpose and meaning. Though I understand that technically every media product has some sort of meaning and it can all be interpreted to mean something, I wanted to create something with a clear and distinct meaning that the audience were easily able to learn from and take forward in life. Along with this, as I wanted to educate an audience, I knew that my target audience was going to be broad. I found that understanding the basic principles of my target audience at this stage was very useful when thinking about whether the ideas I were coming up with would be suitable or not.

To begin, I will discuss the initial ideas I had, and why I made the decision I made to go ahead with the idea I chose. My very initial ideas, and therefore the ideas that were heavily impacted by the initial intentions I had for the project, can be seen through the link here https://xmind.app/m/NuKtPL or image below.

I essentially took the initial ideas in two different ways, purpose/meaning and VFX. As you may be able to tell, these were the two intentions I had for the production. This is evidence of my intentions having a great effect on the ideas I produced. Expanding off of the purpose nodes I ventured mostly into documentaries, as these are literally designed for the purpose of educating an audience, so it makes sense. These ideas include issues in the world I would personally like to be able to represent and bring awareness to; disabilities/disorders that I think are underrepresented; and more inspirational style docs that aimed to make an audience member feel passionately about a specific subject.

On the other side of the mindmap I discuss the VFX ideas I had – these were all film ideas as VFX is usually used to create fictional effects, and that doesn’t fit with the realism of a documentary. Ideas from here included a superhero suffering from their powers; fantasy alien stories; and a film about schizophrenia. I took inspiration from my documentary ideas when thinking about the schizophrenia idea, as it has a similar link to the idea of spreading awareness about a disorder.

It can be seen that all of the ideas I was able to generate have links with VFX and/or meaning in some way, but it wasn’t until after, when I starting to delve deeper into specific ideas that I ended up making my final choice for the idea I was going to take forward.

The reason as to why I chose to make the specific idea I ended up choosing was ultimately due to how personal the topic is. My brother has discovered he has misophonia since 2020, and over the past 4 years I’ve been able to recognise the huge effect it has had on his life. It doesn’t help that Covid19 also occurred during this time, so this only made it much worse for him. My mother has been the one who has researched all about it and pushed to try and receive help, but with the NHS as whole having very little to no knowledge about it, only specific groups of people were available. It's crazy to me how such a detrimental disorder is not known by people, and I too was like this before learning about it from my brother, so I decided to go ahead with this idea to try and change it.

Furthermore, the opportunities that this idea had were actually really high, and they fitted super well with the intentions I had for the production I had as a whole. I’m super glad with the decision I ended up making and I’m proud that I have been able to represent and bring some attention to a newly learnt about, not very talked about, disorder.

The overall goal I was aiming to achieve was to spread awareness about the disorder. I aimed to do this by showing the impact it has on a person’s life and how you can support someone who has it. Saying it in that order is important, because by showing the effect it has on someone (scene 1 mini film + personal stories) I am able to gain empathy from the audience. At this stage the audience are feeling bad about the situations those with misophonia face in life, and the idea is that at this point, the are wanting to hear less about the negatives, and more about how they can help/any positives. This empathy, if I have been able to gain the preferred reading, is ‘used against them’ to make them feel more engaged in questioning these positives such as how they can help. This is a great example that expresses the creative decisions I made regarding structure in the documentary

Another goal of mine for the creation of this documentary was to accurately represent those with misophonia. It’s a really personal topic for a lot of people, and due to the lack of knowledge about the disorder by professionals, it’s the people who have it that are going to have the most knowledge about it. I didn’t want it to be the case that when I published the video, I would get people with misophonia suggesting that the wrong topics were talked about or the topics that were talked about were not well done and better things could have been said.

The question to answer now is, was I successful at achieving my goals? To answer this question I am going to look at the feedback I got from the survey I sent out with the video to those people on Facebook who either have misophonia, or are greatly affected by it. The image below shows one of the questions in the survey that highlights whether the audience member feels more informed about misophonia. The responses from here will determine whether I’ve been able to effectively spread awareness of the disorder.

The responses from this question suggest, very positively, that I was in fact able to spread awareness. This is really nice to see, once again making me feel proud of the product I’ve been able to produce. Though there is a comment suggesting that I did not make them feel more informed about misophonia, they suggest that they already know all there is to know. Despite this person not being my target audience, as they already know about misophonia, this person did suggest that they thoroughly enjoyed the documentary, this can be seen in the image below. This shows that though they didn’t learn anything, they still thought the documentary was effective at it’s purpose.

Now that I’ve been able to understand that I was able to achieve the original intention of creating a media product with meaning, I will now move onto looking if I was able the same with VFX.

Obviously, the first thing to address is that the original plan of including VFX scenes did not happen, and I instead condensed the idea down to just include it within the first scene. However, even this is not entirety true: I actually backed out of including VFX as a whole during the preproduction stage as I didn’t think I had enough time and/or, creatively, it wouldn’t fit. Despite this, gladly, I returned back to the idea during the post production stage, and included an overlapping, visually overwhelming shot at the end of the scene. I think it worked really well, and I’m super happy with how it turned out, but I’ll now have a look at how the audience responded to the this scene which included this VFX.

What I can determine from this is that scene 1 was well done as they all said what I think. The fact that they are saying what I think is super positive as it shows they have gained the preferred reading. The best comment here is ‘Yes it was effective. Slightly difficult to watch but I think that’s the point?’, it perfectly sums it up and highlights the effectiveness of the close of shots, overlaying sounds and, returning to my original intentions, the VFX. Though the VFX were not as far complicated and extreme as I had originally planned, the fact I was able to create an engaging scene that lead the audience members to gain a preferred reading shows that I made the right creative decisions.

Overall, I think the intentions for my FMP had played a huge role in the final production. Though they weren’t exactly as I had originally planned, plans never go as you expect, and in fact, the changes I made I think were actually really positive, leading me to produce a better documentary as a whole. I will speak more about the decisions I made shortly when I delve deeper into the problems I solved during the production of my documentary.

Problem Solving

Though overall I would say that my production was a success and it went really well, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have to face problems and overcome them in order to get into a position where I can say this. Over the past 16 weeks I have had some many decisions to make and different tasks to do, all whilst working entirely on my own, so it’s understandable as to why I ran into so many problems. These different problems can be categorised into 5 main areas. I will be taking the opportunity I have now to discuss a selection of the main problems within these 5 categories.

Creative Problems

Perhaps the largest creative problem that I faced in my production was that at one point, one of my interviewees not wanting to have his face on screen in the documentary. Luckily, this was made clear early on in the production, meaning I had time to plan and overcome this problem. One approach that I could have taken was to not include him at all, and only accept people into the documentary if they agree to their face being on screen. The reason for doing this is to keep a conventional and cohesive style. However, there were 2 issues with this. Firstly, logistically, it would have been hard to find another person willing to be a part of the documentary who has misophonia and is okay with filming in their home. Secondly, creatively, I wanted Eddie to be a part of the production. Having lived with him my whole life and seen him change due to his misophonia, I know that he has a lot to say, and I know that there are great opportunities with having him as a part of the production. Therefore, I decided against them, and kept him in the production.

Now that I had made the decision to keep him in the production, I then had to think about how I could represent him on screen. There were different options open to me such as using an AI character to represent him as a person, or simply using narration over a series of relevant b-roll footage, but I decided with another option – an animated audio waveform. Audio waveforms make it clear that Eddie is only using audio recording and the audience aren’t anticipating to see him. Due to the fact he is the youngest, the use of an audio waveform also seems like a legitimate choice to protect his identity, so it doesn’t feel out of place at all. I used a warm orange and a slight glow on the animation to induce a positive initial reaction to his voice and ‘character as a whole’. I tried to think about semiotics and the different ways in which the colour of the waveform will make an impact upon how the audience interpret the way in which Eddie and how he is perceived. I think the orange fits very suitability and does it’s job at giving Eddie a positive personality without having is face on screen.

During my audience feedback stage of the production, I had a lady at the End of Year Show state that she connected with Eddie the most on screen, and she felt really sorry for him. This was because of his young voice and not being able to see him. I suppose this is not something I had actually thought about in the moment, but shows that my creative choice to include Eddie because I knew he would say good things, and the creative decisions regarding the audio waveform visuals on screen, were very successful.

Another, smaller, creative problem that I had to overcome was that the lighting in Judith’s interviews often changed throughout the clips due to natural lighting being the main lighting in the scene. This natural lighting dimmed and got brighter very often, meaning that if I wanted to cut in and out of her clips, the lighting would drastically change and look very off putting.

To overcome this issue, in the edit, I used the comparison view tool and selected a reference frame for the tool. This tool would then make the clip I have selected, look as close to the reference frame as possible. This tool helped to solve this creative problem as I now had clips with very similar colour tones throughout, making for a much more enjoyable and pleasurable viewing experience. The images below showcase the before and after of this.

Before

After

Logistical Problems

The largest logistical problem that I faced during the production was filming with Tom. I tried really hard to film with Tom in person, but we (me and Tom) kept hitting walls in the plan to do so, and it just wasn’t possible unfortunately. Looking at the final production now, this is not to say that creatively it made a huge impact as I think what he said is more important than any visuals and sound quality, but at the time, it felt like a big deal.

I will now quickly list the logistical problems that stopped us from filming in person:

I don’t have a car to drive
He lives two and a half hours away
The location we originally planned to film at was 2 hours away
Our half terms were at different times, meaning we had some miscommunication of dates over email
He went away with his family for the first week of his half term – this was the time I had thought we were originally filming
He was only available after 16:30
The location we were going to film at would shut at 5
Any other locations that we could have filmed at were too expensive and still resulted in a few of the same problems

As you can see, there were a lot of logistical problems in the way of what I was trying to achieve, and despite the desperate attempts I made at trying to change locations and times, time kept on creeping up on me and I had to overcome the issue with simply doing the interview online.

Despite it might seem like I was unsuccessful to fully overcome this problem, the attempts I made and the lessons I learnt from this experience of a problem is probably more valuable than overcoming it at all. As I said, creatively I think the interview still turned out great so I’m not bothered about this at all. What I can take away now is that filming in person with someone does not have a flexible job, and there’s no budget in order to pay the person for their time is very difficult and logistical decisions should be fully thought through. I think that with enough time we could have eventually figured out a time and place to film in person, but as I had a deadline, and to be honest, just as any other media practitioner would too, I had to make a compromise.

Technical Problems

Technical problems fit into both the creative and logistical problem categories but are more specific to the equipment that I used for the making of the production. Over the past 13 units I have learnt an immense amount of skills regarding the equipment, but despite this, I’m not perfect, and I’m definitely not a professional quite yet, so I still faced a few technical problems. Despite saying this, nearly all of these problems were very minor, so I will just discuss the main one I had.

The problem was that the radio microphone was not built just as I was about to film. I was setting up for Judith’s interview, and for some reason, I had never actually checked upon the equipment inside of the box. I had assumed that the microphone I used at college, the one I had built, was the same one I had taken home, but this was evidently not the case. A picture of what I saw just as I was going to film can be seen in the image below.

Logistically, this was a nightmare because it had set me back on my schedule as I then had to spend the time reading the manual and understanding how to construct the microphone receiver stand and attach it onto the top of the camera. Creatively, I could not start the film process at all because I needed to capture audio, and for the audio to sound coherent throughout all of the in-person interviews, I wanted to use the same, best quality microphone. To overcome this problem, I took my time, didn’t panic, and read through the instructions carefully to ensure I didn’t do anything wrong. The worse thing I could have done was gotten annoyed at myself for not setting it up the day before and testing it, so I just had to be methodical about it.

To add to this problem, I then ran into another one when trying to get the receiver to connect with the microphone. I had the interviewee sat, ready to go, but I could not get the microphone working. After a few attempts at turning it off and back on again, reconnecting it with the connection buttons it eventually worked.

What I was able to learn from this experience is that you should never forget to check up on your equipment before you go and use it the next day. After this problem occurred, I proceeded to check up on my equipment, the batteries, connections and settings every night before filming. This meant I didn’t have to face any similar issues like this again.

Besides from this main one I didn’t have any other major problems. What I will say is that because of the experience I’ve had with equipment over the past 2 years, I’ve definitely had less and less technical issues as the projects go on. This is great because it shows my confidence and skills with using equipment increasing the more I use it.

Project management problems

I’m actually quite pleased with how I have been able to plan out and prepare my project considering the scale of it. As I have said, this is the largest project I have worked on, so there were a lot of tasks that needed to be planned out and given mini deadlines in order for me to complete everything by the final deadline on the 24thMay. I think the most useful document I produced in order to help the management of my project go so well was the production timetable, and then the gantt chart for the post production stage. Both of these served great use in ensuring I know what I’m doing and when.

However, I did encounter one major issue – I had originally planned to be filming with Eddie at the start of half term, but he did not want to answer the questions. Whether it was due to it being a personal topic, or if he just didn’t want to be a part of it now, I suddenly had, in the middle of the recording, Eddie wanting to stop and leave the documentary. This was a huge problem at the time as I had one of my key interviewees wanting to drop out of the documentary. I put it down to it being a sensitive topic and him feeling quite embarrassed/overwhelmed to actually be talking about it in person, so decided to leave him to think about it, and come back to him in a week or two’s time.

Thankfully, after being able to talk about the minimum expectations he has to give for the documentary, and going through the context of everything once again to ensure he was comfortable with where his voice is going, he wanted to give it another go. From there, I was then able to set a date to record with him and I got a really great interview with him.

I used key skills such as planning and time management when deciding how long to give him to think about it, and deciding on a new date to plan on. I also thought about what position I was putting him in, and how it might make me feel talking about a topic such as this, hence why I talked to him about the minimum expectations and where the video would end up. Thinking about it, being kind and understanding is the main concept of it I suppose.

Emotional Problems

I think I deal with my emotions quite well as a whole, so when it came to this project, I didn’t really think about this or aniticpate any negative emotions. I would say that I did become quite anxious and nervous around the production stage, but this was due to the fact I was working with people and I only had one shot at shooting these interviews right as otherwise I’d have wasted both their days, and in the case of Jolene’s interview, my parents days too from driving me around. However, I would say that this is quite normal, as its quite a nervewracking thing to do when you have the amount of experience as I do. I do think that in some way this nervousness helped me, as it actually made me triple check everything to ensure it was all correct. If I was more laid-back then I could have perhaps made more errors than I otherwise did.

The other thing that I would say made an emotional impact on me is the volume of work I had ahead of me. I often found quite overwhelmed, and when I was behind on schedule I got quite stressed. Instead of taking breaks, I tended to just work really hard so I could get back to where I wanted to be. Taking breaks often just made me more stressed as I felt as if I was wasting time. Whether this is the right thing to do or not, I’m not sure, but it did help me get my work done.

Besides this, I have been absolutely fine with the project, and I’ve genuinely quite enjoyed the process of making it come to life. Besides from 9-4 college, I worked during the times I worked best; in the evening. Knowing when I work best has helped me a lot as I’ve been able to suit my sleep schedule to do this and essentially get myself into a routine. It’s going to feel weird finishing this project as I have gotten so used to working each day on this.

Creative changes made during research & preproduction

Though the ideas development stage was the chance for me to generate and expand my ideas, with the end result being to pick one to take forward and produce, this didn’t mean that the idea wouldn’t change. When you compare the final concept of the idea at the end of the ideas development stage and the pre-production stage, there were a few creative changes that were made.

In my original proposal I stated that I was going to produce mini recreations throughout the entire documentary in order to create another layer of engagement to the documentary. These mini recreations would support what is being said by an interviewee, helping the audience to better understand what they are saying. I had planned to use VFX as the main gateway to bring this idea to life.

However, though the concept was good, there were a few creative changes that I ended up making by the end of the pre-production stage. The main, broad change, that encapsulate all the minor changes, was that instead of creating lots of mini recreations throughout the documentary, I produced the mid-length scene that can now be found at the very start of the documentary. The actual scene itself still has the same concept behind the original idea (showing what it’s like to have misophonia in quite a dramatic and horror-type way), but is now just one long clip instead of lots spread over the documentary. Furthermore, the VFX usage is a lot less than I had originally planned. The effects I did end up using are also a lot simpler than the 3d VFX I had thought about using in my original intentions too.

Though it might seem strange as to why I made this decision, as the idea beforehand seems absolutely fine, and actually quite effective, there are some reasonings behind it. The main, and most important reason is that I want those with misophonia to be able to watch the documentary. If I were to have these mini recreations, that I had planned on using trigger noises/visuals in, were going to very intensely suddenly come out of no where, there’s no chance that someone with misophonia coud prepare themselves for this. Its really important to me that those with it can watch, as I don’t think it’s fair if they cant watch something that’s supposed to be representing them and their disorder. By positioning it at the start of the documentary, the scene can be skipped and the rest of the documentary can be watched stress-free. I actually had my brother, who has misophonia, and was a part of the production, to watch the documentary segment to ensure that there were no points at which he found triggered (breathing or mouth sounds especially) – this meant I was confident that what I was producing was misophonia-free.

To add to all of this, when I released the documentary on the 15th, I had lots of comments suggesting that there should be a trigger warning at the start of the documentary. Despite having written it in the facebook posts and description of the video, this was not enough, and those watching did not know whether what they were watching would be safe for them watch. To overcome this problem I published a brand new video with the exact changes that I was suggested by my audience members. I think this was definitely worth the addition as it adds that level of security and comfort for those watching. Examples of the comments I received about the trigger warning and the trigger warning slate I added to the documentary can be seen in the images below.

To add to all of this, another reason as to why I made this creative decision is that to do the VFX that I planned to do, and as frequently as I wanted, would have taken far too much time, and this was just not possible with the time limitations I had. Looking back on it, I’m very glad with the decision to do this as I was up against mini deadlines enough as it is, so I don’t think complex VFX would have made it a very plausible option.

Considering the fact that I had learnt about the time it takes to produce VFX within my unit 12 specialist study, I’m surprised I hadn’t realised this earlier. This is definitely something I can take forward with me and learn from.

Creative changes made during production/post production

The biggest creative change during the final 2 stages actually applies to the same area as the changes I made in the research/preproduction stage – scene 1.

The original idea that I had storyboarded out for scene 1 was that at the end of the scene, the eye would dart around the screen quickly, with the collection of sounds playing over the top. Additionally, there was also going to be a conventional horror-like chime when ever the eye moved to looking at a different spot in the frame. The purpose of this chime was to add dramatic effect. However, this did not turn out like this at all. As normal, the concept stayed the same, but the way in which I got there was very different to how I had originally planned.

What I ended up doing was firstly removing the horror-like chime and then added some visual effect elements to the ending too. The reason why I decided to remove the chime wsa because it did not fit in at all; it almost sounded quite comedic and just simply out of place. As I now had no sound effect for when the eye moved around, the ending scene seemed quite empty, and it needed something to make it feel a lot more intensive. As I already had the sound effects playing from all the triggers the audience have been shown throughout the scene, adding more sounds was not going to be worth it. Looking back on it now, this might be why this chime did not work – it was too overwhelming with the addition of all the layered sound effects. Furthermore, the layered sound effects are the most important part of the scene, as this literally represents how those with misophonia can often experience sounds – intensive. Therefore, the only other option I had was to play around with the visuals in the end scene. What I ended up doing was have the clips of the triggers play over the top of the eye, fading in and out, in the same sequence that the audience saw them in throughout the duration of the scene. The clips peak at a 50% opacity meaning that even at their most visible point, the eye looking around the screen can always be seen. What this now does is that not only are the audio triggers layered, but so are the visuals too.

Another final addition I made to this final shot was copy and pasting the same video layer of the eye looking around the frame, but reducing its opacity to around 30% and setting a scale and rotation keyframe. By playing around with the keyframes, I managed to make the video slowly zoom in closer and closer whilst slowing spinning towards the iris of the eye. It’s intentionally quite an unnoticeable addition, but it just adds that extra layer of depth and uneasiness (specifically the motion of the video).

The before and after of these changes can be viewed in the videos below.

Before

After

The Journey

With this project being the longest project I have ever worked on, I think it’s fair to say that is has been a journey. I have used a multitude of skills across the different areas of production, and as I have previously discussed, encountered many problems too. The entire process has been a learning opportunity, so I will now be taking the chance I have now to look back upon this and evaluate each stage of production.

Research

The research stage served a vital purpose in the production of my documentary. This is because I was producing a documentary around a sensitive topic – I needed to fully understand this topic before there was any way I would be able to appropriately represent and discuss it within the documentary. Though I have had some personal experiences with misophonia, the research stage, in particular, Dr Jane Gregory’s ‘Sounds like Misophonia’ book gave me a real insight into the cycles of emotions that one with misophonia feels. Now looking back on it, this helped me a lot when discussing with individuals, and in fact the professional too, as I was able to speak with confidence on the subject, allowing our mutual connection to feel a lot more trustworthy. Making my subjects feel supported was a very important aspect of production for me, and I think the research stage played a large role in doing this.

Additionally, looking into documentaries as a whole and understanding the conventions really helped me too. It had been quite a while since I had produced a documentary, and looking back at the old one I produced, I can gladly say that this one is on a whole other level. The research he allowed me a refresh on the basics, but also the chance to learn and improve my understand of documentaries. One thing that I really wish I looked into more was how you start, end and overall, structure a documentary. I did a lot into the contents and conventions of a documentary, but not how you actually stick all the pieces together to make it feel cohesive. The reason I wish I had done more into this is because during the pre-production stage, I really didn’t know how it was going to fully come together – it honestly wasn’t until post production when I had all the pieces that I could then try to slot it together. If I had a deeper understanding for the layout and structure of a documentary similar to mine, I would have been able to spend less time figuring this out, and feel more confident on the work I’m doing.

The research I did into understanding what those with misophonia would like to see in a documentary was perhaps themost useful out of it all: it assured me that the decisions I was making, regarding content in the documentary, would be representative of misophonia and what it is. The research that I had previously completed into understanding misophonia actually really helped me in this part too, as I was able to understand the context of what the respondents were saying, and why they might like to have it said.

When looking at the practical work I did with equipment, though at the time it felt like a useful thing to do, and for the most part it was, there were definitely other considerations that I had not thought about which made this practice obsolete. These factors were that I didn’t end up having 3 lights to use, I only had two, and the rooms I filmed in were not blacked out like the studio, they had natural lighting coming from windows. Though during production I made the best of what I had and tried to block out appropriate amounts of natural light using curtains, I think practice doing this would have helped me to feel a lot more confident with my lighting skills. This is especially true due to the fact that lighting is perhaps my weakest area of production as a whole.

Pre-production

Overall, I’m very happy with the pre-production stage and there’s genuinely not a lot I would change about it – I think it was very successful. The main feedback that I would give myself ties in to the previous comment made in the research stage too – thinking about the structure of the documentary and how it was going to be pieced together. I had the documentary style script where I made an attempt to put the questions in the right order to give a sense of where it will all be, but what I think I should have done was returned back to the preproduction stage after completing all documentary interviews. This way, with the logging timestamps of when things were said, I could note down and make different orders of cuts for how things should be positioned. This is all to help me in the post-production stage, as I instead found that I was doing thing on-the-fly – having never edited a documentary like this before, I found this quite hard. I will speak more about this when I get to talking about post production.

Besides the whole structure improvement, I’m very happy with all other creative and logistical preproduction. The logistical preproduction I found was far more useful on this project than any other I had worked on due to the nature of the production; I was working with more people and over a longer period of time so it was hard to remember what I was suppose to be doing everyday.

Production stage

All the time that has gone into researching and planning the documentary had come down to this very moment, and despite having done a bit of equipment practice by setting up a documentary style interview, I felt very negative about my ability to capture professional looking video. This negativity wasn’t down to the fact I knew I couldn’t, I think it was just more the nerves. These nerves are because I was having to drive hours away for a shoot with an individual that was giving me their time to talk about a sensitive subject to them. I was so worried about forgetting to bring an SD card or not set the frame rate correctly – without having a crew there is no one to check what I am doing, and I was suddenly feeling a lot of weight on my shoulders.

Though up until this point it sounds very negative, I think because of the pressure I was feeling, I actually didn’t have many issues. I set up equipment the night before, ensured everything was charged, ready to take out the bag and shoot with – I’m actually impressed with how I manged to react to the pressure.

Once I knew all equipment was fine and the interview was running, I began talking to the interviewee and discussing some of the questions I had previously sent to them. I often find that I’m quite awkward to talk to, so once again, I’m actually really proud of how I spoke to my interviewees. Not only this, the eye contact and body language I gave them. Writing this after the production is complete, I can say that I have since contacted all my interviewees and we are still on good grounds. I think this confidently shows that I was able to create a comfortable and friendly connection with them, which makes me really happy.

On reflection, I would say that the production stage was successful. The key skill that I have been able to take away and improve upon from this stage is confidence. Particularly, the confidence with working with external people. This is especially true to the professional as he was kind enough to give me his time, which his clients would be paying lots of money for on a day-to-day basis. This example has given me great exposure to working with older people with real jobs and professionalism.

All filming, despite not all going as expected (Tom’s interview ended up being online), went well and I’m happy with the outcome of this stage.

Postproduction stage

The post-production stage is my absolute favourite stage of the production process. This statement is reflective of my future plans of going to university and studying post production and VFX. I have already touched upon it slightly when discussing pre-production, but the most valuable skill that I have improved upon in this stage is the ability to cut and piece together an engaging documentary sequence. From only having a very basic outline of the documentary, I was able to intercut all interviewees so that I could tell a story and create an engaging piece. This can be proved by the image below where the audience suggest that they did in fact enjoy the documentary.

What I found during this stage is that as I progressed with it, I became more and more confident. This production highlights my creative skills (an example being able to produce a interviewee lead documentary without telling or showing the questions being asked, and yet still being understood) and the ability to overcome problems and am overall very happy with the final outcome.

Use of Critical Perspectives

Critical perspectives are really important to think about in the production of a documentary as depending on the creative choices that were made, a different interpretation can be made by the audience. Critical perspectives include lots of different considerations, these include the use of: genre, conventions, narrative, character, technical codes, symbolic codes, representation, ideology, editing and sound design. I will be discussing all of these different considerations within this section now…

Critical Perspectives

Genre + Conventions

Since the start of research, genre and conventions have been on my mind all the time. Conforming to the conventions of a genre is important because conventions are expectations, and without fulfilling the audience’s expectations, engagement is lost. Though it is okay to stray away from the genre specific conventions for your production, these should still be considered and included to some extent. This is prevalent in Steve Neal’s repetition and difference theory. His theory argues that genres all contain instances of repetition and difference, with difference being essential to the economy of the genre. If every film within a genre was the same, audiences could anticipate what was going to happen and this would become boring – hence, it’s vital that films experiment with trying out different things and not always conforming to the exact specifics of a genre’s conventions. I have tried to do this in my documentary. Before I explain how, it’s important we understand what genre my documentary is, as without this, we can’t understand how I’ve subverted it.

I would say that although we do see the positive side and negative sides within the documentary, I would still class my documentary as an expository one. This is because the ending message is still very clear, and it’s obvious to an audience member that they should be feeling sorry for those who have misophonia. The expository style is a very ‘conventional’, including some very common documentary techniques to convey a message.

I would say that the biggest thing I have done to subvert this genre is use a film scene at the start of my production. I practically use a whole other genre within this scene, with the intention of it being a horror. Some of the conventions I use within this scene to achieve the effect of it being conceived as a horror are the use of a black and white colour grade (with high contrast), close up shots, a slow build up to the climax and intense/disturbing imagery/sounds to create an uncomfortable feeling. Comparing this genre to the genre of the documentary is entirely different, but I would say it works really well. I’ve being able to subvert the expectations of it being a step-by-step conventional documentary but hooking them into this intense scene at the start. The contrast between these also adds a great deal of interest and uniqueness to the piece.

Now that I’ve discussed how I’ve been able to subvert this genre, lets discuss how I’ve been able to conform to the genre using different conventions. As stated, conventions are important for fulfilling expectations that an audience member might have considering the genre of the media product. Fulfilling these expectations keep the audience member engaged.

The first convention that I used in my documentary was the use of interviews. Interviews played a large role in the creation of my documentary, particularly as I am not a part of it at all and there is no presenter at all. It’s entirely let by interviewees. Interviewees are also important because they share their personal experiences with the audience. For this documentary, this was a vital aspect: the topic itself is very personal and sensitive to some, so it was essential that I had these stories said by the individuals themselves.

What also comes under this, is the way in which I have captured these interviews. For the interviews that I shot in person, there is a particular, conventional way in which interviewees are positioned within the frame. In the images below you will see the interview shot with no illustrations, and that same interview with illustrations next to it. These illustrations on the image represent something called rule of thirds. You may notice that there are four points at the intersections between where the lines cross over. These points highlight the areas within the frame that an audience member is most drawn to. By positioning the subject’s face on this intersection, whilst also considering appropriate amounts of headspace, I have positioned the interviewee in a comfortable position for the audience to watch at.

To add to this, the interviewee is facing towards the dead space on the right side of the frame. The reason why this is so important is because if they were sat left frame and looking left frame, it leaves an uncomfortable amount of space not being used and they are talking off of the frame. By facing the interviewee towards the space within the frame, I have been able to create a sense of balance and purpose for the space – it just makes sense.

A second convention I have used is the use of actuality b-roll. In the particular portion of the documentary where the interviewees are discussing what they like to do in their spare time/what calms them down, I used b-roll to visually show the audience what they were discussing. A great example of this is in Eddie’s interview when he discusses how animals really help him to relax, as they don’t trigger him, and that they also give him some sort a daily routine. To accompany this, when he is talking this through, all of his pets are being shown on the screen. The purpose of this is to simply add further interest and engagement. The video below shows the portion of the video where this is prevalent.

Structure

Narrative and structure play a huge role in creating an engaging production for an audience member: if the clips of my interviewees are placed randomly throughout the timeline, sure the clips themselves would make sense, but that sequenced order, makes no sense at all. If an audience member has to work hard to try and understand what is going on, satisfactory an engagement levels are bought down. This therefore induces a negative, opposite reading to the production. When I reference a particular reading, I am referring to Stuart Hall’s reception theory. This theory states that an audience member can have one of three responses to a media text – preferred, opposite or negotiated. As the creator of this documentary, and with having set intentions for the production and how it’s perceived, I obviously want my audience to gain a preferred reading, as this means they have understood the text as I wanted it to be understood. In a sense, this can determine whether or not I have made a successful production as a whole. I will dive deeper into this within the next section, the audience and meeting their needs.

Returning back to the idea of structure, in order to ensure that I am able to create an engaging ‘story’, within the first scene, that the audience can watch, listen and hopefully learn from, I used Todorov’s narrative theory. From bbc.co.uk, Todorov studied classical fairy tales and stories and found that they all followed a similar chronological order. This order is: Equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, attempt to restore equilibrium, narrative comes to climax, new equilibrium. I have used this order he found to guide the creation of my scene 1:

Equilibrium – The protagonist goes downstairs to have dinner with their family
Disruption – The protagonist is triggered by trigger noises and visuals around the dinner table
Attempt to restore – The protagonist doesn’t want to disturb their family so stays quiet, trying to ignore the noises
Climax – The triggers get worse and worse, the protagonist cannot distract themselves from the sounds
New Equilibrium – This is the only segment that doesn’t fit perfectly into my production, as the scene ends on the climax. I did this for dramatic effect. I suppose it works because this film segment is just a scene, not an entire story. The new equilibrium within the world of the protagonist we never know, and I suppose it can be left up for interpretation to what happens. The intense trigger-full scene contrasting against the black screen and lack of sound is really impactful and leaves time for the audience to reflect on how the protagonist might be feeling.

As you can see, the new equilibrium doesn’t really exist in the conventional form that Todorov anticipated to within his theory. Despite saying this however, I do think that the ending of this scene transitions into the documentary itself very well. As I have suggested, when the audience get to the black screen at the end of the scene, they have a chance to reflect on what’s just happened. During this reflection the expectation is that the audience are questioning why this is happening to the protagonist and what’s causing these reactions – after all, the triggers themselves are quite ‘normal’, so to an average audience member it could seen quite confusing as to why these actions are being presented in the way in which I have (horror style).

After scene 1, the audience are then met with the documentary segment – I will now discuss the structural decisions that I made, to once again, produce an engaging storyline or my target audience. As this was a documentary and not a film, Todorov’s narrative theory does not apply to this structure. Despite this, I did take it into account. The image below shows an illustration and my notes in my notebook that I used when planning out the documentary order, and why I was making these decisions. I also produced a larger illustration of the graph so it can be seen more clearly.

The idea with the graph is that I am able to monitor the positive or negative impact it can have on my audience. The reason this is important is because I didn’t want the documentary to be entirely negative or entirely positive: in order to represent misophonia appropriately, and allow the audience to leave feeling as if they have been met with both sides of the argument. As you can see, the introduction (first scene), what it is and how it makes someone feel are all on a negative low, discussing the negatives that misophonia has. This is then dropped even further when the audience learn about the effect that this has on relationships. The reason I think this drops further is because this section is more relatable to an average audience member. I decided to structure all of the negatives together, and then switch to look at more positive outlooks. These positive outlooks include the coping techniques available and discussing support available. After this, the ending then returns to final messages, which at this point I intended to be negative and positive, though in the final outcome of the documentary, ended up choosing to be more positive. The reason for this is that a positive ending lifts the mood and makes for a more memorable ending.

Character

When looking at characters in the first scene, it’s sort of hard to discuss them in a more conventional sense because they don’t really have much personality or appearance on screen. However, this is the purpose. I have intentionally used close ups throughout this scene to not only draw attention to specific things, but also so that I do not show the whole faces or bodies of the characters in the scene. The reason I have decided to do this is because the characters on screen represent thousands of people who are experiencing the same thing. Without showing clear, recognisable faces or features, the people the audience are seeing on screen, could be anyone. This is really important in reflecting the fact that those with misophonia are not alone, there are thousands of people just like them.

Though I have not made huge attention to it within the production, I did make the creative decision to use a young boy as the protagonist in this scene. The reason why I did this is because a young boy has connotations of innocence, making it easier for the audience to sympathise with them. This sympathy is important in gaining a preferred reading for the audience as this is what I intend them to feel. We, as an audience, see two older people, who we can only assume to be the boy’s parents. This is further backed up by the audio we hear at the start, calling the protagonist down for dinner. This is a very stereotypical scenario and is relatable to practically everyone watching. With the understanding that the 2 people the boy is having dinner with is his parents, we can assume that they are not meaning to hurt their son in the way in which they are.

The parents can also reflect the ignorance of people around the world towards misophonia, not understanding that the sounds they are causing are triggering to the loved ones around them.

Overall, the characters in scene 1 intentionally don’t have much personality and we don’t learn much about them – the full focus for the scene regarding character is to make the audience sympathise with the person with misophonia.

When looking at the ‘characters’ in the documentary interview portions of the production, it can be denoted that there are 3 interviewees with misophonia,1 mother of a child with misophonia and one professional. The reason for choosing to use 3 interviewees with misophonia is because this creates a nice dynamic of a number of different viewpoints from having similar experiences. By having 3 different interviewees to cut between, I was able to keep things interesting, allowing the audience to not have to listen to only 2 perspectives. However, due to the length of the production I intended to produce, I decided to not include more than 3, as this would have just been too many.

The inclusion of a mother allows audience members who are either a parent of someone with misophonia, or friends of someone with it are able to feel represented. Finally, the inclusion of the professional gives the audience someone to trust. This is commonly used in documentaries, however is not a convention. I think he fits really well in the documentary, adding another layer of engagement to the piece. His use within the documentary is far more intellectual than it is emotional, the audience should not have an emotional connection towards the professional, but should do the other interviewees.

Havard References

BBC Bitesize (n.d.). What is narrative? - GCSE Media Studies Revision. [online] BBC Bitesize. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqdhrdm/revision/3.

‌revision world (2019). Genre Theory - Media Studies - Revision World. [online] Revisionworld.com. Available at: https://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/media-studies-level-revision/genre-theory.

Symbolic Codes

Symbolic codes refer to anything going on inside of the frame. This can include: mise-en-scene, acting, colour and setting. Though this is found more deeply within a film, I did still creatively think about the symbolic codes within the frame, as it’s important that I utilise these as much as possible for the audience to both denote and connote.

An example of a symbolic code in terms of the mise-en-scene in my documentary is the homely environment with which I recorded Judith’s interview in. This can be seen in the image below. The reason that this is so symbolic is because the sofa, and therefore what we can assume to be the living room, is a warm and comforting room, with connotations of being with the family in. This is important because it reflects the topic that she is discussing – family. This comforting feeling was not only important for the interviewees themselves, as they were discussing a personal topic, but is also important for the audience feeling as if they are in a comfortable space to hear this information from. This might sound very simple and blatant, but it’s definitely an important aspect to think about. If I had set the interview in a private office space, this would create confusion as an office space has connotations with work and professionalism. There’s no reason the mother couldn’t have her own office, but the symbolic references that this background has would not make sense within the context of the documentary.

Furthermore, for the exact reasons I have just stated, Tom, although filmed on Zoom, is situated in his office, and I knew this before filming purposefully for this reason. If I had both Judith and Tom situated in an office, this would make Tom’s power as the ‘professional’ slightly less powerful and trustworthy in a way because the audience subconsciously taking in and denoting the environment around them, bringing them to assumptions about the individuals on screen. By having only one person clearly labelled as the professional, and most importantly, when referring to symbolic codes, in an office, the audience are able to easily identify who the professional is and it makes sense given the context of their role within the production.

Setting, mise-en-scene and colour can all sort of overlap in a way as I could discuss all three of these in the image. Acting slightly less so because it’s not actually acting, it’s real talking from a real person, though I suppose the ‘acting’ is the fact it’s real, and the impact that something real has compared to something fake is drastic – this is why it’s a director’s job in a film to make you feel immersed into the story so that it feels as if it is real. The reason I say that I could discuss all three in this one image is that there are so many micro considerations that I have made during this production, that I suppose at the time I never even really considered, I just subconsciously did it. Regarding colour, I told Judith to wear something she would normally wear, ensuring that it’s quite a comforting piece of clothing. The woven-patterned jumper reflects the homely feel of the environment, representing Judith as ‘the parent’ within the production.

Technical Codes

Technical codes essentially mean any way in which equipment has been used in order to create meaning. Therefore, this can include things such as camera work (framing, composition, movement, focus etc...), lighting and editing.

Carrying on from my previous comment regarding the words at the bottom of the screen, these words are called lower thirds. As you can see, it gives a little description about who it is we are actually hearing from. What this does is it makes it feel more personal and as if you know the person. Commonly the first thing you do when you meet someone new is ask their name, so by giving the audience the interviewees name, they’re already feel that personal connection.

On top of the name, I’ve also included who they are. So for Judith I said, ‘Eddie’s Mum’ – this is because the audience have already met Eddie within the interview, and Judith references him within her speech so it’s important to know this. The lower thirds allow me to give more context to the audience, allowing for a more pleasurable and easy to watch documentary; you don’t want your audience asking questions such as, ‘who is this’ or ‘why are they saying this’ as this means they gaining an oppositional reading. Another example of the use of a lower third can be seen in the image below. For this example I have used Eddie. As you can see, the main difference is that instead of including relationship context, I have used his age. This was a creative decision that I made as it allows the audience to understand the experiences he has had during his life and how this might affect what he’s saying. I think with a topic like this where I have a disorder that hasn’t been known about for a long time, it’s important to show age too. Despite not having this in my documentary, and now seeing it as a potential improvement to the documentary (I speak more about this improvement in the next section, the audience and meeting their needs), if I had an older interviewee with misophonia, without even hearing their voice to recognise and guess an age, their responses to questions would be very different.

Furthermore, another reason that this is particularly important for Eddie’s interview is that we can’t actually see him, so the audience don’t have the visual element of his face to assume his age. I have used the technical code of editing to add in these lower thirds, allowing the audience to get a better understanding of the context of who we’re listening to and how and why what their age might have an impact upon what they say.

It's important to note that I have also included the age for all other interviewees with misophonia, not just Eddie.

To add to this, another editing technique I used in Eddie’s interview was adding glow to the audio waveform animation. This glow not only make the waveform easier to see and generally more pleasing to the idea, but it also made Eddie feel more like a real person. One of the problems I had with Eddie not having his face within the production was ensuring that my audience were still going to be able to emotional connect with him. The subtle use of the glow on this animation helps bring it to life, amplifying the fact that there is a real person saying this.

For the duration of the documentary practically all of the shots (apart from live-action b-roll footage) is static. This is done intentionally to, literally, add a sense of stillness. With it being quite a sensitive and personal documentary, the stillness adds a level of respect, allowing the audience to focus directly in on what the interviewees are saying without any motion disturbance.

Despite saying this, there is one point within the documentary where I decided to do something different. I used my editing skills to slowly zoom in on Erin when she discusses being bullied in school. The reason why I decided to slow zoom this clip is because she speaks so powerfully and about such a heart-breaking topic that I wanted to create a sort of immersion with the clip, drawing the audience in. The only reason why I was able to do this slow zoom, and make it intentionally unnoticeable, yet still effective, to the audience was due to the fact I made the creative decision of leaving this clip as one long clip. This singular clip lasts 48 seconds, which when look at it as a percentage to the whole documentary, is 7%. 7% for one singular clip is quite significant, and with their being no other clips like this apart from at the very start and end with Tom, I really wanted to draw the audience’s attention to what Erin was saying: it’s the most impacting and shocking statement said within the documentary, making it something the audience will sympathise with.

I think this works really well at bringing attention and focus to a specific, pinnacle point within the documentary.

Furthermore, you may also notice that I made the video fade from black at the start, and fade out to black at the end. I have used fading as a way to indicate the start and end of a topic within the documentary, as I want to draw so much attention to what Erin is saying, I have used this technique around what she has said too. I would say that the concept of fading to black is a common technique used in media, so is easy for audience members to understand, though even if they haven’t seen this before, is easy enough to pick up. Therefore, I’d say that I’ve successfully been able to create meaning through the use of the technical code, editing.

Representation and Ideology

Representation is a really important factor in my documentary and has been something to think about all the way back in the research stage. The idea of wanting to be able to accurately represent a community of people who have a disorder that is not very well known about, was quite a daunting discuss, but explains why this led my research in the way it did. Throughout the research stage I did a large portion into just understanding what it is, and I would say that the primary research I completed with users in the Facebook misophonia chats was very useful too. It was not all about just understanding the facts of misophonia, but also about understand what aspects I want to target and why discussing these areas of the disorder may be more beneficial to the documentary and representing those with misophonia better. A lot of thought went behind this, and this is reflected through the structuring of the documentary that I have previously discussed.

I would say that due to the decisions I made regarding research and understanding the subject before producing a documentary about it, and successfully finding willing, engaging interviewees to be a part of it, I was successful in having accurate representation within my documentary. Another thing that helped with this is the decisions I made with the questions that the interviewees were answering: I chose a range of questions that covered a wide area of the topic, giving me the opportunity to represent all aspects of it. I think it was particularly important how I saw both negatives of it, but also the positives and how you can use different techniques to overcome/tolerate it. With my target audience including those who have misophonia, I wanted to ensure that it was not all negative, as this would be awful for them to watch, knowing they can’t do anything about it. Furthermore, it would be awful because that is not true at all; there is help available and there is an opportunity to do anything they like in life, just as anyone else would have.

To back up what I’m saying about this being successful regarding representation, I have some feedback from my audience who watched the production. I will only touch upon this briefly as I will look into this further within the audience and meeting their needs segment of the evaluation. As you can see by the image below, ~83% of respondents knew what misophonia was before watching, meaning that they can determine whether they think I've been able to represent it appropriately. A sample of responses from the question ‘Why did/didn’t you enjoy the documentary’ can be seen too. All of these responses suggest very positive reflections upon the documentary, with many even suggesting that they found it informative and explanatory. A particular response that proves the representation factor is the very first one, stating that they liked the different perspectives. With having 3 different viewpoints on the subject, I needed to appropriately represent all of them, not just the one about those with it, so I’m glad to see they found this well put together.

I would now confidently say that I have effectively been able to represent not only a disorder but also the collective thoughts of a community too. To add to this, when thinking about the ideologies that are expressed within my documentary, it’s very similar to representation, due to the fact that misophonia is commonly misconceptualised and people think it’s not real/not aware of it/think that those with it are just overreacting. I tried to cover all areas of misophonia in order to end this negative common misconception and properly represent it for what it is.

Editing, Post Production Effects/Processes

The editing process involves bringing all of the recorded sound and video clips from the production stage into a timeline by cutting and placing it into a specific order to create an engaging video. I’ve already discussed the structure of my documentary, and some of the techniques I have used in this, such as intercutting, so I’ll be focusing on scene 1 within this portion of the evaluation.

There is one specific technique that I have used in scene 1 in order to create meaning. This is the use of repetition within the scene. After the scene is set and the audience watch the protagonist walk downstairs after being called down for dinner and sit in a chair, at what we can presume to be the dinner table, considering the given context, the audience are then met with a close up of the protagonist’s eye. Despite not having seen the protagonists face at all before this, the audience understand it is the protagonist’s eye because of something called the Kuleshov effect. From movementsinfilm.com, the Kuleshov effect is when an ‘audience derives new interpretations from composition and sequence’. The original experiment that proves this effect is quite different to the circumstance with which I have used it, though I would say it still works. Given the understanding that the audience have seen a sequence of movements from the protagonist during the intro of this scene, when they are shown the next shot of an eye, the audience can interpret that this is the same person they have been watching before in the sequence.

Within the context of the scene, this eye initiates the start of the main purpose of the scene – showcasing all of the triggers around them. The use of repetition that I previously stated is used when I cut back to the eye every single time after the audience see a new trigger. The reason for this repetition is to show importance; the purpose of the scene is to show how these triggers can affect someone with misophonia, and the quick darting of the pupil in the shot shows the anxious feeling the protagonist has. I suppose this is actually another example of using Kuleshov’s effect: the audience are presented with a fairly normal action such as eating, but because of how close up the shot is, and how uncomfortable it is to watch, when they see this paired with another extreme close up of the protagonist's eye, they can interpret a fairly normal action to a very overwhelming sensation. All of this has been thought through by me in order to try and gain a preferred reading of sympathising with what the protagonist, and therefore, those with misophonia (once they realise what it is in the doc), have to go through on a daily basis.

I would also like to point at the use of a cyclical structure that this scene has. As I stated, the scene starts of with the eye to initiate the sequence of triggers. I decided to also end the scene with the eye too as this once again showcase the significance of it.

From industrialscripts.com, ‘by using a cyclical structure, writers can emphasise the knowledge gained during the course of the story’. Despite this only being a very short scene, this fact still applies: the audience are able to compare the protagonist’s feelings before and after the events of what has happened. At the start of the scene we are aware that the protagonist is worried, due to the connotations that the soundscape has (I will speak more on this momentarily), about going downstairs so we’re already slightly on edge, but by the end of the scene everything is very overwhelming and we understand why the protagonist was feeling this way.

I would say that considering the creative decisions I made within this scene, and the theories that I’ve been able to apply to it, I have been able to create meaning through my editing, and post-production skills.

Harvard References

Harries, S. (2021). What is the Kuleshov Effect? [online] Movements In Film. Available at: https://www.movementsinfilm.com/blog/2021/3/7/what-is-the-kuleshov-effect#:~:text=The%20basic%20principle%20of%20the.

Scripts, I. (2022). What is Circular Storytelling? The KEY Lessons For Story Structure. [online] Industrial Scripts®. Available at: https://industrialscripts.com/circular-storytelling/#:~:text=By%20using%20a%20cyclical%20structure [Accessed 23 May 2024].

Sound Design/Post Production Sound

Particularly in the first scene, sound design was a vital aspect in articulating the subject of the documentary to the audience. With the topic of my documentary being a sound related disorder, I found it greatly useful to use sound as a way to represent it.

To conform to horror stereotypes, I used slow music that built up in tempo and volume as the scene progressed. This way, the audience is anticipating something to happen, but they don’t know what. This anticipation keeps them engaged and guessing what’s going to happen. The slow start to the music is reflected within the visuals of the scene too – with quite drawn-out shots of the protagonist going downstairs. Despite this, these are not too long to prevent disengagement however.

On top of the music, there is also a heartbeat layered into the mix. This heartbeat is, before any trigger sounds come in, the most foregrounded sound. The reason for it being foregrounded is that I wanted it to exaggerate its importance. The reason it it’s so important is due to the connotations that a heartbeat has, and the meaning that this creates. Hearing a heavy heartbeat has connotations with being very nervous or worried as your heartbeat rises when this happens. With this being a horror scene, creating this nervous anticipation within the scene was important in ensuring that the audience feels like they are walking alongside the protagonist, experiencing the same emotional reactions as they are. This links in with the idea of appropriately representing the emotions that those with misophonia feel when triggered. In fact, it’s not even just about being triggered, many people with misophonia struggle before the triggers have even happened because they pre-empt what might happen, causing them to stress and panic. By using disturbing music and a foregrounded heartbeat, I’m setting the scene for emotional reaction the protagonist is going to have.

When looking at the rest of the scene, when the triggers start to come in, it’s evident that sound effects play a huge role in creating meaning for the scene. Without sound, this scene would just not make sense – sure you’d be able to get the context of it due to the visual cutting that I have previously talked about, but the scene is only so impactful when the sound is there. As you can see in the image below, I decided to make the creative choice of leaving the trigger sound effects playing after the trigger is shown. What this meant is that by the end of the scene, you’ve got 7 different triggers all playing at once. This is done to represent the overwhelming effect that triggers have on someone with misophonia. As I previously mentioned with the music, this is also the point at which the music is most loud and at its highest tempo, so this adds to the whole overwhelming factor too.

The orange clips represent all of the trigger sounds (with the one at the start being an exception as this is the dad calling the protagonist down for dinner), the green represents the heartbeat, and the purpose represents the music. Speaking of the sound clip at the start, I’d just like to quickly discuss the purpose and importance that this has. Though it’s a very short and simple audio clip, this gives context to what’s about to happen – without hearing that the protagonist is being called down for dinner, the audience wouldn’t know what was happening.

You may be able to notice that the green layer (heartbeat) actually has quite a lot of cut up clips, and this is because throughout the scene I actually increased the tempo of the heartbeats. This is to show the protagonist getting more and more overwhelmed, adding another layer of complexity and believability to the scene.

Within the documentary segment I had 2 different audio layers, one for the interviewees microphone and one for the backing music. Within the edit, this was far easier to control and keep organised than scene 1, as it was far simpler. However, it was simpler for a reason: it was a creative choice - I did not want lots of sound effects throughout the interviews in the documentary as this is not what was important. What was important was what the interviewees were saying, and ensuring that I had crisp audio recordings of this.

The music is then used in the background to reflect the mood of what is being said by the interviewee, further creating a more engaging production. The mood of a music track can entirely change how an audience member perceives what is being said so choosing appropriate music was very important. It needed to be perfectively reflective of what they were trying to say, or else, I could mislead the audience into finding something positive negative, or vise-versa. Alternatively, it could also create confusion, as it doesn’t make sense to have happy, upbeat music behind someone speaking about a really sad, personal story.

From looking at all of this, I would say that overall, I’m very happy with the decisions I made regarding sound and that the skills I used to bring it all together in the edit I am very proud of. Without the post-production stage, I would just have a bunch of audio clips – this shows how important these skills are.

The Audience and Meeting Their Needs

Due to the nature of the purpose and topic of the documentary, my target audience is very wide. The reason why I decided on producing this documentary is because I wanted to spread awareness of the topic, therefore, the audience for my production is essentially anyone who does not know what misophonia is. In the research stage when I was discussing my audience, I also stated that I would be aiming it at 16+ year olds as it’s quite a mature documentary, with quite a sensitive topic. To add to this, the introduction is quite intense and could be overwhelming to some young teens. Furthermore, within my research I also found that my target audience would fit into 2 of 5 categories in Bulmer and Katz’s uses and gratifications theory. This theory explains why an audience member might be watching a media product. This is important because if we are able to understand this, we can narrow our product further to receive a higher percentage of engagement and preferred readings. These 2 categories that my audience would fit into are surveillance and personal identity. Surveillance states that the audience are watching to inform or educate themselves – this makes perfect sense as I am trying to produce something informative, so the audience would need to think this way in order to be engaged with it. Personal identity states that the audience are watching to gain a sense of relatability – this is for the other percentage of my target audience who, despite already knowing all about misophonia, are watching it because they want to hear the stories from other people who have the same disorder as them. Alternatively, these people could also have family members who have it, hence the reasoning as to why I decided to include a mother in the documentary. I would definitely say that this is an example of me successfully being able to communicate to a specified audience, as I am fulfilling their needs of personal identity by including someone just like them to feel relatable too.

Therefore, my target audience for the documentary are 16+-year-olds who either don’t know what misophonia is and are willing to learn more about it, or do know what misophonia is, and are using it as a way to feel more relatable and not alone

In order to learn more about the part of my target audience who already know what misophonia is, I initiated in some primary research where I asked them what they would like to see include in the contents of the documentary. I found this really important for not only representing those with misophonia correctly but also ensuring that the information and questions I might highlight within the documentary are going to be useful for my audience members fitting into the surveillance category. The image below shows the post I sent out on Facebook misophonia groups in order to collect this information. If you would like to look at my interpretation of all the results I received, click here.

Audience and meeting needs

I think that because my target audience is so broad, and I didn’t have to make specific considerations into account in order to be able to say I successfully produced a target that suits them, I think I can say exactly that. The considerations that I did make however, though minor and aimed at a broad audience, I would say most certainly engaged the target audience. Let me prove and explain why...

The images below show the basic demographics of those that responded and gave feedback to me on my survey. I had attached this survey to the description of my Youtube video, and made those aware of this, with an extra link attached, when sending it out to people online. I shared this online to people in the Facebook misophonia groups, and to friends and family too.

As you can see, those who took the survey, fit into the demographics of my target audience: they are all over 16 and there are no specifications on gender within my target audience. Below this, you can see that my documentary received high appraisal with an average of 4.6, meaning they thoroughly enjoyed the production. Though this information is quantitative, meaning I can’t interpret this any further, it does give me a good base understanding that I was effectively able to produce an engaging piece of content for my target audience – which is great!

Moving on, I then proceeded to ask why they did or did not enjoy the documentary. I did this in order to gain qualitative feedback – this is important because it can be used to learn and have a deeper understanding of their feelings and thoughts. Qualitative questions are also great because they don’t restrict a respondent to picking options, they can say whatever they like. Sometimes this means that I can gain really valuable information that I would never have even thought of. A sample of the answers I got from this question can be seen in the image below.

What I’m seeing a lot of in the comments here is the term ‘informative’. This is really great news as it shows that my initial aim and target for producing something with meaning has come to life. Counting the YouTube views my video has, I’ve been able to inform 300 people on a disorder that I have aimed at trying to spread awareness. I’m really proud of this number and I think that’s an achievement in itself. Whether those who watched it knew what misophonia already was doesn’t really matter to me: they can take that video and share it as they need. I produced it represent those with, so those with it may use it however they like, and considering the positive feedback it has received, this is now a safe space for them to send someone when they next get asked about misophonia.

Another common answer here is the fact that they simply enjoyed to hear the stories from lots of different perspectives, particularly as what they were talking about were very personal. This shows that not only did the interviewees do a good job at sharing their lives with the audience, but I also did a great job at inducing this; asking the right questions, positively reaffirming them throughout the interview and trying to edge more and more information out of them after each response. Furthermore, I think this shows that my selective choice of clips to use in the final cut was very effective, as I have been able to keep them engaged and interested in learning the lives of my interviewees. This is a big achievement for me personally because I remember how hard it was for me a few weeks ago to edit the documentary and bring it to life.

Thinking about engagement factors, a simple yet effective technique I used to ensure that my broad target audience would feel engaged with the production, is using common documentary conventions. It may sound very straight forward but it's true. If I hadn’t used documentary conventions within my work, my target audience would not have had the same reaction to my production as they did, as they would have been less focused on what was being said and more focused on why the interview camera is positioned strangely, or the lower thirds are placed in the middle of the screen.

Though overall I got some really positive feedback suggesting that the documentary really engaged them, I did also receive some areas to improve on. I will interpret these as areas of the production that could have been better tailored to my audience's needs. I will be using the responses I got from the question ‘What would you change/improve?’ from my survey to answer this question. Understanding how I can improve is really important to me, and it’s always interesting to know what the audience has to say, as ultimately, there's no point in a product without the audience.

After scrolling through the responses of this question, there was one key topic that kept on coming up...

Including older interviewees with misophonia. All I can say is that I completely agree. I do think that the interviewees I had were too similar in age, or at least, there should have been more interviewees, therefore allowing me the opportunity to have a wider range of ages. I think that where I faulted is that older audience members with misophonia can only relate to the people on screen so far, until there is such an age gap that what they are saying, particularly regarding school and relationships, becomes un-engaging and there is a lack of relatability. If I had included 2 more interviewees within the age ranges of 35-50 and 65+, I would have allowed for different stories to be told, ones that I more distinct to living with misophonia as an older person. A particularly interesting area that I could have discussed with them would be how they have coped with having to work with it throughout their life. I briefly mentioned it with Erin, but as she is only at the start of her career, she doesn’t have the same experiences as older people would. Furthermore, as one comment suggests, misophonia didn’t even have a name when older people had it when they were younger, so it would have been interesting to ask about this, and the effect that not understanding what they had and why they were reacting to sounds in such a way affected their life.

Apart from this main response, there are actually a few other comments that I found particularly interesting. Firstly, I found 2 very similar comments that suggested that they would have liked to have seen more information on how people can find misophonia resources. These can be seen below.

As one of the comments suggests, I did mention how people can find more misophonia information through the use of Tom’s comments on it, however evidently, my target audience would have liked to have seen more than this. When producing my documentary I was kind of in an awkward dilemma where I knew the fact that it’s poorly understood by the medical community, but I had a professional as an interviewee. I don’t know whether it’s a confidence thing, and I should have just gone ahead and mentioned this to him directly within the interview to see what he said, or whether I made the right choice not to include this, but this respondent did suggest they would have liked to have seen this discussed. Perhaps this should have been something to have considered more deeply if I wanted to have met their needs further.

Secondly, another comment that caught my eye was the one which can be see below. It discusses the idea that interviewees could have been more honest and open about what actually happens once they are triggered. The respondent states that she is on the opposite end of this and finds that this should have been better represented. Once again, I do think that this comes down to confidence from me trying push this out of the interviewees. However, this does come with the heavy moral dilemma where, is it really appropriate to be asking my interviewees such personal questions and trying to push them about a really sensitive topic. This is something that I could have perhaps done more research into as it would have been a really interesting addition to the documentary; adding another level of intensity and realism. I think this would have appealed greatly to the audience members fitting into the personal identity category, as they would have been able to relate greatly to these events.

A particular reaction to my documentary that actually altered the documentary as a whole was the comment about including a trigger warning screen at the start of the documentary. I have mentioned this previously in the creative changes that I made during post, but I want to make it clear that this is only here because of the feedback I received. Due to the amount of people saying it, and how much sense it makes to have one, there was ultimately no reason as to why I shouldn’t have one at the start: it makes those watching far more comfortable as they know from a certain point onwards (after scene 1) there are not triggering sounds or visuals. This can often be a problem for those with misophonia as they never know what might happen next in a video – it can make consuming a informative media text like mine very anxious, which isn’t a nice feeling. The examples of the comments suggesting this can be seen again below.

Overall, I would say that with the evidence I have shown, I can prove that I have successfully been able to engage my target audience, and though there are improvements that could have been made to further meet the audience’s need, I would say that I’ve done a fairly good job at tailoring it towards a specific, targeted audience.

Career and Skills Development

Throughout my production I have undertaken many different professional roles. This is especially true due to the fact I have been working alone. When producing a professional documentary, it’s common to have many people working as a team fulfilling specific roles with the specific high-level skills they have. However, as I have been working on a college production, I have had to fulfil every role myself. This has meant that I have had a lot of different tasks to do and things to think about during the filming of my documentary. I will now be going through the different roles that I have undertaken, explaining how I performed them and whether I think I performed well at them.

Director

As I have created my documentary from the very start to the very end, making every creative decision and change there is, I think it’s fair to say that I very much fulfilled the role of being director. The director usually guides and ‘directs’ their team, but as I was working alone, I sort of told myself what to do. Though I didn’t necessarily have the directorial skills of communication within the production of my interview segments of the documentary, I did use these skills within the first scene. The reason I was able to use these skills in the first scene is because I had actors playing characters that I had created and made identities for. The entire behind the scenes for the production of scene 1 can be seen in the video below. The director has quite an overall view on the whole production, so it’s hard for me to pick out specific points where I used directorial skills. It’s more so the fact that I have been making large creative decisions that have affected the outcome of the documentary throughout the entire process of production.

Camera Operator/ Grip

During the pre-production stage I made the creative choice of using 2 cameras to film my in person interviews. I did this because I wanted to be able to cut to the close up, tighter camera when the interviewee says something dramatic or I feel as if it would leave an impact on the audience member. Therefore, when it actually came round to filming these interviews, I needed to handle two cameras at the same time. This can be seen in the image below.

Career and Skills Development

When having to control and manage two cameras at once, it meant that I had to do everything twice. This includes: white balance, exposure, frame rate, iso, composition, adjusting their tripods, focus, making sure that they both had appropriate amounts of battery and had SD cards with enough storage in them to hold large video files. Having to fulfil the role of grip, I tried to make it as easy as possible for myself the next day by setting up as much as I could on all the equipment the night before. Mainly, this included physical things such as batteries and SD cards, but it did also include checking the basic settings such as ensuring the frame rates and aspect ratios are set appropriately.

On the days of production, I made sure to keep the cameras rolling for as long as possible between questions as I would try to speak with my interviewee on more of a conversation basis instead of question by question. This sometimes meant that they would go off on tangents – useful ones – but meant I wasn’t always recording on the cameras. I tried to find the balance of recording the footage, but also thinking about how much space it would take up on my SD cards and how much battery it would use. This was a logistical and creative dilemma I faced and found that I dealt with quite well.

Lighting

To accompany the visuals of video, another role I undertook was to control lighting in the scene. This applies to both the film scene and documentary segment too. The image below highlights the areas I considered when fulfilling my role as being in charge of lighting.

This image was taken when setting up for when our protagonist drags the seat out and then sits down. As you can see, the camera is positioned directly opposite the protagonist who is sat in the chair. As a part of lighting department, one of the considerations I have to take into account when sitting up my lights is to ensure that they cannot be seen within the frame of the shot (unless this source of light lives within the world of the protagonist too). This scenario is a great example of how I have been able to create 3 point lighting within my shot in order to get a clear, creative and conventional shot. Firstly, I must say that the reason why I only have one actual professional light source is due to the fact that this was all that was available from the college during this time – this meant that I had to get creative with how I performed my three point lighting. The green illustration highlights the professional light I had. I decided to use this piece of equipment as the key light for the subject, as this is the main light that lights the subject. Furthermore, this piece of equipment had the most creative opportunities due to it’s settings, so this was another decision that I made as having the role of lighting. The light is positioned outside of the frame, and has some of the barn doors closed off slightly in order to achieve the most optimal creative outcome.

The purple illustration highlights the fill light. For this instance I used natural lighting as my fill light, as this just made sense given the surroundings I was filming in. I had originally drawn the curtains fully across to remove any light from coming in, giving me a blank canvas to work with, but I ended up opening them up very slightly to allow some light leak. This light acted as a soft, dim light on the other side of the subjects face.

Lastly, a problem I found with the shot was that the protagonist’s hair blended in with the dark background. I knew that I was going to be adding effects, especially adding a black and white colour grade, so I needed to create more contrast between the hair and background. To do this, I used the torch on an iPhone, dimmed it to the lowest setting and sit it on the floor, lighting upwards on the wall. This can be seen by the red illustration in the image.

The outcome of 1 out of 2 shots, with the camera in this position, with all the light in position can be seen in the image below. This is obviously just the raw shot as it compares greatly to the end result of the shot in the final cut. To show the comparisons between the before and after of post production, look at the image further below. I will now be discussing my role as editor, and the different tasks I had as a part of this.

Editor

Having the role as editor meant not only cutting all the recorded pieces of video and audio together, but also having several other jobs too. The very first job I had as editor was to log all of the recorded footage and audio, writing appropriate notes to help me determine which clips I should use within the edit. Thinking about my future goals, being a logger is an entry level job into the industry, so learning and improving upon these key skills now are really important. To optimise the time I had during logging, and to make my life easier once I got into the editing stage, I also added time-stamps to a lot of my clips as this allowed me to understand what part of the clip I specifically wanted to include. This can be seen in the image below.

I feel as though this is something often overlooked by editors, but is a vital task needed to be complete in order to save time. Saving time means less money is spent hiring out editing spaces and getting teams of editors to cut it together in the real world.

The different tasks involved in the actual edit once the logging is complete include: cutting, sound editing and adding effects. As a consequence of the production I would say that I have improved greatly within all of these areas.

Cutting has been really important in producing an engaging production as I have been able to back up what an interviewee says with what another one says. The sense that they are all saying the same thing allows the audience to understand and assume that those with misophonia share similar, collective thoughts.

Sound editing obviously played a huge role in representing what misophonia is as misophonia is directly linked with sound. This is specifically evident in scene 1, where I created a layered effect, amplifying trigger sounds, music and intense sound effects such as a heart beat – I think this was very effective at doing it’s job. Sound specific editing is something I wasn’t very confident on before doing this project, so it was definitely a big hurdle to overcome. However, after making creative changes and pushing through to finalise the edit, I’m very proud of the sound design and soundscape that I ended up producing.

Effects editing played a huge role into scene 1 as though I had been able to create an overwhelmingness within the audience through audio, there was still video to achieve. Through the use of keyframing opacity and synchronizing these with the audio triggers, I was able to elevate the production and make for a more engaging experience. Apart from scene 1 however, more basic effects such as a ‘dip to black’ on the end of scenes allowed the audience to understand when a scene was ending and a new one starting. The reason this is important is because it shows that change is occurring and a new topic is going to be discussed. Dipping to black is a very conventional technique used to indicate something ending, and has been around since Melies’ time, so it’s a great, simple and effective technique to use.

Sound Operator

In order to edit the sound, there needs to be sound in the first place- therefore, the final main role that I fulfilled in the making of this documentary was sound operator. For the first scene I used a directional shotgun mic as here all I needed to do was capture specific sounds that were being made. I decided to choose the shotgun mic as this does not pick up any background sounds, allowing for a more clean audio clip.

For recording audio for the interviews, I needed to capture crisp, high quality audio of them speaking. To do this, I made the decision to use the new wireless microphones that we had acquired at the college. As sound operator, on set I connected the microphones to the transmitters and then positioned the microphones appropriately on the interviewees in order to capture their voices but also not have them too seen in shot. I wasn’t too worried about the literal microphones being in shot, but the wires that ran from them would look messy in shot, so I made sure that these were hidden.

Though I did not work with a team, I did work with actors and interviewees on the other side of the camera. What this means is that during this production I have improved upon and gained valuable experience of communicating with external people. Furthermore, this communication does not only include on set but off set too, as I have discussed logistics with them before filming. My on set communication consists of great experience for treating others I may never have met before, respect, and understanding the position I am putting them in considering the nature of the documentary and subject.

I would like to say that overall, I worked to the best of my abilities. Using the technique of making little checklists each day, and ticking these micro tasks off throughout the day, ensuring that everything is complete, has allowed me to keep on top of my tasks and ensure I’m working at a solid pace. I used this technique throughout the entire process of production, starting all the way in research.

I would however say that the one point at which I think I could have worked better is the very end of the post production stage. Though it’s my favourite bit, and you would assume that I would be the most enthused by this, the fact that I was coming to the end of weeks worth of work, I was starting to get a little drained out and lost effort slowly. Though this is understandable, I still wanted to hit the same level of criteria as I had at the process, which made me stressed about not getting enough work done. I think what I should have done is set myself my manageable tasks to keep my moral up.

Despite this, I’m very happy with how I performed over the last 16 weeks and am proud of the effort I was generally able to maintain.

My career path moving forward is to become a video editor. I don’t know the specifics of this, but postproduction has always been my favourite, and specifically video editing has been my favourite part of the process. Furthermore, I also really enjoy VFX, so this may be a specific niche that I end up progressing with too. In order to fulfil my wants of becoming a video editor, I am going to study postproduction and VFX at university next year. I am really looking forward to this and I can’t wait to be focusing my attention all onto this section of the production process.

This project has not changed or altered the way in which I think about my future, as it has infact reinforced it. I thoroughly enjoyed producing the mini effects segment in scene 1, and it shows that despite it being quite basic and simple, I really enjoy the area of the process. Furthermore, the whole concept of trying to put together a structurally sound documentary using interviewees speech to back each other up was really interesting. I think if I have some professional advice and guidance from a lecturer at university I could end up to really enjoying this part too.

Final Reflection

After evaluating the entire process of the production, it’s now time for my final reflections. This will include an overview of the main successes and failures I think I had within the production, the aspect I’m most proud of, where I would have liked to have developed further and a final statement regarding my skills and future. This is quite a sentimental moment as it’s the final statement I will have to round of my time at college as a whole. I will be beginning with the successes of the production.

To summarise the successes I had with this project, I would say that the ability to apply my skills across all production areas and bring it together is what I found most successful and in fact, I would say is what I am most proud of too. During my time on this course, I have developed many different productions from very start to finish, and with each production I have become more and more confident and constructing it. Despite having gained the skills to create this documentary, it was still a big hurdle to overcome – it’s the largest production I have created, and with it being a solo production too, this just made it even harder.

Despite there being problems to overcome along the way, I couldn’t be more proud of how I have been able to collate all of the recorded elements and bring it together into a meaningful video that can change people’s outlook on a disorder that is very personal to me. I think the best way to prove this is through the audience feedback I gained – I had some really kind and positive feedback messages showing their gratitude towards my efforts to spread awareness of this disorder. It’s clear that they’re desperate for appropriate representation so this is really nice to see and makes me proud of what I had done. The images below show this feedback.

Final Reflection

A failure to the production was the decisions I made regarding the interviewees. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a ‘failure’ because I think the interviewees with misophonia were absolutely great, but the decisions I made regarding representation across all ages would be. I had lots of comments in my feedback suggesting that they would have liked to have seen older people with misophonia as they would have had a very different perspective on everything compared to the younger people I had in it. I do think that this was a consideration I didn’t think about and could have definitely been fixed if I had thought about it as there are plenty of people on Facebook who potentially would have agreed to be a part of the production. It does mean that now I have got a production that perhaps doesn’t appropriately represent all different viewpoints of misophonia as I had originally planned this documentary to have.

If I were to do this project all over again, there are definitely some key changes that I would make to the documentary. The first change is that I would include far more b-roll. I really think my documentary lacks visual interest, as it is essentially just interviews. Though I did want it to be a lot of interview-based visual materials, as this allows the audience to connect with them on a more personal level, there is too much of it and it does become a little boring. I think the b-roll that I was able to achieve in the section where the interviewees discuss what they like to do in their spare time/how they calm down is really good as it’s a literal b-roll that showcases to the audience what they are talking about. I think something that might have been useful to do is discuss different environments with which they find themselves having triggers in, such as a school (like they did talk about), and literally shoot b-roll of them walking around a school. This would have added far more interest and visually represented what they were discussing. It can be hard to fully understand and imagine the scenarios that the interviewees were discussing, especially Erin’s, so to have her go back to her old school, this would have been a really good opportunity. Obviously, there are logistical constraints and hurdles to overcome here, but being critical on my work, this would have really improved it.

Another change that I would make is to include more intensive VFX. Though it’s definitely not a ‘need’ for the production, I do think it would have elevated it to the next level. This is also a want on my end due to the fact this is something I am passionate about and actually spent a long time learning about in unit 12 specialist study. Though the skills I learnt from unit 12 will be useful for me in the future (I’ll speak more about my future soon), it would have been nice to put them to the test in this project. The reason I decided to not include more intensive VFX because I was honestly worried too much about logistics. Though this was true, if I worked hard I do think I would have been able to achieve just this extra more work, as I believe it would have had a big pay-off. These visual effects would have been really in representing the emotions those with misophonia feel to triggers, and could have worked quite nicely with the b-roll addition too.

As a consequence to this production, I would say that I have definitely grown as a filmmaker. There are 4 reasons that explain why I believe this:

Filmmaking is not just about the literal filmmaking side of it, it’s also about working with people and communicating with them. I would say that my confidence working with external people has developed, especially with writing formal messages/emails too. At the start of the production, I didn’t actually have any intention of including more than one person with misophonia within the production, but due to the decision to just go for it and ask those who had responded to my audience survey, I was able to get some really engaging and vital interviewees in the documentary. I would also say that because it’s a documentary and I am having to speak to people, asking questions about a sensitive, personal topic to them, this experience of having to do this has grown my confidence. I was definitely very nervous to do this as it’s quite a daunting thing to do when you’ve never done it before, but now that I’ve done it, the next time it'll be far easier.
Confidence in my own practical skillset has improved due to the range of job roles that I had to fulfil. I’ll say it every time, but after each project, I forever get more and more confident with working with the equipment, and I would confidently say that this is the most confident I have felt using the whole range of equipment (camera, audio, lights) than I have ever done before.
Due to the scale of the production and how much I had set out for myself, my ability to structure and develop a short production has most certainly grown. This includes both creative and logical decisions that I had to make in order to produce it. Creative being to produce and generate an idea that is sufficient enough to fulfil the needs of what I want, but also logistically possible enough to then go and make it. Logistical being actually going ahead and bringing it all together, using my creative desires to path the way in which I do things.
Furthermore, I had to schedule all of this too. Though I suppose this comes under the logistical decisions I made, I’m putting this in its own reason as to why I have grown as a filmmaker due to how big of a task this way. It’s the longest production I've worked on, and I’m very proud with how I was able to deal with all the tasks that needed to be completed along the way. An example of this is that every day I would write a list of micro-tasks that I would need to complete that day. This helped me to keep on top of everything and reach all deadlines along the way.

My time on this course has directed my life ambitions. Going into it all I knew was that I liked to make and edit videos for social media, and that I really enjoyed making people’s days through this content. As the course is now coming to an end, I can confidently say that the skills I have learnt, and the productions that I have been able to be a part of and/or produce on my own have only made me agree even more with that fact I like producing media products. The satisfaction of getting audience feedback and effectively being able to gain a preferred reading is totally unmatched, as it shows that all the time and effort that went into producing it was worth it. Even if I don’t gain this preferred reading and I actually find that after the production I would have done it differently if I could again, I learn from this, and then move onto the next production. The course represents working in media well as you complete a project then move onto the next one – except here it is a safe environment where money and real-client satisfaction is not important. I have been able to learn so many skills over my time on this course, all of which will be extremely useful for the next stage in my life.

Speaking of this, next year I’m studying post-production and VFX at university. If you told 2020 me that, he’d be extremely amazed at the situation I have found myself walking into: it’s an absolute dream to be able to take what was just a little hobby into a real world, hopefully prosperous future career. I’m still not sure exactly which area of post production I will end up taking, but I am giving myself the time at university to figure this out. What I found is that through each level of education I have become more and more precise with my future endeavours. I’m really proud of what I have been able to learn and I can’t wait for what the future holds for me.

LO6.2 Use evaluative and reflective skills to make decisions for a creative media production

LO6.2
Use evaluative and reflective skills to make decisions for a creative media production