Week 5 | Jwhiteual132024

Week 5: 4th-8th March

Monday

I am writing this as of week 5 Monday morning. The current situation is that I do unfortunately have outstanding research that is not completed. The problem was that, on Friday, practicing and improving upon my practical documentary interview skills took a lot more time than anticipated. Despite this, I am very happy with the skills I was able to improve upon, and the end result makes me excited for the opportunities this project gives me.

My current Trello checklist board can be seen below.

The tasks with the orange bands are tasks to do if I had spare time on those days, the red bands are tasks that need to be completed. It can be seen that because of how long the practical interview skills took on Friday, I have 4 outstanding tasks to be completed. I had started the interpretations of my survey results on Friday morning, so this is something I am planning to start with today. My goal for today is to complete the entire research stage so that I can get back on track with my action plan and then start creative preproduction tomorrow.

I have also updated my action plan to keep on track with the wider picture of it all, ensuring that I am staying on track with my master production schedule.

I received an email response from Emma, the clinical psychologist I had previously emailed. Very unfortunately, she states that she is unable to take part in the production. This email can be seen below.

For more information on this, click here

Tuesday

Unfortunately, due to personal reasons, I was unable to complete the work I had set out to do yesterday. I was only able to complete the Facebook/Reddit survey interpretation but did not manage to move onto anything else. I found the interpretation of this survey very useful as it has helped to inform and support the ideas I have had for the documentary, and the sort of topics I should be discussing within. Despite this, I have realised that I do have Saturday free as I am not working my Saturday job this week. Therefore, this means I have an extra day I can use to catch-up on my work. With the assumption that I able to achieve the completion of the research stage tonight (not including extra research opportunities), I am planning Saturday’s time towards creative preproduction, as planned in my action plan.

These are 2 important things that happened/I was able to get completed today:

I was able to finish the interpretations of my survey results. This meant that I had now completed all of the essential research tasks to be done. I found the interpretations of these survey results really interesting and it has helped me a lot with the understanding of the content of the piece and how it will be pieced together. It’s important to remember that my idea is not and was not restricted after the ideas development stage, this research should have helped to inform and improve upon the idea. What I can say regarding this, is that in my personal experience of this, I have found that the research stage, although not changing the original idea too much, has definitely helped to guide me in the right direction, giving me a deeper understanding for what I intend on producing.
As it was Tuesday, we had our weekly meeting regarding the End of Year Show. Unfortunately, script still hadn’t done their job for deciding upon a title for the show, so the team leaders spoke amongst themselves and we instead voted for the best title. The title ended up being, ‘That’s a wrap!’. I think this title is suitable as its fun and has connotations to media production as this is what directors often say at the end of a shoot. Now that we had a title, we (the graphics team) could create a logo. There were concepts spoken about during the meeting of creating a literal wrap character. Some quick drawings I drew in the meeting can be seen below.

After the meeting was complete, I decided to have a quick meeting with the two others in the graphics team, as its important we work as a team. The results from this meeting were that if we are to use the title ‘That’s a wrap!’ and a logo of a wrap, it looks too similar to a sandwich shop. I am glad we were able to recognise this before moving on with it, as this saves us a lot of time and allows us to produce something much more effective. The idea we had instead of using a wrap was using film reel and using this to wrap it around a camera or some sort of character. With this in mind, we decided that we should split a part and create our own concepts ready for next week. From there, we can see what everyone likes, and move forward using that chosen concept.

The image below shows a concept for a loading screen as guests walk in to be seated.

The idea is that the character slowly climbs up the ladder for a minute, then jumps onto the reel slide, coming all the way back down. This animation can then be looped forever, allowing for a perfect loading/waiting screen.

Wednesday

Despite having stated that on Monday I was unfortunately not able to get Emma on board with the production, and had a choice to make between two possible ideas to overcome the situation, I have sinced received an email back from her stating that one of her colleagues is happy for me to contact him about this opportunity. The email can be seen below

I had a search on google for who he is, and given the fact she stated him as a colleague, I was able to also find him on the NHS Oxford Health Specialist Psychological Intervention Centre website. Emma’s name can also be seen in the screenshot too.

To add to this, I was also given Tom’s very own website that he has set up to give online CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) which is a type of therapy which can help those with misophonia. It is great to see that is knowledgeable on the subject of CBT as this is one of the points I wanted to discuss within the doc too.

Now that I have received this email, this changes plan entirely. I was going to have my auntie step in place to be the professional, but having Tom would be far more ideal as he is specialism is to do with disorders including misophonia. The next step is to create an email to send to Tom, to double check that everything I have said to Emma previously would be okay with him.

My email can be seen below.

I was then responded to very quickly with the email below.

This was absolutely great news. I proceeded to plan out a date and time we could have a chat. We decided upon this Friday at 5pm.

I am very happy with the chance at having a professional be a part of the production again – I think this will elevate the production quality a lot.

Structure of Doc

Throughout this day, I was also able to get a much better understanding for the narrative and structure of my documentary. I did this by firstly understanding the contents of my documentary.

I began with the basics – who is going to be in my documentary? I was able to break the 5 people I had into 3 different categories: Have misophonia, Affected by misophonia through family, and Professional. I have got 3 people who have misophonia and 1 in the other 2 categories. I think this makes sense to have more people in the category of people with misophonia, as ultimately, it is a disorder about misophonia itself. Particularly due to the lack of knowledge and understanding of misophonia within the science-field, personal stories are going to be the best way to express what it is.

The next step was to think about the questions that I could ask each category of interviewees. The images below show what I was able to come up with.

From here, I split the documentary up into sections, making it easier to manage and understand the structure. The reason I decided to think about the questions first was that I could not link those questions together and understand the sub-topics within the doc. These sub-topics would then become the different sections of the doc. To help with my understanding on who would be featured in each section, I gave each category a colour: blue is with misophonia, pink is affected by misophonia through family and purple is for the professional. The image below shows the sections of the documentary.

You may also notice a graph-like drawing at the bottom of the page. What I did here was plot the structure out on a graph, relating to the mood it sets for the audience. What I was able to find is that my documentary begins very low, looks at the positives, and then brings it back down to an even ending. I want the audience to understand both the negative and positives of misophonia, leaving them with an open ending. This ending may be influenced by what the interviewees say, but I am going to direct the questions so much that they discuss positives and negatives.

Now that I have been able to understand how the documentary will flow, the next step was to understand the specifics on each section. The images below show my breakdowns and understandings for each section. What I found through doing this was that the more questions I added to each section, the more I had new ideas flow. This task followed through into Thursday too.

Thursday/Friday

On Thursday I continued to think about the structure of the documentary, and even looked at an existing example to understand how they framed theirs. The existing example I looked at can be found below.

The documentary was about 3 people who have grown up without a father. Though there are only 3 interviewees, and the documentary is primarily interview footage, it is still engaging. I was able to learn from this that they edited and cut the answers from the interviewees among one-another's to add variety to each question. The questions were not explicitly told (there was no interviewer on screen or text saying what the questions were), which is just like mine, they embedded the questions without the sentence of their answer. The filmmaker was able to keep it engaging through the use of another tighter camera on the face, and b-roll. The b-roll was relevant to what was being discussed, so is perhaps something I should look into. An idea I was able to gain from this is asking the interviewees what they like to do, or do on a daily basis, and filming them in slow mo to use as b-roll. Use of slow-mo separates the footage from reality, and makes it clear to the audience that what they are seeing is footage that relates to what is being said.

On Thursday, I also prepared some questions/conversations that I wanted to speak to Tom about in my meeting with him on Friday. These inclujded:

- Purpose of the documentary

- His role within the documentary (specialist view on misophonia contrasting with personal stories)

- Questions: What is misophonia? Coping techniques available? The work he does online with CBT

- Where are we going to be filming? His house? NHS Oxford Clinic? Somewhere else?

These questions will help to ensure that the call I have with him is worthwhile - ultimately I am having the call with him to clarify everything and ensure it is a go ahead operation.

To further prepare myself for the interview, I tested Microsoft Teams on my laptop to ensure that it worked. The screenshot below shows this.

Not sure if it would work with Cirencester college organisation account however, so decided to try it with personal account. The app doesn’t support personal accounts – so I had to login in on the web. I was able to locate where I would type in the meeting ID and passcode which I have been given by Tom in the email.

The conversation I had with Tom can be seen below.

This video chat was great, it gave me the opportunity to not only talk about and confirm things with Tom but actually just meet him as well. It’s good that I have been able to have a first conversation with my interviewee before the actual interview, as it makes it a lot less stressful and comforting that I am seeing someone in person I have spoken to before. It was great to hear that all of the points I want to discuss with him, he is very happy to talk about, and furthermore, didn’t even have anything to add: I had included everything he would have.

There was one predicament that we found during our chat – location. The original plan to discuss with him was to film at NHS Oxford Health’s clinic, but he stated to me that this would take far too long and would be very hard to get processed. There is the additional problem on top of this in the fact that Tom would be talking as himself, with his own personal information, but works for the NHS and on NHS property. This is something he advises we shouldn’t go for, as its almost too much hassle for what I really need. What I really want for the environment for his interview is a professional-looking working environment. The next idea we had was to film in his home, specifically, in his office. This office is the room which all of his online patients see anyway, so it’s a good environment. The problems with this are that I would be intruding on his families home. Though he is happy for me to come in and film in his office, he would rather another option.

After this call, I spoke to my dad about the situation, and he said that his work has spare offices/meeting rooms that are often not used which could make for a good option. Furthermore, these offices are only a 10 minute drive from where Tom lives, so for Tom’s sake, this is a great opportunity. I would need to confirm if I am able to film on the property first, but it sounds like a really good option. The image below shows the email I sent to Tom regarding this.

His response to this was, “Sounds good to me.” which is great as he is happy for this to go ahead.

Additionally to all of this, Friday was the day that I began producing the preproduction material. I started off with the storyboards for the film scene, as this is something I was able to envision – I wanted to get it done on paper.