Having been given an assignment to create a documentary, I decided to use Salisbury Cathedral as the primary focus. This was firstly for convenience as it is less than a 10 minute walk away from my house, the second was because I grew up near the iconic building and see it every day. This has always given the Cathedral a special place in my heart as it represents my home town for me. Our first task once our idea had been decided on was to create a pitch to present to our tutors, the lower year group and our peers. This was primarily a chance for us to practice pitching our ideas, but the other advantage was for our audiences to ask questions that could lead to problems we had no foreseen. Luckily my idea had few issues with it, allowing me to proceed to the next step.
My first port of call to get the ball rolling was to see if the Cathedral would be willing for me to film and even give me an on camera interview.
I instantly went to both the website for the Cathedral and their Facebook page in an attempts to contact someone. Thankfully I was instantly put into contact with the person I needed to speak, Seif El Rashidi who was in charge of the Magna Carta celebrations in 2015. He was more than happy to assist me in my current assignment. To give him full understanding of my idea I sent him the PowerPoint presentation I used during the pitch of my idea to my peers.
The added bonus I received from this contact was the best person to ask for an interview. Steve Dunn who is the Head Guide at the Cathedral and as a result would knew all the answers to the questions I would be asking him. I promptly contacted him to request his permission to give me an interview.
Myself and Steve began to e-mail back and forth with him willing to assist my far more than I had ever anticipated. We covered all the information he needed to feel comfortable in the interview, we decided on film date of 16/12/15 and he was even gracious enough to organise a location for filming.
With all in place I sent him over a copy of the five questions I would be asking him during the interview. As I knew the Cathedral had such an extensiveness history within the city, I decided to focus my interview on how the Cathedral ended up on the site that was chosen.
It was at this point my documentary hit the biggest obstacle in its path. A fellow student had decided that instead of making their own documentary that they would instead join me on mine as a co-producer. However none of the work done so far had any of his input whatsoever. This was not through a lack of his chances in approaching me about the production, instead it was more down to pure laziness on his part and has been speculated by a few that he only joined my production as he knew I would do the work. With less than 24 hours before filming the interview I received the following message from the said student.
When the first message arrived I went into a panic and instantly messaged some of my other peers. How was I supposed to film and conduct an interview on my own. Luckily Kelly Turner without hesitation dropped all her plans for that day to assist me. I then received his second message, but given the lack of effort already put in by the student along with Kelly's willingness to drop everything to help me made me decided to keep Kelly in place and not have him at the interview at all. With all in place the only remaining part was to do a risk assessment once we arrived on location.
location_risk_assessment_sheet_-_interview.docx | |
File Size: | 339 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Filming for the interview went perfectly and all the answers I was seeking were given. I did debate about covering the myth behind how the Cathedral ended up at its chosen site, however with a limited run time and so much to work with already I decided to avoid this tale. Instead I chose to use the opening and ending to house a narrative containing facts and information around the Cathedral itself. This meant the only thing remaining was to film my cut-away shots of both the interior and exterior of the Cathedral. I firstly jotted up a risk assessment for the shoot itself as permission had pretty much been given already. Having visited the site many times I was able to do the risk assessment based on my already existing knowledge.
location_risk_assessment_sheet_-cut-aways.docx | |
File Size: | 339 kb |
File Type: | docx |
I knew from looking at the Cathedral website they had many activities that ran throughout the week as it is a working church with services. After a few e-mails a date and time where decided on which was for Thursday the 14th January.
Despite earlier issues with the student that joined my production as a co-producer I was happy to honor a request from my tutor and that was to give him a final chance to actually do some work on this production. However, unlike with the interview I did not even get an e-mail from the student this time. He knew the date, start time and location to meet at, all he had to do was arrive as I would have gone to collect all the equipment. After waiting for 30 minutes there was no sign of him, so I continued to film without him. This caused me to return to my risk assessment to add to it as I was now working alone. Filming went perfectly and I achieved all the desired shots I needed. After all the filming had finished I received a message from the student claiming he was unable to get into Salisbury.
At this point it was to late for him, as I had already informed our tutor of the situation and how all that was left for the production was to record a voice over and to edit it together. My tutor informed me he would be removed from the production as the work remaining is not enough for him to claim co-producer for the production. My next step was to edit together my footage ready for the narrative to be recorded and added later. Once this was done I sat down with the facts and information I had from the Cathedral website to begin writing a script for the narrative.
I decided to not match the footage with the facts being stated to make viewers more likely to go to the site themselves. If I had accompanied the narrative facts with shots of the items it would have eliminated the need for some to go and see the Cathedral for themselves. The entire production was edited as if it was an episode of a web-series that explores historic building around the world.
The Finished Production.
Evaluation
While I had a few bumps along the road, the production all-in-all came out as I envisioned. I would have liked some more varied cut-away shots, however this would have required equipment that was unavailable to me. I believe I also showed how well I can work with people who I am asking assistance from to achieve the desired results. I found images to add to the interview to illustrate the changes the Cathedral has seen and the added bonus was due to their age copyright was not an issue for me to use them. If I were to do another documentary based around the Cathedral I would expand further into exploring the interior of the Cathedral with on location interviews covering the different areas.