Documentary

The idea I was working on was a documentary about British boxer Ruben Alves, we planned to follow him and find out his story. The first part of the film was a poetic piece, the idea behind this was to film Ruben straight on as we changed the lighting to different colours, the main part of the poetic piece was the sound which I had to do. The inspiration for this was taking from a video game called; The Last of US.
I felt that the overall look and feel of the poetic piece was very aesthetically pleasing, I also felt that it runs smoothly and an enjoyable experience to watch. I felt that the idea for the piece was also very unique and unlike any of the others we had heard about or seen. The sound on this project was a massive part of it as it would tell the story and I felt as though it did tell the story and lead the audience through the build up of a fight. The sounds that were also used for the piece were very clean and edited accordingly, especially with the heart beat being a forefront of the film.

I believe it terms of weaknesses in this film, was that it wasn’t long enough and the reaction that we got to it was that people wanted more. In terms of this weakness we would have liked to have added more to it, but felt it wouldn’t have worked for us personally. The other weaknesses of this piece, I felt were that it was a bit too acted from Ruben and didn’t look very natural, although this was what we wanted to do, I think if we did it again we would want him to be a lot calmer and not have to que him and to just let him get out the feelings that he would associate with the build up to a fight.
The overall piece of the documentary I felt was very strong and got the story of Ruben Alves across, I feel that this piece was also very pleasing to the eye. The style of the piece suited the personality of Ruben, it was very calm and relaxed, but also had a bit boxing edge to it. The cinematography of this documentary was very strong and had a lot of nice shots of the gym. Another strong part was probably the main part of the documentary and that was the interview with Ruben, throughout the film you see Ruben sat in his living room talking about boxing and his experiences, I think this bit is so strong because he has so much to talk about; he also talks very personally about everything. His calm persona is also an interesting aspect. The sound of the documentary is very clean, especially within the interview, Ruben is heard clearly, which is what we wanted as we wanted to really push his story though.

Even though I do think that this documentary is a good piece, it also has its weaknesses, the problems I think it has is that it’s very interview heavy, by this I mean in terms of the shots of Ruben sat in the living room, I think that this does become quite repetitive and I understand that this can become quite boring for the audience. The other down sides to the documentary is the eye line of the interview, throughout Ruben is looking up and this can become very distracting to the audience also. We did use music on the documentary, although very quietly we probably could have went without it, as the audience were pretty hooked on listening to what Ruben was saying instead of getting distracted by the music playing throughout.
The process of making this work was pretty straight forward from my point of view; I felt that everything was done to a schedule and ran pretty smoothly. This was the first documentary that I had worked on in a while, so I was very excited to follow something new and find out a thing or two along the way. In terms of the way we went about thinking of ideas we were the kind of group that were watching stuff all the time looking for inspiration or just little bits and pieces that we thought would work in our project. From my perspective I didn’t know a great deal of boxing; I had watched it before I just didn’t know the ins and outs of it, and so my process of work was to learn more about it. I did this by watching a variety of different boxing videos, such as; Interviews, Boxing matches and even adverts, this helped me a great deal as it gave me a lot of different ideas and helped me to understand the personas of different boxers. As a group as we were constantly coming up with ideas this gave us a good starting point for when we started the poetic piece, we all knew the idea that we wanted to go for and I feel we all had a similar idea of how we wanted it to look and feel. This process then overlapped into the making of the documentary, a lot of different discussions took place as to how we wanted the documentary to be stylistically. This prompted us to look into a range of different documentaries so that we could get an idea of different approaches that we thought would best suit us. When in the specifics of making this documentary we took a very calm approach towards it as we wanted that to reflect in the finished film, we thought that if were relaxed about it then it would keep Ruben relaxed which I feel that it did. The way we went about the post production was also very much the same, we took our time on it, didn’t panic, we all put ideas into how thought it could flow and I thought this worked as we all had a chance to voice our opinions which meant we were all really happy with the finished documentary.

My individual contribution to this project was the sound design; I wanted the sound on both projects to be of a high standard so that it didn’t affect the visuals. As this was something I wanted to achieve I spent a lot of time perfecting my own skills so that I could give it my all and be proud of it. My contribution for the poetic piece was all of the sound that was featured in it, as I wasn’t in the group from the start some of the sounds we recorded by Reece, when editing the poetic piece I felt that the sound that Reece had recorded was too a good standard for me to work with. As the poetic piece was very sound lead, I wanted the sounds to be very full to show the crowd reaction along with Rubens reaction. The actual sound edit for the poetic piece didn’t take me very long at all as I know how I wanted it to sound and already had a sound design put together for when the visuals were ready, so that when they were I just had to put it on and tweak it around a bit. My contribution to the actual documentary was a lot more hands on as I was recording all of the sound and especially the sound for the interview. To make sure I recorded the sound properly for the interview I got some different types of sound equipment out such as boom mics and lapel mics, this reason for this was so I could try them out on myself and then I was able to see what worked best and what didn’t work at all. When it came down to doing the interview I decided upon lapel mics as I felt that they were the best for dialogue and meant that it was right up next to Ruben speaking. The problems I felt we encountered as a team was that we were quite light on numbers compared to other groups, I’m not using this as an excuse, but I felt that we couldn’t get things done as efficiently as each person had to take responsibility of more than one role. This was sometimes problematic In terms of producing for James as he had to think about the production side as well as his main role, it was at times difficult getting a hold of Ruben, so we would all turn up ready to shoot but Ruben would cancel which could be very frustrating.
As I have said previously my approach to working on this project was watching a lot of different documentaries, even unrelated ones. For example I watched a documentary on BBC called; Life and Death Row, this documentary followed inmates on death row in America, it also gave us and insight into the families of the victims and the prisoners. I used this documentary as I feel it was quite a reflexive documentary in that whenever the inmates finished speaking you would see them take off their radio mics and proceed to leave. I like this about the documentary as you got to use the workings of the piece. I feel this toppled into our documentary in that ours was quite reflexive in that you hear Reece ask Ruben the questions; this means the audience can get a taste of how we made our film. Throughout this documentary you also got to a see a very personal account of the inmates which I felt I personally wanted to get from our film and I feel that we did this also as Ruben definitely showed a vulnerable side to himself.

Whilst I was doing sound on this project I was also reading; The Location Sound Bible, by Ric Viers, this turned out to be a massive help to me as it explains everything you need to know about recording sound on location, it was useful as if I couldn’t quite remember something about the techniques of recording location sound, I was then able to open this book and find out what I needed to know, by doing this I also learnt a great deal more just by looking over the book every time that I needed to.
Overall both of these approaches to the making of the work made a massive difference to me personally as I found them to be massive inspiration, by doing both of these techniques of watching and reading, it has also helped me to learn a lot more about the fields I have worked; documentary and sound. I plan to use the theory side a lot more in my future projects, as I believe it is the best way forward.

Luke Hall