LAND Documentary Final Edit

GARETH MESSENGER

0905095

25/05/2012

BA (Hons) Journalism Year Three

LAND DOCUMENTARY CRITICAL REFLECTION

The Land project for Year Three journalism students was originally discussed between students and lecturers as being more focused on telling a story as this was a skill which played to the majority of our selected year's strengths. Although, enthralling imagery has been a crucial asset in the completion of this year's pieces, the idea of processing and telling a story across the entire project.

Our task was to produce a five minute documentary based on Maggie Holland's folk song “A Place called England”. The song itself refers specifically to the English countryside of hills and nature while realising the impact industrial action is having on the traditional view of English natural eyesores. My group consisted of Jake Gable, Karen Purnell and I and immediately we broke down the lyrics to the song to see which shots we could film and which locations would be most efficient for our piece. In the process of this we constructed a detailed, thorough and specific paper edit linking the rushes we would capture to the lyrics in the song and annotating the previously discussed locations so we would have an organised timetable of when were available to film. However, Chris explained that the idea was to not be too literal so we set about focusing our shots in other parts of the song using the music to good effect.

We first contacted Maggie Holland who agreed to let us film her sing the song. Despite the rights of the song now not belonging to her, we were cleared to proceed but we hit a stumbling block when we were informed she lived in Edinburgh which proved to be inconvenient as financially it would be a problem. To overcome this and after conversation with Chris, I decided to contact a university in Edinburgh to see if anybody would be available to film Maggie Holland singing “A Place Called England” but unfortunately nobody was willing to help so we then decided as a group to move onto finding a composer or folk singer to produce a new version of the song especially for our piece.

Even though I believed the sunrise shot as our opener to be an impressive viewer, I felt it was too stereotypical of nature and we had to think outside of the original and go for the more obscure rather than sticking to a shot that was used far too much during last year's coastlines projects.

During the actual construction and producing of our piece, because of certain issues there were a lot of dates were all members were unavailable at one time. I have been particularly critical of our lack of initiative to go out and film individually rather than waiting until we were all available. It was a process which slowed the production of our piece and all members of the group have accepted responsbility. In spite of this, we acted swiftly and became more efficient in filming in groups and both individually. I worked a lot on Winchester and the surrounding areas as I have a vast knowledge of the area, and especially St Pilgrims Walk and St Catherines Hill. I focused mainly on rivers and the effect water could have on our piece integrating around the lyrics. Tight shots of the water flowing down the stream, as well as 'gushing' shoots of the water flowing from breaks in the river were all included in the final piece. We incurred an issue with the filming of some shots, in particular Karen whose filming was done on a 4:3 ratio which was contradictory of the 16:9 wide-screen shots filmed by Jake and I. However, this was quickly amended in the rough edit.

I am particularly pleased with all the shots I filmed. I went to every location in Winchester, Portsmouth and elsewhere with a solid idea of what I specifically wanted to film, and even though there are a small minority of my rushes which I know could been far better, the majority of the shots I filmed were lovely images, but I have always been certain in my own ability to film quality shots with the equipment available to us.

When it came to the final edit, we had no luck with a production of the original song, so after Karen and I had a thorough conversation with Chris, we decided to use Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis as our theme song, mixing an original version of 16 minutes long down to five incorporating a combinations of beds, mixes, swells and beats which came out as a fantastic polished piece of music. To incorporate the lyrics of the original song we used particular designated lyrics from “A Place Called England” and used Jake as a narrator in sort of a poem format. The decision to use Jake was discussed and decided by Karen and I, as we decided Jake had  a soothing voice and pronunciated his words correctly with a valuable tone. We used Jake's narration in the piece as a starter to introduce the piece and then build up the repetition and frequency of the lyrics as we neared the climax of the song which all worked in tandem with the bed and proved fruitful in our final delivery. The shots which were unveiled were fantastic and worked really well with the music, and were the best shots we had filmed. We had decided to create the song and use the pictures to the song and worked that way instead of placing the pictures on the timeline first to then introduce the song on the edit.

My criticism of the piece is we had no spade digging in the dirt which visually would have been fantastic and could have been excellent for some natural sound. Another criticism is the group's time keeping when deciding when to film was originally poor but was quickly rectified and the system we introduced of localising areas to certain people worked extremely effectively. We probably needed at least another 15 minutes of raw footage to give us that extra variation, but the shots we had filmed in the process were up to a high quality standard.

The final edit itself is an interesting journey through the traditional England. The idea to use a train starting the piece makes us feel like we are on a journey and immediately engulfs the audience into seeing more. The end shot was a lovely gentle end to a traditionally classical song, and the night shot of the train is a superb contrast from England at the beginning of the day, to England at the end of a day. It was England.