Documentary Production

This post and the next blog post are focused on the overall production of the documentary, so I decided to split them up into production and post-production so the posts are more in order and easier to understand. Therefore, in this blog post, I will be focusing on our production process of the documentary and how it affected our overall project.

        On Wednesday November 8, my group and I decided to film some B-roll. At the beginning, we wanted to film an interview that day, but we thought taking some more time to focus on fixing and remaking our interview questions would be better and would improve our interview footage and answers. So, like I talked about in the last blog post, since we had already planned out a lot of the B-roll we wanted to film, we believed that using a whole class worth of time to film B-roll, would make the overall production be better and more coordinated. This did end up helping my group and I get more connected as we all knew what most of the B-roll we had looked like so we could help make other footage or sounds fit.

        Before filming that day however, we filmed a couple of B-roll shots on the day we did our main research during class. What we did was film the screen of a computer scrolling through important book banning articles or a list of popular and important books that are banned or have been banned in the past. These shots not only gave us a variety of B-roll for our piece, but it also added more context and information to show how many books have been banned. This gives the viewer an idea of how much book bans are really impacting the world and how apparent they really are.

        Going back to November 8th, we filmed a most of our B-roll that day, so we decided to start with the most obvious place: the library. This was were we filmed most of our B-roll because it was the place with the most books and therefore gave the best chance to get a variety of shots. In the library we filmed a lot of shots focused on books in a bookshelf. For example, vertical bookshelves and panning through a horizontal bookshelf.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

        Apart from the library, we also filmed a lot outside the ceramics room. The ceramics section of the school is in a long hallway with a lot of storage closets and rooms. Something that hallway also has is a big bin of textbooks and old books that are no longer being used.

        

        Obviously, no banned books would be in the pile as that would be against the law to have one in school (and would also completely go against our whole topic about banned books); however, the books did looked old and unused, so we took that and decided to make it feel like banned books that have been thrown out even if they weren't.

        This area was also where we filmed the very first shot of the documentary: the opening of the book. This was an idea we came up with while we were already out filming. We had thought of this because we didn't really know how to start the documentary. One of my group members suggested that if we do a shot opening a book it could be like were diving into the topic of books and the essence of them. We also all had the idea to film closing the book as well and that could be how we ended the documentary; however, it ended up not really fitting anywhere during post-production, so we left it out. This was because we decided to include a quote about books and literature that we found inside of one of the textbooks. 

        The excluding of B-roll ended up happening a lot too because we filmed a lot of B-roll that never ended up fitting on top of any VO or interview, so we ended up leaving them out; however, this showed us that filming more B-roll than necessary is always helpful in case you need more. Even though we had a lot of B-roll left over, we still ended up being short during post-production. This was because even though we had extra, the extra we had didn't fit the areas we needed B-roll for. I actually had to film some B-roll in New York at my cousins house because we didn't have enough, but it ended up going fine because they have a small library that I could film in.

        Before all of this though, we filmed the interviews. On Monday, we filmed our first interview with Ms. Herring. This interview went very well. Not only because she gave very good answers, but also because nothing went wrong and she understood everything very clearly and gave specific examples we could further build the VO around it. The only thing about this interview is that because she was the first interviewee, we forgot to ask her to restate the questions, so we had to shape the VO to almost ask the question before her interview. For example, Ms. Herring began talking about a book we read in class (1984), but she forgot to say the name of the book until about 30 seconds after answering the question, so we had to fit the voiceover to talk about the book 1984 right before her interview and her talking so it sounded like she was talking about the same book. 

        The second interview with Mr. Berna went much more smoothly because we already went through some things that we wanted to improve, so we easily made it flow easier. The only thing about his interview is that there were a couple of people taking a test in his class during the interview, so there were page flipping sounds in the background. Even though most of them were cut out, a lot of them weren't and ended up staying in the background.

Overall though, the interviews were very very good and were perfect for fitting the voiceover. 

        The voice over was also recorded around this time. Before this though, we had to alter the script a little bit to fit what the interviewees were talking about so everything would flow smoother. After we finished editing the script, one of my group members mom recorded the VO since she actually works for speaking over commercials, so we basically had a professional talking in our documentary. The VO was filmed in a padded room so the sound wasn't echoing at all. 

        This same group member had a copy of the book 1984, so I also asked her to film a couple of clips with the book so we could use it for B-roll on top of the voice over or the interviews. 

        Even though this was is basically research, we also looked for some background music that could fit behind the documentary during post-production.

        Overall though, our production stage and schedule had to be edited and changed a lot but it ended up all coming together and working perfectly with each other.

-Dana