Critical Evaluation

Our aim for the ten-minute project was to show Tango at a match in his full glory, shouting and swearing, as he is a well-known fan of Sheffield Wednesday FC. We would then look at him in a different light at home and at work as a normal everyday person.                                                                                                                                                   Overall, I think our ten-minute project could have been a lot better. However I am very pleased with the footage shown, as it is clear and precise and backs up everything the main character and the interviewees speak of. Nevertheless, despite attempting to express the main character in both a positive and negative way, we only managed to show him in a good light effectively, which was backed up by interviews and footage of his softer side. I think that by including more footage of him behaving badly and certainly more interviews from people who detest him, we would have solved the problem. But, regrettably we seemed to get lost along the way and despite originally planning to capture Vox Pops and get interviews with the public to ask of their opinions of Tango, we didn’t carry this through. Another problem was that Tango wasn’t willing to tell us any stories regarding his past convictions. He was very hesitant regarding this subject and would only talk about how he is harmless and only a true fan. 

I feel that we have put a lot of hard work and time in to this project in order to get the things that we set out to achieve. Looking through all of the footage shows that we captured copious amounts, but I felt it wasn’t shown effectively in the final product. Given more time I think we could have retrieved these and applied them within the piece. Still, I think our genre of documentary is very imaginative and creative and was a very hard task to pursue. I believe that we have thought outside the box and way outside of our comfort zones in an attempt to push ourselves, which we certainly have done.

A positive part of the project is the interview recordings. I have never practiced with sound and thought this would be the best time to learn more. I had a very limited amount of time to fix these recordings and practice with the sound track pro. However, I think that some of the sounds were of good quality and not over intrusive or hard to hear. There was one part of the films dialogue that wasn’t brilliant but I was un-available for this part and another member recorded this. Furthermore, I wasn’t given a copy of this part to save and log, so the sound file was lost meaning that we could only use the cameras microphone which was poor quality. 

We originally planned to interview Harry Gration so he could be the neutral voice within the piece but these plans fell through. To overcome this we arranged an interview with a Sheffield Wednesday Steward instead but I felt that he wasn’t pressed enough with questions such as “Do you know of people who hate Tango'?. 

In all, I am pleased with what we have managed to create when regarding the sounds. It doesn’t contain everything we wanted but does follow the structure that we planned. Given more time we could have added more footage and tweaked about with the atoms sounds and interview sounds.

When it came to filming the work for our piece, we had a very strict regime of what we wanted to capture, and where and what should be involved in each shot. Every time we went out to film we stuck by these plans religiously so every shoot was scheduled and ran smoothly and coherently. I thought this was by far the best process and it definitely made me, and no doubt some other members of the group, take the project a lot more seriously as everything was completed on time and we had an idea as to what we had filmed and what else we needed to film.

When I was recording sound for the interviews I tried to remember all that I was taught in university lectures and all of the knowledge from outside sources that I have researched. On the first day of filming I encountered problems and when I listened back at the interview recordings I knew where I was going wrong, such as the wrong type of microphone being used and being too far away from the interviewee. Luckily we had other chances to record the interviews so I learnt from the past mistakes and improved on them to ensure good quality sound recordings, which I then took on board for all the future recordings.

The group took the work seriously and as mentioned before, we created lots of paperwork to back up and enhance the project to guarantee it ran smoothly. This encouraged me to take a look at the sound and ensure I was logging all of the recordings and cleaning up the sound tracks and labelling them so it was all in check and organised. This helped other members of the group and showed I was taking this role seriously.

When it came to editing the piece we ran in to major problems and the project was left to be completed in only one day which was infuriating as we had put so much time and effort in to planning and getting the footage. However, even though this may have been our downfall I felt that I learned a lot from this process.

Most of the footage wasn’t labelled or put in to appropriate folders so we set about doing this taking it in turns.  It was strenuous work and we devoted a lot of time in to doing but it allowed us to get to know every bit of footage and where it was shot. We were able to look at it in more depth and we identified where we were possibly going wrong, such as camera angles or not asking the interviewee strong enough questions and then not being assertive enough with the interviewee. Because there were three of us trying to complete the project we grasped each others ways of thinking and showed our creative flare. This bonded us and we felt confident together to get the project done. Also, the delay in the project made me think about how to ensure this never happened again and what I could do to stop anything like this happening in the future.

In this project I was the sound recorder/ editor. I was at every shoot apart from one interview recording because of a presentation. I was dedicated to this project because I enjoyed the topic and I saw how passionate the director was which spurred me on. I am not wanting to going in to sound as a profession or pursue it further at university but I chose to do this because no-one was willing to and I didn’t want to be ignorant and cast it aside. I wanted to try my best and learn from my mistakes to then make them right.  When both of the projects were constructed I was one of the editors.

In this project I took a more laid back approach and wanted to let the director be the director and the producer be the producer because I am fed up of everyone taking over roles which aren’t their own. If my voice was needed I would speak up and express my opinion and ideas. Sometimes the director would ask for my opinion and this opinion would have an effect on some of the footage or change a sequence but overall I mainly kept to my role until the end when I stepped in as one of the editors.

At first, the whole group worked marvellously and we respected each other’s opinions and ideas. We kept in contact most of the time to either express a thought or to arrange meetings. If a member was contacted to complete something, the work was done and to a perfect standard. I aimed to complete all of my tasks and even volunteered to help others in their work also.

However, near the end of the project we had some major issues with a member who didn’t put his full effort in to the project, This left us in deep water and the project was taken on by three of us, none of whom were the editors. This caused big rifts in the group and the project was left to be complete in one day rather than a week, which was originally planned. We had meetings to discuss problems and he understood that he wasn’t putting enough attention in to the piece and that he left it down to the last minute. The work was ultimately completed and we managed to clear up any problems between us at the end of the project.

Inspiration for this piece of work came from various TV documentaries and short documentaries that I viewed in and out of university. When I watched the ‘Portsmouth Fan documentary’ there were a lot of parts that I envisaged for our piece. In sound terms I wanted to use the whole crowd ambience with whistles and the band mixed in, this kind of noise makes us come to life and enjoy the match even more and I thought this would be perfect to kick start the piece. I looked in to Mic settings and the various Microphones to get an idea as to what to use for each part of the shoot such as the Rifle Mic to pick up all the sounds in the stadium and a Lapel mic to just capture the interviews dialogue, as these are more effective. Other atmos sounds involved in this piece helped because I was able to identify what people immediately hear when at a match. This made me note down what I need to record in order to create a proper atmosphere on a match day.

In one of my previous lessons I was shown how to correctly use the microphones and the do’s and don’ts of controlling the boom pole and keeping an eye on the levels. All of this helped because I knew where the boom should be held to ensure I captured all the dialogue but most importantly keep it away from the view of the camera.

I would say that our ten-minute piece is an Observational documentary as we simply set out to capture Tango with no interference on match days, which is clearly shown. Furthermore, there is no interviewer asking questions and it is left down to Tango to introduce himself and his past events.  I would also say that another form of documentary that the project falls into is expository, because we are basically showing the audience the ‘better side’ of Tango in order to prove that all of the negative press that he receives is false, and that he is a decent, down to earth person.