2 Minute Poetic Screening

Today we screened our 2 minute poetic documentary and I wasn’t too optimistic about it as I knew the editing had been rushed quite a bit despite the fact we were quite organised and had filmed quite a lot of footage.

I think one problem was that we went ahead a filmed lots of interviews etc because they were important and we wanted to get them as soon as we could but what we didn’t think about was getting footage that we could use for the poetic. We did have a storyboard for it but as time went along we realised that we weren’t going to get enough footage of just Tango to make up most of the 2 minute so we decided to film lots of football imagery of around the stadium of things like burger vans, stalls, police, fans etc and then build it up so it leads onto the Tango stuff.

Due to the fact we had to wait until the Saturday home game to get a lot of this football imagery (as on previous shoots we’d mainly concentrated on Tango footage) we didn’t leave ourselves a lot of time to get it into the edit. Although I still feel more of the edit should have been completed before this point so we could just put the new stuff in at the beginning where it needed to go or replace some shots with the better ones.

I also had ideas to use some split screen which we didn’t get chance to do and also add the text bits like the Tweets etc in a better way.

When we screened our film we did have some positive reactions and some people felt we showcased Tango well but some people thought we didn’t make it clear enough what was so special about this person. I think that may be down to us concentrating on too many things like the build up to a football match with football imagery and then the Tango stuff and maybe we should have concentrated on Tango a bit more. I think I was reluctant to show too much Tango stuff because I wanted to hold it back for the 10 minute piece because the poetic was just meant to be us showing his rowdy side and then the rest of him for the 10 minute. I think what we lacked was Tango acting up and maybe we could have highlighted it a bit more – I think my split screen idea, if we’d had time to do it, might have done this to an extent because I wanted to do a split screen of him taking his top off, singing/shouting, swearing, doing hand gestures etc which might have been more effective.

One of the criticisms was the music we used I think because it was a bit too cheesy, I expressed I didn’t really like it because it was an England song and we are doing a documentary about a Sheffield Wednesday fan but the editor said it was good for creating pace for the montage we had and it was a better song to cut to rather than using the actual band audio we recorded from the match like I’d suggested because it didn’t create much of a beat.

One thing they did like was the use of sound at the beginning where we used the crowd cheering and built it up over the images of the football ground, I too thought Joe had done a good job with this and would have liked to have used more stuff like this all the way through rather than putting a song over the top. I think for the 10 minute we will spend more time as a group discussing the audio as it always gets left until the last minute with most people when it really shouldn’t as it’s integral to the feel, tone and pace of a film. If possible I would like to get some of the band together to play some Sheffield Wednesday’s songs for us when there’s no crowd about singing over it because that way we’ll have some pure audio to play about with.

Overall we got 62% which I was happy with due to the fact I knew how quickly we had to do the edit but then I was also a bit disappointed because we had put a lot of effort into being organised as we got our idea very quickly and started work on it almost straight away so I didn’t think we’d have these problems. If we have time I think I’d like to redo our 2 minute because we’ve all put a lot of effort in and I’d like our piece to reflect that.