Documentary Unit: Easter Work

Over the Easter break, we've gotten a lot further in our work. We now have three shoots completed with one remaining (assuming we don't decide that we need extra coverage).

Completed shoots...

- Central character Carl's interview
- Carl meeting Michelle - a middle aged lesbian who discussed the topic with him
- Carl and his boyfriend, Kristian

I have to give a lot of credit to Mary where it's due, as she had to film the meeting with Michelle and the coverage of Carl and Kristian on her own. However, having decided exactly what would be discussed and filmed when planning our documentary before Easter, we can agree that the ideas for both shoots are joint.

As Mary and I filmed Carl's interview together, I can discuss our central character's shoot. We made sure to work off of our script beforehand, by deciding what Carl would talk about and act out in advance, we were able to be very well organised and schedule everything perfectly. We had him introduce himself and discuss things such as his childhood, coming out to his family, his time at school and what he looks forward to in the future. We encouraged him to be himself and try not worry about saying everything exactly the same each time we filmed a topic that he discussed. Luckily Carl's a very naturally confident and upbeat person, so he was very good at being interviewed.

We filmed this in his bedroom, as it's the most personal place he could be. I think it will make the audience feel closer to him and his story. As well as filming the interview in his room, we had him act out one of his hobbies of playing the piano and singing and looking through family photos, these will make very good sequence/cutaway shots. We've also got scanned copies of his family photos to use in the documentary. Our other sequence shots involved wide shots of his street and close-ups of items in his room such as his artwork and stuffed animals.

And lastly we filmed a more emotional part of his story. We took him back to his old secondary school. We've been told that we don't have permission to use the school's name in our film, so we were only able to get the one shot of the school that didn't have the school name/logo in it. We had a short interview with Carl in front of the building (as he was very uncomfortable being there) and he discussed how it felt to be back outside of the school.

I think this shoot went very well. From the material that we've got of Carl, the audience will really get to know him. With the addition of his meeting with Michelle and introducing his boyfriend, we've got a lot to work with now. We will next be interviewing Vicki from Kent Pride, and will gather archived footage from her.

Screenshots of Carl's shoot