Documentary Unit: 'Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face'

Today I have watched the documentary 'Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face'. I for some reason had never heard of Katie Piper and her story, until I saw an episode of Body Shockers (which she presents) and was intrigued, so I decided to research her. I found out that she was an up and coming model, until she had acid thrown in her face - orchestrated by her ex boyfriend. I was so shocked and disgusted when I learned this, and so was even more intrigued when I found out there was a 2009 documentary on this.

For the most part, the documentary was very shocking and emotional. It begins with her showing us her pictures on TV, with her back to us, telling us about her past, then the first shocking moment is revealed when she shows us CCTV footage, tells us she had acid thrown in her face and shows us herself now, with a scarred face and a plastic protective mask. After this first shocking and upsetting moment, more follow with her revealing that she's so afraid, of her attacker being at the door every time she hears the door bell, of hot drinks and candles. There are then incredibly sudden and shocking pictures of her in hospital, first with plaster over her face, but then gruesome images of her burnt face, having surgery and her skin graft. Shocking for the audience in general, but this upset me very much - which obviously achieves having an extreme amount of sympathy for her as well as anger toward her attacker.

Accompanying this, her voice overlays with "they removed my entire face, I guess it just ended up in a medical waste bin" - which is devastating. The final most shocking moment followed, with a family video of her struggling in her early recovery days at hospital, unable to talk, along with an interview with her parents, who get emotional talking about her not being able to talk and writing questions like 'am I dead?', 'help me' and "the worst of all" ...'kill me'.

The biggest break through moments were when she and the audience experience a suspenseful await the verdict of her ex boyfriend and her attacker, who both received two life sentences. The lead to the second breakthrough, of her no longer needing to live in as much fear, and deciding to finally leave the house and go shopping. Although it's emotional as she is so self conscious, it's also a turn around moment as it's the beginning of her new life, and her being able to be more like herself again.

The most uplifting moment is when she, her family and friends go out to celebrate her birthday. For the first time since her attack, she got dressed up and went out in public to celebrate, finally feeling like she had her life back. With this being one of the final moments of the documentary, it gives a very upbeat and inspirational vibe.

It was extremely uplifting for me to watch now, as in the documentary she says that she wanted kids and a husband and wasn't sure if she could have that anymore, and she now has a baby and a husband. She also thought her career was over, and she is still an active presenter today. While the documentary had very gruesome, unsettling and devastating moments, it gives off a very positive message that you can truly overcome anything.

Above: Katie before the attack

Above: Katie in 2009, at the time of the documentary

Above: How Katie looks now

Documentary Unit: Final Cut & Critical Reflections

As of today, Mary and I have completely finished our film and the documents supporting it. Today, Mary viewed the editing changes that I'd made and agreed that everything looked great and was almost ready to submit. The only task we had left was to add the closing credits, so we viewed two Channel 4 documentaries' credits (Skint & Educating Essex) to use as a reference on how we should display and order our own. We finished with very neat credits with the upbeat acoustic music that's used throughout to accompany it.

Once finished, we showed our documentary to our tutor. And thankfully, she couldn't find fault with it. Thanks to her advice in previous viewings, our final cut needed no further changes.

We've ran into a few issues along the way, with the LGBT support group dropping out, struggling to collect rights-free Gay Pride footage and smaller details such as on-set lighting issues and a faulty battery. But due to being very organised and co-operative, along with our characters also being so, we've had great success in this unit. I think that our central character is perfect, due to wanting our documentary to be touching and emotional, but not depressing, he's ideal. He has sad stories of his past and has had struggles with his sexuality and the discrimination he's faced, but due to his bubbly and extremely likeable personality, he's perfect for being our main focus, drawing the audience in, and ending the documentary on a positive note.

Our other characters of Michelle, Vicki and Kristian make up the rest of the documentary in a very contributive way. Rather than being add-ons to Carl's story, they each bring their own very informative and personal touch. I think that Michelle is very useful for relating to the past and how things are changing, as well as getting an insight into gay people in an older generation. Vicki is the least personal aspect of the documentary but the most informative, as any young gay people can find her information extremely helpful. Lastly, Kristian is both great support for Carl's story as well as bringing a second experience of a young gay person coming out in today's society.

The visual's of our documentary are of course a large part of what makes it so interesting. Being made up of active sequences of the characters and their surroundings to support what they're saying, and vibrant Gay Pride footage, I think it makes the documentary a lot more eye-catching than one that is filled with nothing but interviews.

However, we didn't solely rely on visuals. I think that the questions we had each character answer provided us with great interviews full of helpful and very touching stories. We also added statistics to our documentary based on previous research about the discrimination of homosexuals and how homosexual teenagers are dealing with their sexuality. Give the documentary a lot of factual support.

I'm also very happy with our choice in music. We searched a few royalty-free music websites and eventually decided on Acoustic Breeze by Bensound. It's a very low-key soundtrack, allowing it to fit with the emotional side of the documentary, but due to being an acoustic guitar track, it also has an upbeat feel. I think it really strengthens the ending to the entire documentary.

I'm incredibly happy with the outcome of all of our hard work. I think the documentary fits very well with the Channel 4 style, due to the overall subject and it's visuals. I also think it's very inspirational for any teenagers struggling with their sexuality or homosexual people in general. It's a very touching film and we've achieved exactly what we set out to.

Being Gay Today - Final Cut

Documentary Unit: Finalised Script

Now that everything is complete, we have updated our script. As our draft script differed to our end result due to original plans falling through and deciding to set up different situations. We originally planned to interview and observe an LGBT support group, then have our central character, Carl take part in a group session. However, luckily in the early stages of planning rather than later, the group dropped out. So the LGBT group became an interview with the Kent Pride organiser, even though Carl couldn't join in with this, I think the Pride group is even stronger than our original idea.

Everything else in our script remained the same throughout, just with different cutaways, sequences, ordering and commentary. So we've been able to keep the same vision for the documentary the entire time.

So we now have a finalised script, based on the ordering and features of our final film. I think it's a very strong script that perfectly captures our documentary.

Our script from start to finish

Documentary Unit: A Lot of Editing

Today I spent approximately 7 and a half hours of straight editing. To have everything neat and ready for our last fine cut viewing tomorrow and submission the day after, I edited as many things as possible. I firstly needed to cut our time down, it's been tough to cut down mine and Mary's work - which is why our original cut from our transcript was 23 minutes long - but today I managed to cut it down from 12 minutes to 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

I then spent a lot of time changing some cutaways all including pride footage, shots of Carl and images, due to feeling that the new ones I've added are stronger to the story. But the two things that have taken the most time and detail have been fine tuning the sound and colour correction. 

Due to an error on our mic, all of our sound was only coming out of one speaker, so I firstly needed to correct that, I then moved on to changing the volume on all of the clips, as they varied in volume to each other. There were also a lot of glitches in the sound and certain sentences that had been cut together didn't flow, so I removed all glitch sounds and created gaps in the sentences to tidy them up.

After this, I colour corrected every clip. As they were all slightly lacking in vibrance and colour (which I think can be the obvious difference between an amateur looking film and a professional one). Now that I've done this, I think the documentary looks a lot more fresh and eye-catching. The only issue that I ran into with colour correcting was with Michelle's interview, as the light from outside continues to change dramatically throughout. It's quite noticeable but I don't know how to fix it in a smooth looking way, so I'll ask for both Mary and our tech support's opinions tomorrow.

The last thing I did was add a soundtrack to the documentary. Mary and I both liked a royalty free acoustic track that we tested so I used it for the remainder of the documentary. I didn't want it run throughout as I think it takes away from what the characters are saying. So I added it to sequence clips with commentary and for the introduction and closing credits.

I think with all of the progress Mary and I have made in the last few weeks, and the fine touches that have been put into place today, our documentary looks great. I think I'm going to feel very positive when submitting it.

Our almost completed timeline

Documentary Unit: Pride Footage & Title

We'd originally struggled to receive any answers about using people's YouTube pride footage. But finally, we got replies this week and have now been able to add it to the documentary. It's been extremely helpful for our sequences and cutaways, as well as bringing a lot of vibrancy and excitement. We've now also been able to have our statistics and questions written on screen at the same time as they're said in the commentary, as I liked the idea of having slowed down, slightly blurred, black and white Pride footage in the background. We both think it looks great.

We also decided on our title yesterday: Being Gay Today. As our tutor suggested that we either using a pun for a title or something very straight forward, we opted for the latter, due to this being a sensitive topic. I think our title works really well with the documentary as it describes exactly what it's about - dealing with being gay in this time.

One of our on-screen statistics

Documentary Unit: 'Teens'

Today I watched the third (and only available on demand) episode of the Channel 4 documentary 'Teens'. The episode follows the lives of four teenagers, three of which are connected and one has her own story. The story of Shauna, James and Peter focuses on a bit of a love triangle, due to the fact that best friends James and Peter are both interested in Shauna. Whereas Melissa's story focuses more on sex/teenagers losing their virginity, and a love interest between her and her best friend, Shane.

I found the documentary to be very honest, it didn't ignore the obvious that most teenagers have sex, go to house parties and drink alcohol. In fact it even began by introducing each character at a drunken New Years Eve party. There's minimal interviews with the central characters throughout, for the most part they give their opinions on an issue or talk about their feelings in actuality scenes with friends. However, more documentary styled interviews do take place, but with disconnected couples sharing their relationship stories and friends of the central characters talking about them.

The unique part of the documentary is that throughout, the teen's texts, social network posts, internet searches and calls are often written out on screen. This has been seen before, for example in Sherlock Holmes, but I personally haven't ever seen such an interesting feature in a documentary and not to such an extent in any programme.

I found this documentary to have a very personal touch, with the commentary being done by Craig Roberts, he's rather young himself, so it felt like a documentary made for young adults, by young adults. It's also very easy to get invested in the characters, as the topics include sex, love and friendship, anyone can relate to it and sympathise with their issues.

Shuana, Melissa and James

Documentary Unit: Commentary

We recently dedicated a day to commentary. At times when I'd been doing some editing, Mary had been planning our commentary while watching to figure out the best things to say. We then came together and typed it all up, we then looked back at the commentary from our original script and mixed them together. I think we have great commentary as it's very descriptive of what our subject and question of 'what's it like being gay today?' is, as well as introducing each character and including important and supportive facts.

We decided that Mary is the best choice out of the two of us for commentary, as she's very close to our central character Carl, Michelle is a close friend of her family and she has a great speaking voice. So, we moved on to getting it recorded. We used the mic in the recording room and recorded it onto the Zoom. We ran into a couple of problems as we weren't too familiar with the technology, but as nothing was too major, we managed to record our commentary with ease.

We then proceeded to add it to Final Cut. Once we split each section up and placed things such as the introduction and introducing Carl, it made the documentary really come to life and feel professional.

Above: Our first page of commentary

Above: Our timeline, showing the newly placed commentary

Documentary Unit: Further Editing

Mary and I were able to get a lot of work done today. We added all of our intro and end shots, and all of our establishing, actuality, sequence and cutaway shots to the entire documentary, as well as cutting further clips that weren't needed. We also fine tuned everyone's dialogue by cutting out the glitches and making the cut together sentences flow a lot better. Our documentary now feels a lot more professional, sentimental and takes us a big step further in the editing process. The only issue we're having is getting approval from anyone to use gay pride footage, but we continue to contact people.

As writing the commentary has begun, our next task will be to finely structure the commentary and get it recorded and added to final cut.

An actuality shot added to Vicki's interview