Commentry

A documentary is a film that attempts, in some way, to document reality. However as a group, we feel a documentary capturing reality could be criticized for being biased; portraying through one persons view point. Although the scenes are chosen accordingly, the script is not existent, and there are no real actors. We feel   In certain cases, a documentary will rely on a voice-over or narration to describe what is happening to the audience, in other cases, the footage will speak for itself. Documentaries often include interviews. Many of today's documentary films have a political or otherwise controversial agenda; like "Super-size me". Audiences have recently become more open to watching a documentary with a more serious agenda. Our task was too create an opening extract for a documentary; with our own individualistic agenda choice. Charlotte was in charge of editing, Bayo was in charge of filming, Shamara was in charge of research and Natalie was in charge of Blogging.  


We have both challenged an conformed to the typical conventions of an expository documentary; speaking directly to the viewer by using an authoritative voiceover and titles helping us to portray a sense of involvement and information to the audience (We used titles to illustrate the occupation of the interviewees, we used a voiceover during the introduction; establishing shots of London to introduce our documentary and hype up our audience; creating a climax). We felt creating a sense of enthusiasm was important because of the nature of Funky house music. Documentaries such as ours &  'Scratch' are reliant on shots being in sync with the music. 


We have also conformed to some generic media conventions 


From our audience feedback we have changed various things to improve the quality, such as including a voiceover. We added the voiceover during the introduction; people commented the introductory establishing shots of London were too drawn out and repetitive, so we added a voiceover to take up spare time, making it more entertaining and give our documentary a more desirable opening. The voiceover was recorded on the microphone and imported onto itunes where we converted the file so we it would be applicable on Final Cut express. 


Another change we made was add pictures during the interviews. The interviews were drawn-out and delayed with background information of Funky which may be puzzled the audience. We added images to help the audience understand UK FUNKYHOUSE, by using pictures of who and what the artists looked like when the DJS were talking about them. Furthermore, we added adverts to represent the different music genre events. 


We were criticized for not using different forms of editing to our advantage considering our topic was so volatile and fun. So, we included different kinds editing styles. We superimposed a slow zoom in image of Yates night club, which we faded over the top of the DJ who was talking about his experience working in Yates. We included  consistent cross-dissolves and shape dissolves. 


Our introduction was evaluated as being "too long and not in sync wit the music, it doesn't create the right buzz" Therefore, we altered our intro by cutting the clips every time the beat dropped. This made our intros shots in sync with the music which gave a dramatic affect, especially with the voiceover. The changes made to the introduction created a larger sense of anticipation to watch the rest of the documentary.