Practice Documentary - An Interview with Lynda Berger

Demons and Thieves - Lynda Berger Documentary from Will Knight on Vimeo.

In our practice documentary we were asked to make a short 10 minute documentary on the author Lynda Berger and her latest book Demon and Thieves. The aim of this task was to try and enhance our skills regarding video production in order to produce our best piece of work for our final documentary on our chosen subject.

The main lesson I learnt was that you must use more than one camera when filming, the reason for this is because when we were interviewing Lynda Berger we did not realise that camera one was rather blurred because the camera was zoomed in, and as we didn’t have time to change it we had to put up with the blurred camera. However if we had only used that camera individually then we would have had a blurred documentary for the entire time. In the documentary the use of the second cameras angle was involved a lot because we wanted to see when it worked best. After producing the documentary we learnt that instead of transitioning to the second angle during questions it would work better to use the angle for the duration of the question and answer because constantly changing the angle affected the continuity and at times it seemed unnecessary. This has taught me firstly to double check all possibilities regarding camera positioning and secondly taught me to ensure I use more than one camera when filming my final documentary.

Will edited the practice documentary but I still personally learnt a lesson for the final task, Will used as many new tools as he could to see how they worked and the most effective scenarios to use them in. The tool he found most effective was when interviewing the third student he used what is known as a “screen on screen” where a mini screen appears in one corner of the screen whilst the student is still on the main screen. Furthermore, the tool had a similar effect to the cutaway tool but unlike the cutaway it can display both images at the same time.

Finally I learned something from the editing software iMovie. The cutaway tool was involved heavily in the documentary when Lynda is showing her artwork to the camera and also when we were interviewing the teacher and students. The cutaway tool allowed us to smoothly transition between the angles of the two cameras without affecting the continuity of the documentary. I really liked the effect the cutaway tool added to the documentary during Lynda's interview as it allowed us to show the close up of her artwork which camera one wouldn't have provided.

Overall I have witnessed things in this practice documentary that I will make sure won’t happen again in the final, on the other side of things I have learned that using the cutaway tool and the screen on screen tool are two effective methods of editing as they enhance the professionalism of the overall documentary and it shows that we are experiencing new technologies therefore improving our knowledge.