Documentary Evaluation

Here is our finished documentary on Gym

Why I chose gym:
When I first gt the option to do a documentary the first thing that came into my mind was gym. The reason being is simply because gym is something I have been engaged with since I first turned 17. I've always been interested into finding out peoples background into gym. This is because we all have different backgrounds and different reasons to start and do gym. I decided to get together with another student from my class who was also interested in finding out the same topic and we took a trip to the closest gym to our college but also one of the best gyms around.

Documentary style:
Deciding on what type of documentary we would do was slightly hard as we had all sorts of documentary types which would go really well with the gym. At the end we decided to do an expository documentary. Meaning that we would not interact with people being interviewed and we would not be in shot at all. We also used voice over.  

Use of camera:
To be honest I would say that our use of camera could be slightly better as it was dodgy in places. For all of our shots we had the camera standing still on a tripod. Although we did this we had a few shaky shots like the establishing shot of the gym we done. For example at 0.06 seconds we started panning really gently then it gradually speed up and slowed down again towards the 0.20 seconds.
Although we had a few downs with our camera I think we also did a good job with it has we had a few shots variations from low angle shots, high angle shots, medium shots and long shots. Like i have mentioned before we also used a camera movement called pan to for our establishing shot so the audience knows where the action takes place and also for the audience to see the mise-in-scene. Most of the shots angle where repeated as the interview mostly took place in the same room. The only time the angles of our camera changed was when we had different people showing different exercises.

Use of sound:
I have to say that sound was what let us down the most. Although i done a good job with the soundtrack where I used garage band to produce my own soundtrack. Our audio was not the best us it was not clear and it was slightly hard to understand what the people where saying. Then again we can not say we could improve on that as this documentary took place at a gym where there is background music always on, people screaming and shouting and weights dropping to the floor. We tried our best to reduce the noise and improve on the clarity of our audio.
We also wrote a scrip in which we had one of our teachers to read for us so we could use it as voice over. The reason we had the teacher doing this is simply because non of us had the voice for it and it would be hard to understand what we were saying.

Use of editing:
Editing was the easy part of our production. This section did not take long at all as we used simply cutting and fading techniques.

Use of mise-en-scene:
To show the mise-en-scene we used two establishing shots, one at the start of the document to show the audience where the action is taking place and also another establishing shot in the middle of the documentary to remind the audience where the action is taking place.

How happy am I with the finished product:
Taking in consideration that my partner most of the time was of college and i did most of the work myself i am really happy with my finished product. Although all the negative feedback i think our work came out better then we expected. We managed to gather a few interviews which were actually really good. I am a bit disappointed as we had arranged an interview with the gym owner and at the last minute decided to not do it.