George Wing Television Blog

After finishing out documentary I can confidently say its been a success. Looking back over my early blog posts when talking about the initial idea and our pitch, its safe to say its gone roughly as planned. We were incredibly pleased with the way our filming went after all the hard work and time we put into pre-producing ensuring some really good interviews and shoot locations. Our interviewees were perfect for our piece, and really brought the documentary together in reaching a successful final conclusion for our presenter. Artist  Shahak Shapira is well known for his opposition to extremism and his website “Yolocaust” where he photoshopped pictures of people taking selfies or inappropriate pictures at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. People had been taking pictures of themselves doing Yoga or Juggling whilst some teens had been jumping over the concrete slabs, one even captioning his picture “Jumping on dead Jews”. His website was visited over 2.5 million times, ...

Liza Williams has a long catalogue of documentary films she has directed and produced over the years. Her most popular works are with BBC Three and Channel 4, where she captures raw moments on film, building strong relationships with her subjects and capturing their lives on film. The topics she covers are usually quite controversial, and she's not afraid to cross social barriers. She will usually cover observational/structured documentary and current affairs. On her page for thetalentmanager.co,uk she  claims to gain "the trust of contributors in challenging and sensitive situations is central to the way I produce." This is well reflected in her documentaries. For example, in her BBC Three documentary The Drugs Map of Britain' she follows the life of various struggling drug addicts, finding their stories and how they got into their drugs; it mainly revolves around the use of legal highs: a synthetic version of cannabis, usually sold in smoking mixtures. The do...

Yesterday we showed Helen our updated rough cut to get some feedback before our fine cut is due to be handed in. We had changed quite a lot in the edit from what we showed Zoe, making the edit less linear through removing the 'journey' concept and focusing more on the interviews and finding the most suitable place for them to be, not just in chronological order. Whilst viewing our updated rough cut, Helen gave out more constructive feedback and found parts we could improve on. Although we were a little downhearted since we though we were close to the fine cut, we developed a strong understanding of the feedback she gave, and agreed to make those changes to better our documentary. Her feedback is as follows: More atmosphereric sounds in the beginning. The sound is a bit off. Helen also felt that the images shown in the beginning don't work to the voice over that we’re having. One of the sections worked where one man is taking a selfie. Cut out some of the pre-title ...

Benefits Street Benefits Street was a greatly controversial documentary when it was first broadcasted and has raised peoples conflicting opinions ever since. Wether you think its good or bad, there is no arguing that the show has been a television success. As a result it would be interesting to find out the key as to why it is so successful. Because despite its negative media coverage, it is still gripping to its viewers, for its social conventions. As do most modern documentaries, Benefits Street opens up with a short drone establishing shot. For this we are greeted with 'James Turner Street', a British street of council houses to people living off benefits. When filming, I wish we could've used the drone to get some establishing shots and GV's; especially for the Berlin Memorial. However, we were unable to given the strict drone flying laws, and after asking the memorial, they didn't want us to do so. We worked around this so they weren't detrimental to...

Shahak Shapira- ( Artist) Shahak is well known for his opposition to extremism and his website “Yolocaust” where he photoshoped pictures of people taking selfies or inappropriate pictures at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. People had been taking pictures of themselves doing Yoga or Juggling whilst some teens had been jumping over the concrete slabs, one even captioning his picture “Jumping on dead Jews”. His website was visited over 2.5 million times and all twelve people who were in the pictures reached out to Shahak to apologise, one stating that he was an idiot and just trying to make a joke which was in very bad taste. David Glenwright (Social Media Expert) David Glenwright is a social media expert, working as the Head of Training at JC Social Media , with a background in War Studies.  David is our main expert for this documentary who will be talking about the theories behind selfie culture and social media. In his interviews he offers solutions to people; his theori...

Taking on board what Zoe said in our feedback the other day, we came to the conclusion we needed to re-record some of the voiceovers. When we originally recorded them on the first day, our presenter didn't come cross as confident. I suggested this in Berlin as a suspected it could be the case. However, when listening to them on their own they sounded fine. It was when putting them into the edit they weren't as effective. The aim was to re-record it next week before the fine cut deadline as we would have a much better idea on how w could improve, and how it works with the final edit. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible since our presenter was due to go abroad on the Saturday afternoon, and wouldn't be back in time to re-record before our hand in. We therefore decided to do it today,  just before he leaves. When we recorded the voiceovers at the start of the project, we had him sitting down reading from the script. This time we had him reading while standing up.  We also ...

Again, today I was away on work experience so was unable to make it. However, my group went in and showed Zoe our rough cut so far. The cut went from 25 minutes the other day to 15minutes today. Zoe liked a lot of what was shown to her but gave us constructive feedback too. We need to make the documentary less linear again, wanted to have non-sync clips in the beginning before the title sequence to show the audience some highlights and keep them interested. This meant getting rid of Kamran's PTC. She also wanted us to re-record Kamran’s voiceovers since they sounded bland and not too confident; after all these were recorded on our first day. This meant this evening we had to re-write the voiceovers and work out where we definitely do and don't need them. 

This week I had work experience with broadcasting company Two Four, who produce programmes for companies like the BBC and ITV. This week I was welcomed but a great team of people, who had me working on various television programmes in pre production and post production. This had been a great learning curve for myself and my documentary project. When in posts, I was told to log footage for the edit and how to do it properly.  This was good for me as I was able to log footage for a professional production, and the footage was from a documentary, just like I'm doing. During my experience here, I was also told to gather some celebrities together for a new television show. These celebrities needed to fit a certain criteria, which I found to be rather challenging at first given there was very little publicised information about it. This meant some in depth research, which I was a skill I had picked up from this documentary unit, in order to find these people. Linking this, I would ...

When editing the documentary there was a great deal of footage to go through. I went through and watched all the footage and organised it into appropriate bins, to make it easier when editing. I then went onto syncing the audio for Berlin, which was time consuming. This included all the interviews including at the memorial and the PTCs. This wasn't simple given the three camera setup so I ended up doing this manually. Although more time consuming I still found it to be the best method as I could separate shots with audio, making it easier to cut for the edit. I would have to use the audio track recorded from the camera and try and match it up with the clip mic or boom using the track, so I could see the similar pattern in audio levels.

Today there was a transcript workshop, which I was unfortunately absent for due to my work experience with Two Four. However, I was also logging footage there and was told how to do it in a live working environment so I feel I had caught up with it.  I was also syncing my audio as I had more clips to do, while the others made a start on the transcripts, which I went through after so we could work out what to include in the edit. When we got all our scripts transcribed, we sat down to underline all the parts we wanted to include and cut down into our final 10minutes. Using the transcript made it a lot easier for us to edit as we could select specific important parts of the interview to include rather than keep on listening to the full thing. It also made finding the selected clips easier to find especially with the  time in/out. I previously found the idea of a transcript a waste of time, but after actually working with them I would definitely take the time out to make them i...

Jewish Museum  Today was our last day of filming in Berlin and for the project overall. We were filming at the Jewish Museum in Berlin today, talking to one of their Holocaust experts. The interview setup took us roughly 30minutes, but our interviewee was late, which worked in our favour as we could perfect lighting and shots. After using a three camera setup for all of our other interviews and having them work out well, we found this setup didn't work as well for this interview setting. Me and Trine weren’t particularly impressed with the wide shot, so we decided to remove it and have various handheld shots throughout the documentary instead, which worked out a lot better. After a successful half hour interview, I wanted to film a few shots of Kamran and our expert walking in together before to edit in before sitting down for the interview. The only thing I wish had worked out better for this interview is the cameras cutting out. This happened for all the interviews. Luckily ...

Shahak interview  Today we filmed our interview with our 'yolocaust' artist Shahak Shapira. We were able to film this in   the hotel we were staying in. We had the choice of two rooms to film in; after receding the two locations we found the one closer to the kitchen was prone to more background noise, while the breakfast room was louder but closed for 11:00 which is when we were due to film. We had to make the executive decision in hopping the noise in the breakfast room would quieten down when we come to film, which luckily it did. Because it was a dark day outside, we required the two LED lights with the orange filter, which improved the aesthetic look. However, when watching the footage back I found it to be a little too orange, so will bring that down more in post. The answers he gave were very useful to our piece, and will look fantastic to the overall documentary. After filming this we went on to shoot a short sequence of Kamran looking through social media on his ...

Berlin Memorial  Today was the day we arrived in Berlin, and our first port of call was the Berlin Memorial to film people taking these selfies or showing any possible signs of disrespect. To our expectations we saw plenty of people acting in the way, and we managed to catch some of them for interviews, to not accuse the of disrespect but find their motives behind it. This was an eye-opener for us all as it appeared people had different reasoning for taking these pictures wether it was because they were unaware of what it symbolised (thought it was simply art). This lead us onto the idea that the memorial isn't signposted very well. It's not until you go underneath the memorial to the museum where it even mentions the holocaust. Our presenter also drew this conclusion so we filmed him expressing this at the memorial. We found it weird that people were getting told off for siting on the tall stones rather and told they could sit n the smaller ones. I couldn't help but thi...