Supporting Plans

These are the three plans we made for one of our supporting pieces of work. The idea is to make a newspaper article about an olympic star who is striving to compete in the London 2012 olympics.

Olympic Stadium Response

We have received a phone call from the London olympic committee explaining that we are unable to film inside of the building site due to safety reasons however there is an area close by called Greenway where we can good a very good view of the stadium.

Update

We decided to make a short update video about how we are getting on with our planning and preparations.

First Interview

A person in our class is a gymnast, he has agreed to let us interview him about his opinions on the London olympics. We will have him doing a routine then move onto us interviewing him.

Storyboard Planning

I have gathered up a few pictures of memorable olympic moments which we will put into our storyboard. In our documentary we will be putting in archive footage of London landmarks and memorable olympic moments such as Usain Bolt breaking the 100 metre world record, Muhammed Ali lighting the olympic torch, Jesse Owens winning 4 gold medals at the 1936 olympics in Germany and 16 year old Mary Lou Retton winning gold in gymnastics with a perfect 10.

Interviews

In our group we have e-mailed various olympic committees in hope of a reply and possibly an interview. We have also e-mailed Boris Johnson just in case he has any free time to give us a short interview, which is very unlikely.

Source: http://www.london2012.com/

Planning

We have started to make our storyboard, the basis of our documentary is the impact that the Olympic games will have on London. To start off we will have short clips of famous London landmarks with commentary over the top. This helps to set the scene and can interest the people watching.

Changes in groups

My old partner, David Griffiths has left Heathside and gone to another college. I am now in a group with Lawrence Rogers, with a complete change in ideas. Now we are thinking of doing a documentary about the effect the olympic games is going to have on London. Another idea we could have persued is violence in football, this is a wide subject and would have been interesting for the three of us.

Research

Here are 3 mainstream documentary makers.

Michael Moore:Michael Francis Moore is an Academy Award-winning American filmmaker, author and liberal political commentator. He is the director and producer of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, three of the top five highest-grossing documentaries of all time. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, documenting his personal crusade to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation and The Awful Truth.Moore is a self-described liberal who has criticized globalization, large corporations, gun ownership, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system in his written and cinematic works. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. In 2005, Moore started the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan. In 2008, he closed his Manhattan office and moved it to Traverse City, where he is working on his new film.

Louis Theroux:Louis Sebastian Theroux is a British-American broadcaster best known for his television series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends and When Louis Met...His first journalism job was at Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992 he was hired as a writer for Spy magazine. He got his break in television working as a correspondent on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on off-beat cultural subjects, including Avon ladies in the Amazon, the Jerusalem syndrome, and the attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people. When TV Nation ended he was signed to a development deal by the BBC, out of which came Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. He has guest-written for a number of publications including Hip-Hop Connection and he continues to write for The Idle.

Nick Broomfield:Nicholas Broomfield (born 30 January 1948, in London) is an English documentary filmmaker. He studied Law at Cardiff, Wales, and political science at the University of Essex; subsequently, he studied film at the National Film and Television School. Broomfield films with a minimum of crew, just himself and one or two camera operators, which gives his documentaries a distinctive style. Broomfield himself is often in shot holding the sound boom.Broomfield's early style was very conventional Cinéma vérité: the juxtaposition of observed scenes. He would not provide much explanation by way of voice-over or text, rather letting the film talk for itself.It was not until Driving Me Crazy (1988) that Broomfield, already a known filmmaker, appeared on-screen for the first time. After several arguments regarding the budget and nature of the film, he decided that he would only make the documentary if he was able to conduct a sort of experiment by filming the process of making the film—the arguments, the failed interviews and the dead-ends.This shift in filmmaking style was also heavily influenced by Broomfield's experience in attempting to release his earlier film Lily Tomlin, which chronicled the star's one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Once completed, Tomlin claimed the film was a spoiler for the actual show and she filed suit for $7 million against Broomfield. The documentary was shown on public television but not widely released. Eventually the footage of the stage show shot by Broomfield was used in the video release of the one-woman show.It is for this reflexive filmmaking style a film being about the making of itself as much as about its subject that Broomfield is best known. His influence on documentary is clear: Michael Moore, Louis Theroux and Morgan Spurlock have all adopted a similar style for their recent box-office hits. Filmmakers who use this style have been referred to as Les Nouvelles Egotistes; others have likened his work to the gonzo reporting of Hunter S. Thompson.Broomfield is an alumnus of the National Film and Television School; he co-wrote the documentary Kurt and Courtney (1998) with American filmmaker Joan Churchill.In 2006 he completed a drama called Ghosts for Channel 4 inspired by the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster when 23 Chinese immigrant cockle pickers drowned after being cut off by the tides.His 2006 project on the Haditha killings, Battle For Haditha, was shot in a documentary style although the events and characters were all dramatized. Instead of a detailed script, the actors were only given an outline of each scene and where the story was going. The outline is reportedly based on rumours, as the trial had not even begun when the filming began.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Broomfield
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Theroux

Editing

Now we have uploaded our interviews to our laptop we're working on, we have edited the clips using iMovie to make them shorter and more efficient. It takes time to perfect the editing and we will keep working on it to get it right.

Interview Practice

Me and my partner have been practicing different technhiques when filming an interview. We have done 4 interviews in total, each one being about 2 minutes long. The different camera techniques we have used are hand-held shots, steady shots and a shot that challenges the form of interviews.

All of our practice interviews have been completed and uploaded onto a laptop. In my opinion i think our interviews went pretty well. We used all the necessary techniques and used them well.

Planning

We have started our planning process for our documentary and have decided to start a blog to record the progress we make throughout the documentary. For the beginning of this process we have been researching documentaries of the same genre, such as one of the "Ross Kemp on gangs" episode when he is with the neo-nazi football fans in Poland.

The idea we have come up with for our documentary is looking into football hooliganism and how bad it has gotten throughout the world. Since we are both football fans this will be a very interesting topic for us to cover.