I have certainly learnt a lot from this documentary making experience. I've always been fascinated by this particular method of story telling as it gives you the opportunity to educate others as well as yourself along the way about certain subject matters. It got me properly reading my The Documentary Filmmakers Handbook properly and to keep it at hand at all times, so there's that as well!
The entire process got me thinking an awful lot about team work. There have been countless times where I had to stop myself and just either post the blog entry, or to just scrap it all together as I found myself approaching a rant; never a focused one either. It lead to stress and frustration which is never good to have to deal with if the solution isn't always immediately obvious.
When a job needs done (sometimes several jobs), you need to do them yourself. One team mate, although not particularly great with cameras, tried his absolute best to help. I felt like a teacher during exam time quite a lot which is definitely not an ideal situation when you have something to film. Everything in this regard did, however, work out, through communication and understanding one another of where we were at level-wise. When asked to have certain pieces of work done, it was done promptly and went through it together to ensure that, for example, shot lists and storyboards were appropriate and easy to follow. It all worked out and we're all dead happy about that.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same about everybody involved. The sole reason that the initial idea had to be tweaked a fair bit was due to the fact that the person who was meant to be in charge had slacked; not notifying us significant aspects within a suitable time frame (often this would be late the night before). After a while, it just became stressful and every aspect of the process is deemed a massive chore when we waited on unreliable people. The director should have a vision of what is going to happen, not give us a vague idea and expect us to do everything for him. This was further enraging when we looked at his blog, which was made out to be otherwise.
That said, communication is key. I know, now especially, that if such a major issue such as this occurs again, to directly bring it up to the person we are having the issue with, as it will never be resolved if not. It's the mature and professional thing to do, and it relieves everybody involved all ridiculous amounts of unneeded stress. This person in question did, however, create a very impressive edit which incorporated not only the performative conventions of documentary, but also the crew interaction with the subject and referring to the documentary process that we were currently going through, found in the participatory documentary mode.
On that note, it has been a fascinating process in general in the making of our documentary and, overall, I am pretty pleased with how everything turned out. Of course, there are definitely aspects that I would change for future projects but, on the whole, it turned out rather well. Next time, I would wish to ensure to have far more pre-production and production meetings. I had oganised a few that were outside of class, but I can't really count for any that had everybody on the team there at the same time, which is highly unfortunate. That said, we did get a great deal done as well as fixing our major issues regarding the major subject change. So a significant issue was overcome and for that, I am damn well proud.
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