Food For Thought

For our assignment we are planning to carryout a short documentary that focus on the concept of healthy eating and will aim to show the audience that healthy food does not need to be boring but can be interesting and delicious.

We are aiming to use real statistics that will be shown on the screen to give the audience a more visual feel by using graphs, charts to include the number of people who eat unhealthy food in the U.K and how many peole at their "5 a day" and also camera shots of people eating unhealthy food.

We will aim the documentary around a Nutritionist called Anna who focuses on healthy foods and in the past has made a number of healthy recipes that include healthy cakes and meals as the main section of our documentary will be used to show Anna making a healthy cake , possibly outside infront of members of the public to give it a sort of "fly on the wall feel" to it. This is also good because it gives Anna more publicity and interest to her profession.

Also we will interview Anna before hand to give the audience a chance to See her personality so we will tell her, what we are going to do what we would like er to carry out for our documentary and talk and photograph the various food that she has produced before.

Also after the cake has been made we get members of the public to try it and then use "Vox Pops" to ask members of the public to tell us what their thought and opinions are of the cake and whether or not they would buy it if it was sold in a supermarket.

We will use a Panasonic camera to film the process of Anna making the cake as this will be my role I wanted to use a Panasonic camera as it is small and easier to use to change to the type of angle you want. Also we may use a fig rig and a mono pod.

What got us inspired to do this documentary is the work of Jaime Oliver's campaign on improving school dinners which helped to create healthy school dinners and trying to get students to try and go for healthy food instead of unhealthy food.

Another television show that inspired us is "You are What you Eat" which focuses on a nutritionist helping a certain individual who struggles to eat healthy food and is someone who only eats unhealthy food. By changing their lives the nutritionist Gillian McKieth shocks them by going into their fridges and cuboards and showing them how much unhealthy food they have and are consuming.

Short Documentaries

Documentary film is a broad category of visual expressions that is based on the attempt, to document reality. Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television series. Documentary, as it applies here, works to identify a "film making practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.

The word documentary was first applied to films of this nature in a review of Robert Flaherty's film "Moana" [1926].

An example of some short documentaries:

A Short Documentary that focused on a New York Subway Drummer on New Years Eve. I chose this documentary as it focused on the real life of the drummer and his personal life, for example how he makes a living it shows real life experience through his eyes. i liked the use of fae ins and fade outs that create different transitions for example when it moves on from one drummer to the next to create and suggest a new style.


New York Bucket Drummer Awesome Short Documentary - The best free videos are right here

A short documentary about a girl who lives with severe CFS/ME (chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis) and is confined to her bed. I felt that this documentary had a better impact on me it was more personal as it used diegetic sound like voice overs it also has a narrator, unlike the previous documentary, that asked on the spot questions to her parents and how she is dealing with the illness

I like the use of cross cutting the the girl to her looking outside her window and this gives the audience the sense of loneliness and isolation.

The documentary had a beginning, middle and and end. It started off by interviewing the girl and asking about the effects of the illness, the middle focused on the concept of the parents experiences with dealing with her illness and her everyday routine.

For example she said she did not have enough energy to get the the end of the stairs to call down when she needs something so she has to ring a bell.

The documentary ends by the narrator asking her and her parents about her aspirations and dreams for the future, what she wants to get out of live, for example having a normal teenage life e.g. going to University, clubs and pubs and slow getting married and having children.



Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

This is an action film based on an Archaeologist called Indiana Jones played by Harrison Ford and is directed by Steven Spielberg.

The documentary mainly focuses on the making of the film and what it took to make the action stunts and special effects for the film.

I wanted to add this as an example of a short documentary because I love the films and also it is a short look of what it takes, in the way of cast and crew to make a film.

It features diegetic sound like narration and voice overs with the cast and crew and also the famous music. The narrator is Leonard Nimoy who was the first actor to play the role of "Spock" in the famous "Star Trek" franchise.

I felt that the documentary was well constructed as it gave the audience an insight of what shooting a film is like on screen, for example staging and choreographing scenes as well as off screen and what the cast are like.

One shot excersise Wednesday 10th February

On Wednesday we carried out and finished the task that was set on the following Friday the 5th February. It required us to shoot a film in on shot last around a minute. Were not allowed to edit any of the scenes that we shot it all had to be in one motion. Our film was a dodgy deal that had gone wrong it had the characters meeting in a remote location to therefore carry out a transaction.

We filmed by the lake on the University Campus. This exercise was enjoyable as it was challenging because we had to plan and perform the scene before we could actually start shooting.

This meant we had to direct the camera to get the specific positions that we required also the actors had to stand a certain position so that we could capture all the action in the frame and that the actors knew where they were going next so that there would be constant motion within the shot.

We all had a chance to play different roles, for example I sometimes played the role of the dealer then later on we would switch roles as I then had chance to have a practice with directing side of this and therefore have more parctice with using the "figrig" which is a device that secures the camera and stops it from moving when taking close-ups or mid-shots.

This was a good exercise as it encouraged good team working skills and he problems you will face while making a film, for example there were times were there was too much light exposure on the lens and also it started snowing which meant that there were times where there was snow on the lens.

Also we had the problem of people walking in the shot, so we had to plan it very carefully. We focused and based our work on the film "Russian Ark" which focused on specfiic events in Russian history and used the concept of filming a feature lenth film in one shot.

I particularly enjoyed this idea as it was new and original but I also see the challenges that the director had with setting up scenes and filming them all in one shot without any editing and without any mistakes.

Also the Ben Dodd film "Surprise" which both focused on the idea of shooting the film in one shot but this time started with the end of the film with a bathroom mirror smashed and a body in the bath and worked backwards to reveal the "surprise"

scene 1 from mandybriggs on Vimeo.

Robert Rodriguez

Robert Rodríguez was born June 20, 1968, he is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in his native Texas and Mexico. He has directed such films as Desperado (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), The Faculty (1998), Spy Kids(2001), Sin City (2005) and Planet Terror (2007).

He has shot short films that have attracted a range of audiences. One of his finest short films that he went on to shoot the action film El Mariachi n Spanish, which was shot for around $7,000 with money partially raised by participating in medical research studies, won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992.

I really enjoyed this and finding out more about the director and his previous work as I am a huge fan of his films. Also I found interesting was how he made his films reach such a high standard with only a small budget and how he used editing to create effective scenes.

Camera handling 5th February

On Friday we learnt more about camera handling and Mike went into more detail in describing the different types of equipment you can use to contol a camera as well as the way you hold the camera. For example Mike discussed hand held cameras and the ways in which you hold them, for example arms bent and also to control your positioning of a camera you could lean against a wall.

Other equipment that Mike talked about was the use of the monopod which makes the camera easy to operate and hold. Also the Figrig that is wheel that is used for contol when carrying out close-ups. We also looked at the different styles of filmmaking for example:

• "Touch of Evil" [1958]

• "Rope" [1948] Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, he made the film like a theatre play and shot on four reels of film all in one take that he could show in four bits in the cinema.

• "Russian Ark" [2002]


• "Timecode" [2000]

Oh My God 5th February

Oh My God 2 from Ross Weir on Vimeo.

Today we continued with the Oh My God execrsise but to experiment with the 180 degree rule as me and mandy used the edited version of ours and the aim of the excersise was to team up with another group who was the opposite as we shot the frame from left to right, we had to find another group who shot right to left.

The other aim of the excersie was to show what the frame looks like when the 180 degree line is crossed and to also create a continuous motion to show both characters running but in opposite directions to also create a narration and storyline.

This excercise was varuable to me as it was another chance for me to improve with my editing skills and improve my technique, for example when to cut away at a cetain meoment to craete a consistent and constant flow but to also judge as a story teller what wpuld come next in the scene as the previous task was to collect and edit the shot, throught the use of a shot list, this time we had to develop our understanding of editing through the way we narrate and tell a story.

If I was to do this excersise again I would find a better way of laying out dragging the file onto final cut as this took some time, however I feel more comfortable when creating subclips and feel more confident with using final cut and judging what scene will fit in where and where the right place to cut is.