CRITICAL REFLECTION
Working on the marketing and promotions for our productions company, I feel I was a valuable member of the team, and always contributed to the workload.
My role within the group consisted of producing the marketing and promotional work for our production company. We came up with the name ‘Silver Line Productions’ as it related to several ideas we had at the time, like the Undertaker and Cancer Documentary idea. (see New Media page)
As well as this, I was contacting another primary for our documentary back up idea in case our main idea fell through. (see documentary research page). This idea would follow an Undertaker, where I planned to document his daily routine, along with the emotions that are involved within the job. It would require us to film at Dunning’s funeral services in Andover. The main contact I had was a friend who was an undertaker working there. However, in week 11 this back up plan idea fell through because Dispatches had already ruined the filming ground for us. I researched into the history of documentary and particularly looked at the modes, genres and practitioners of documentary film making. (see documentary process and Photojournalism pages) This has helped me develop my skills in creating marketing in order to fit the genre and story of our documentary. I played around with a couple of poster ideas, one which was quite controversial and related more to the after effects of greyhound racing i.e. rescue center’s, and the other was more balanced in terms of showing greyhound racing under a more positive light.
The final poster (located on the home page) is a more general outlook on the subject which uses colour in order to put the subject of greyhound racing under a more positive light. It has a clear message that the documentary will be exploring both sides of greyhound racing; with a more objective, Un-biased outlook on the issues being investigated.
The poster is a tool to entice the audience in, and as Bill Nichols said, Documentary Film makers are used as a way of asking questions that the audience want to know. Therefore these posters represent the topics that will be explored, and the questions that will be asked.
The title ‘life behind the media muzzles and money’ entices the audience into wanting to know what goes on behind these terms. I used a rhetorical question ‘will you take a gamble’ which breaks the 4th wall and engages the audience to actively think about what they’re reading.
A flyer has also been created with the facts about how many greyhounds are discarded. This relates to the more controversial issues we will be exploring in our documentary and triggers the audience’s emotions using the shock factor. This was done through research online about the negative side of greyhound racing.This was to capture the audiences attention and make them actively think about what the image is showing and telling them.
Alot of my inspiration for this came from my research into documentary propoganda that I looked at on my critical reading page. I wanted to ask the audience their opinion about if they want to be responsible for creating this amount of abandoned/discarded dogs by placing a bet. It relates to war time posters which manipulates the audience to do what the poster is saying, or feel guilty for not doing it.
In order to get a sufficient amount of work completed, I set myself days purely playing about with editing on Photoshop to complete some promotional material. I created the business card and logo first as these were the main sources we needed to start promoting our production company and we generated social networking sites such as facebook and twitter to start getting opinions and hype about our documentary. I had the business cards printed at Vista in order to arrive in time for our presentation. I needed to make sure I met my own deadlines in order to get everything printed and done on time for presenting our idea. Within the group, I also created the general layout of our Yola website and made sure everybody’s page was kept similar in order to look more professional. I wanted the website to look more minimalist as to not over power the visitors to the page with too much information at once. My role focused on developing the promotional material to make sure it was all ready for the presentation and contacting our back up primary (before it fell through in week 11). The other members of the team focused on contacting our primary sources for greyhound racing and we all developed the documentary idea together. We wanted to explore themes to give our documentary a unique selling point. These are: - Gambling - Greed - Obsession - Owner-dog companionship - Exploitation
- Competition
I developed some of these themes in the promotional material I have created. However, when we get to go to the locations I would like to get real images to show dog-owner companionship and the extremely loyal and positive side to greyhound racing.
We met as a group every Wednesday after our lecture for around two hours to discuss and develop our ideas and website. When we needed to meet more often we also set time aside on Mondays and weekends. I feel that aspects that could have been managed more productively were things like, not focusing too much attention to the greyhound racing and equally focus on a back up idea, as a couple of our previous primary sources for greyhound racing fell through which could mean we would have been left with no back up. Unfortunately the Undertaker back up plan idea fell through in week 11, but we also acquired several confirmed primary sources for the Greyhound idea, which gave us more confidence. We made group decisions, but often the group would divide and each would have a different opinion, sometimes ending in an argument which I felt was bad for the team morale and could have been handled better. In order to solve this problem, we tried out both ideas in order to see what worked more successfully and we all had our opinions heard. Technically, I feel that I have developed my skills using the SLR camera and RAW editing (see Technical Development page). I feel I already had a good knowledge of using Photoshop from the first year which came in useful during this project. I experimented doing a couple of Photoessays using the Canon 550D (see photoessay page), which has allowed me to use techniques similar to the practitioners I have researched into such as Walker Evans and Bresson. My role within the 15 minute presentation, was to get the supporting material ready to hand out on the day as well as being in charge of creating the team members T’shirts. I also explained why I have chosen these forms of promotion and what my influences were. Propoganda was a big inspiration for me as I wanted to engage the audience.
Next year when we have done our filming, I look forward to being a part of the editing of the final product and to continue to develop my skills using the SLR cameras and Final Cut Pro.
Overall, I feel I have been a valuable member of the team as I completed what I set out to do and made sure I put my opinions across where I felt they were needed. We all contributed to the work and I feel positive about filming next term when we get to meet all of our primaries and continue to develop our skills.
