Interview Questions for Documentary

These are the questions we used for each other interviews.

Louise's Interview Questions

- Tell us a bit about yourself
- Tells us your story from when you first went into care until now
- Do you still see your mum?
- DO you still see the YLF team?
- Would you say your a hero?
- Is the charity a hero to you?
- Tell us about recent events that you have done for the YLF
- Tell us more about Stephen and the Young Lives Foundation

Stephen's Interview Questions

- Tell us about the YLF charity
- What is the new directions mentoring programme?
- What did you do before the charity?
- When did you meet Louise?
- Would you say this charity is a hero to many children?
- How has Louise developed since being involved with the programme?
- What is your favourite part of your job?
- Would you consider yourself a hero?
- Would you consider the charity a hero?
- Would you consider Louise a hero?

Holly's Interview Questions

- Why did you become a mentor?
- What happens in a mentoring session/group?
- How has Louise changed?
- Is this job voluntary?
- What did you do before the YLF?
- Would you consider yourself a hero?
- Would you consider the charity a hero?
- How has Louise progressed until today
- Do you still meet up with Louise even though she has finished the programme?

Church Interview Questions

- Tell us your story from when you started to go to church
- How does it feel to come back?
- Compare how different it is from your first day here to today?

Editing Workshop

We had a special guest speaker at our uni. John Ramsden is an editor for the BBC.
After we had a lecture from him we was given a task, where we was given a script and had to combine sentences and make it sound as if it was already one sentence.

Here is my finished video.

I thought this task would be easy, but actually it is hard, because when you finally find a word to add in it had a different tone to the sentence its supposed to flow into. After I finished the sound task, I added some cutaways over the jumps in between the interview.

Overall it gave me a rough idea on what I will be doing for editing.

Filming Shoot 1 - Louise's Interview

One of our first interviews we was able to get was with Louise our case study for the documentary.
We originally was hopping to feel all of our interviews during the easter holidays but due to lack of replies on available times, however we was able to film Louise on the second week of our Easter Holidays.

Me, Charlie and Sophie went to Louise's house to film this.

The interview started off bad as there was still clips left on the camera, from the previous users, because i did not checking the camera and delete the clips the night before. So during the first interview with Louise we had to delete all the clips from the camera including her interview, due to the camera not allowing us to delete the individual clips. To sort this problem out Charlie re-formatted the memory card so that it would clear the previous clips off, however it did mean that we had to do the interview all over again. After getting into the second interview the battery ran out of charge, so we had to stop and plug it in.

We got Louise to tell her story from the beginning (when she went into care) to today and how she has ended up. We then asked her other questions such as, who Stephen was, tell us about the young lives foundation, etc. so that we had extra information on certain areas of her life.

Even though we had these problems to start off with, after we sorted out the battery and memory card problem we was then able to film the rest of the interview and also get some cutaway shots from around her room.

Canterbury Workshop

Our class was given a chance to go down to the Canterbury Cathedral to see the process on how they were re-building a window for the cathedral.

As Canterbury Cathedral was one of our options to do our documentary on, we thought it would be good to get a look of what our possible project could be done on.

Unfortunately the day we arrived we weren't allowed in/around much of the cathedral due to there being a wedding, however Helen, our tutor, arranged for us to go to where people are carving wall pieces for the cathedral.

When we got there we was given a tour of what happens and the process they go through with completing stone pieces, as well as health and safety of the area.

We were told to get into groups and film what the people are doing.
I teamed up with Aquila and Aimee.

We filled out a risk assessment before filming and made sure we had consent forms on hand, for people who wouldn't mind filmed.

We was able to get a variety of interesting shots and film one of the workers carving designs into stone.

I feel that we got a variety of shots.

We started with outside ones, for cutaways such as close ups of different stones, ones from the cathedral and new stone they use to carve into and also shots of the building itself for an establishing shot. We then went inside to film some workers carving stone as well as how they transported the stone to the workers and around the workshop.

Overall i'm happy with what we filmed and feel that we got some very good close ups that we used in our video. Aimee edited our video for this workshop, here is our finished video.

Sound workshop

In our Sound Workshop we was given at a task to go and film and edit a small interview to show what you know about sound as well as trying out different ways of getting sound clear and crisp without being in shot.

I teamed up with Aimee, Sophie and Roxanne.

Roxanne was the interviewer, Aimee was the interviewee, Sophie was the boom operator and I was the cameraman.

We decided that we could do a scene where the interviewee was making a cup of coffee, while being interviewed. We decided for sound that we would put a clip mic on the side under a tea towel where the kettle and drink making was, so that we could hear Aimee clearly. We did this because Aimee would be moving around you so if Aimee moved around you would then be able to hear the ruffle of her hair as well as her clothing. To make sure we could hear Roxanne's questions we decided to use a boom pole under where she was standing, out of the shot.

Here is a video of the task we did in the Sound Workshop.

Overall we got clear sound from the clip mic, as it was quite close to Aimee. However the boom sound didn't turn out as good because it was quite far away from Roxanne. Also we only focused on the sound of the interview and not on the shot. The shot was not framed nicely as there was empty space around Roxanne and Aimee, and the lighting was very poor.

Next time I would use the clip mic method again, as it was quite handy to put it on the side somewhere, especially if the person your interviewing is moving around on one side quite a lot as well as speaking. Also I would make sure the shot is nicely framed and lighted instead on just focusing on one thing.

Reflection On Documentary - Group

Me, Charlie and Sophie sat down and spoke about what our documentary is actually going to be based on. At first we thought we would focus on crime because we thought that the children who went to this charity had helped children with this. After researching into the Charity a bit more we then decided to focus it on troubled children, as we felt that this broadened the audience a bit more.

After having a discussion with our tutor Helen, we now know that we will be focusing on Louise's story and how the mentoring program helped her. Also we thought we would include Holly, Louise's mentor from the charity and talk about her story as she is seen as Louise's hero.

Documentary research - 'Banged up and left to fail'

'Banged up and left to fail' is a documentary that is on BBC Three and was shown on Monday at 9:00pm for an hour.

"Natalie seems like any other university student on her Policing, Investigation and Criminology degree, but she has more experience than most. From the ago of 13, she has repeatedly in and out of the criminal justice system - that helped her change. Natalie's story isn't unique. Nearly 60 per cent of all offenders on a short sentence will commit further crimes within a year of release from prison. In this documentary, Natalie explores the impact being locked up has had on young adult offenders like Sephton, who spent most of his adolescence in prison and now struggles with basic tasks such as food shopping and cooking a meal. She also meets those in charge, such as Minister for prisons and Rehabilitation, Jeremy Wright, to find out what the government are doing to tackle our high re-offending rates."

In this documentary Natalie shares her story and also meets up with three different people who have recently come out of prison and are trying to get their life back together.

1 - Martin - Looking for a house
2 - Elliott - Looking for a job
3 - Sephton - Has anxities and has been mentally scarred from prison

Unfortunately for each of these people they had the same response on what happened when they came out of prison and that was because they didn't get help with any rehabilitation, they were more likely going to go back into trouble. This happened to be a continuous cycle for some people.

While meeting each person throughout the documentary she tries to help out every person by getting them a bit closer to what they want to do, i.e. Natalie helps Sephton with going shopping and learning to cook a meal, so that he doesn't feel so anxious about doing it.

Natalie also went to visit a women's prison called Drake Hall, that did help women with rehabilitation so that they won't get back into trouble. They discovered that people who served over 12 months here had a great response with getting back on their feet, where as the people who served under 12 months didn't do so well, and ended up getting back into trouble.

Natalie also went to see Jeremy Wright who is the Minister of Justice to talk about the new scheme they have for people who serve short prison sentences. Their new scheme is to keep them in contact for a year, to make sure they don't reoffend again and if they do they can take the person to court and put them back in prison.

I noticed that for filming locations, Natalie went to the houses to interview the three people that she was helping. Natalie met up with Jeremy Wright in a pub/restaurant area, which is interesting because you would have thought that because he is so high up that the interview would have taken place in a work area such as an office.

There was some interesting parts to the documentary and one part that caught my eye was when there were drawings of Natalie when she would talk about her past. This made the interview more interesting as is mixed up the shots a bit. I also liked how there was a mixture of speaking in front of the camera as well as commentary which made it less sync heavy, due to there being quite a few interviews.

Overall it has definitely given me some ideas for my documentary, especially because how they have set this film out is similar to how my group want to do our documentary.