Rough Cut Screening - Feedback

As we haven't filmed all our interviews, we couldn't show a complete rough cut of our documentary. We did however, show the interview we did with George Neish & asked the audience for their feedback on the following things:

1) What parts do you think we should cut from the interview?

2)What parts didn't make sense because the question hadn't been included?

3) Do you think interview was framed well, with good use of mise-en-scene?

4) What parts do you think could be used as just audio as opposed to visual image & audio?

Our feedback was generally quite positive, with people commenting on the good use of light, mise-en-that represented George in his natural environment & the clear sound.

In terms of what to improve on, the general consensus was a variation in shots of the interviewee during the interview rather than having the camera in just one set place, cutting out all waffling and repetition of points, lowering the camera so the interviewee takes up more space in the shots, cutaways (although we do have cutaways but hadn't yet edited them in)

This will be incredibly useful for when we film our next string of interviews over the Christmas period.

Dunraven is Homophobic..?

When searching the meanings of the colours in the Gay Pride rainbow flag - something happened that appalled me. When searching for this information, the school had blocked the site.



Horrified by this revelation, me and my friend Lee decided to Google gay rights, and the same thing happened again.



This has posed the question in my mind as to how Dunraven can possibly say they're against homophobic bullying, when they clearly have an issue with students searching gay rights on the school computers? Hmm....

Capturing & Editing

We spent todays lesson capturing our third interview with David Robinson. As the interview was nearly 14 minutes in length, we cut the interview into small chunks, eliminating the questions being asked & just having David's answers. This will make it easier for us when editing the entire sequence, as we will be able to cut out any footage that doesn't make sense or doesn't fit within the five minute time period. We've also done this to our other footage from previous interviews.

Shooting Schedule Changes

Due to the fact that we are doing a documentary our shooting schedule has been disrupted repeatedly, we have had to work around other peoples schedules and around the weather, due to the recent snow we had to cancel our filming until transport was vise-able again. 

We have so far managed to interview, Dalia Flemming, George Neish and David Robinson, but due to complications have had to reschedule our interview with Stella Collinson twice and our interview with Lee Smith three times. 

We have come to realize that it's all just part of the process and we cant do anything about it, we attempt to get hold of people and reschedule, it has definitely been harder then shooting a fiction piece because we are  unable to control the shooting schedule, we have to work around our own commitments and the commitments of others. 

We hope to have all of our filming done by the deadline and by next thursday at least have three interviews to present to our class, with some editing done to show how we intend to present our finished documentary. 

~Rose

Film Poster Mock Up

After creating our individual posters, we got together and brainstormed ideas for our poster.

We researched into previous posters and taglines to gain some inspiration into our own posters. Pictured below are some examples we found.

We split our page into 3 and made 3 poster mock-ups (pictured below). We aimed to give each poster a different title, tagline and image/photograph, with a differentiation in fonts and colours.

There were many disputes as to what poster was planned to use, with not everyone in the group agreeing on one poster. To help us make a decision, we took a small poll with the five people in the room and asked them what they preferred. The votes were unanimous with the 2nd poster entitled "The Other Side of the Rainbow" receiving all 5 votes, and the 3rd poster "Rainbow" not receiving any. Because of this, we have decided to use the second poster as our main film poster.

Film Title and Tag Line Ideas

We had not yet been able to come up with a title or tag line for our film so we decided to take half an hour from one of our lessons to discuss it as a group and brainstorm ideas. 

These are the ideas we came up with:

Titles

- The Last Taboo

- Double Rainbow

- The Gayest Documentary 

- The Rainbow Taboo 

- The Other Side of the Rainbow

Taglines

- We're not racist, nor sexist...So why are we homophobic?

- So intense. So vivid. ('Double Rainbow' title only)

- Why should being gay, be so hard?

- This certainly isn't a pot of gold... (rainbow themed titles only)

- No child is born homophobic

- Gay is the new purple

- Gay doesn't always mean happy...

After some discussion as a group we picked our fifth option for our film title and tag line. We managed to narrow it down to 'The Gayest Documentary' and 'The Other Side of the Rainbow' and due to the fact we thought that 'The Gayest Documentary' could be perceived as offensive, we made the decision to use 'The Other Side of the Rainbow' with the tagline 'Gay doesn't always mean happy...'.

Shooting Schedule

These dates are subject to change/rescheduling however this is the basic shooting schedule we have planned for all our interview'ees.

15th November - Dalia Flemming Done
28th November - George Neish Done
7th December - David Robinson Done
15th December - Lee Smith Done
16th December - Ms. Ivy Cancelld
17th December - Dave Robson Done
18th December - Stella Collinson Done
24/25th December - Michael & Kevin Done
28h December - Aimee Joyce Cancelled

Group 5

These are the members of group 5 and their personal jobs and qualities they bring to the group.

Mia Reid: Co-Director and Researcher.

Mia has managed to line up interviews with the chairman of the LGBT (see group powerpoint for further info) And a prominent worker in stonewall.
Furthermore Mia offers helpfull direction and also took up the mantle of asking the questions when we interview our subjects.








Freddie Skinner: Editing, General Help.

Freddie has proved extreamly valuable as his editing skills have helped the group move forward in our work, he edited the short test run interviews we performed with Lee Smith and George Neish, furthermore she also cut together and placed our presentation on this blog. Furthermore he got us an interview with a friend of his, whom was raised by two sets of same sex parents.




Rose McGinley: Co-Director, Camera Woman, Researcher.

Rose has contributed to the ideas for the documentary and worked in close conduct with Mia Reid in order to decide on what general settings and questions would be preferable during interviews. Furthermore Rose has done the camera work for the interviewing of Lee Smith and Diana Flemming and will in the foreseeable future be handling the camera work herself. She also managed to get Stella Collinson and George Neish to provide interviews for the group (who are both gay students) and David Robinson who can provide a perspective from the other point of view (a homophobic student).

Group 5 Presentation

Methods to Capturing Sound

We visited the Clapham Learning Centre to test all the different equipment that we could use for filming our interview.

Two members of our group testing out the standard microphone. From this we found that using it would alter the layout of our interview and is more likely to have inconsistencies in the sound level than using an indoor foam covered boom pole.

 Three of the group testing the mini clip-on microphone. This would be good a choice to have to record a double of the audio that we get from using the boom pole. The problems with this method are that it picks up a large amount of unwanted sounds from its surroundings and has a very short life span and will require a lot of spare batteries. However, will still use this as our back-up source.

The wireless clip-on microphone kit that is a possibility for using for our interview. This is just as good as the above, but we feel that there would be no point to having a wireless set, when using one with wires would cause no problems for our interviews.

This is the Marantz that we have chosen to be our primary way to capture our sound. Its good because it can capture a large amount of sound whilst maintaining a good battery life and producing very clear, high quality recordings.

Audience Survey

1) Do you think it’s wrong to be gay?

Yes            No            Not Sure

2) Have you ever witnessed homophobic bullying?

Yes            No            I’ve taken part in it            I have experienced it myself

3) Have you ever tried to help someone who was being bullied for being gay?

Yes            No            I’ve never witnessed homophobic bullying

4) Do you think homosexuality is a choice?

Yes            No            I don’t know

5) Does homosexuality make you uncomfortable?

Yes            No            Other…………………………………………...

If yes, why? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………...

6) Do you think homophobic bullying is an issue in your school?

Yes            No            Not sure

7) Do you have any friends or family members who are gay?

Yes            No

8) What do you think of people who are verbally/physically abusive towards homosexuals?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………....

9) If you discovered that a friend of yours was gay, would you still maintain contact with them?

Yes            No            Not Sure

10) Do you think it’s hard for people to admit to being gay?

Yes            No

If yes, why?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………....

Mia's Film Idea (very brief)

Documentary
A five minute snapshot into homophobic bullying within schools and how it's being dealt with - told from different perspectives.

Begins with a montage of people expressing their views on homosexual people.

Interviews with gay & lesbian students giving accounts on their experience of bullying at school & how they dealt with it - did school intervene in any way? Did they feel like they could talk to a member of staff about it?

Interviews with LGBT Forum chairman, Dave Robson, and representative at Stonewall (currently sorting out potential meetings at the moment) - what they do, what they've found from their research.

Potential interview with senior member of staff about what they're doing to stop homophobic bullying in their school - do they think it's a serious issue?

Homophobic Bullying

We regrouped and had another group discussion about what we all felt would help us to move forward as a group. We ended up deciding on Homophobic Bullying for our new topic.

Fiction or Non-Fiction?
We haven't decided yet specifically what area of homophobic bullying we will do, we all plan to come up with a plot idea for each and then come together.

However we have done some extensive research as a group in order to try and find out more about the topic and how we could tackle it.

We searched youtube and found a couple of shorts that were informative.
One took a more comedic view which was entitled 'Homophobic Homosexuals'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG3OkXaNcck

However, we found it to be more on the comedic side than we liked and decided we didn't want to follow up on this kind of film tackling the problems gay people face.

We then decided to do a little further research into the more comedic side of the way homophobia could be tackled and found the youtube video 'Homophobic Batman' which, again, is comedic about Batman and the Joker. Although it is funny, it does also show what homophobia is but, again, was not as educational as we would have liked so we decided we didn't want to tackle homophobic bullying from a comedic point of view.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feLCpfGniz8











We then did some research on outwardly gay speakers, which is when we found Chris Crocker, who is currently one of the most famous vloggers on YouTube. He recently made a video about how he should be defined by his gender and not  by how he dressed just because he sometimes wears women's clothes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyQ4_KVDnoI

It was a very powerful YouTube video and we hope to emulate the way he was able to really get his point across and make contact with his audience.

We also watched part of a film named FIT, which was created by Stonewall - a lesbian, gay and bisexual charity. We all felt it was very good and communicated its point well to the audience - the film FIT may play a major part in our coursework.

http://www.stonewall.org.uk/

We also looked in to other resources Stonewall has produced and read through two of their booklets titled "The School Report" and "The Teacher Report" (pictured below) which are full of statistics and personal accounts from students and teachers from all over the country. The booklets give a detailed insight into the types of bullying that goes on within both primary and secondary schools, how schools have tackled the problem, and personal responses to homophobic bullying.
Some of the evidence we found from the research was incredibly upsetting and shocking - especially the homophobia of some of teachers, and the lack of support some schools give to their victims. This increased our drive to create a film that will give a  voice to the victims of homophobic bullying.

-Rose (edited by Mia)

Primary Ideas

Primarily we started with this picture on the right >

We were told we had to brain storm ideas that could revolve around this picture, it also had to match with our brief where we had to tackle a real world issue. We thought the picture could relate to the expression of youth so we went with that and ended up with this.
















We then decided to focus on the way youths these days could choose to express themselves and how they were often misconceived by older people.

After further brainstorming and coming up with ideas our group ended up with a more in depth brainstorm of different ways youths could express themselves that would look good on the camera and that could work well within our story line. Then based on the amount of time we had we chose eliminated some of the ideas based upon how interesting they would appear and how easy they would be to research and then shoot with the spaces available to us.

After discussing through our ideas we attempted to brain storm how we would capture these things on camera, how they would look, how we could make a good, in depth film that would still give us a good grade.


Sadly we soon hit a dead end and the group didnt know how to move forward, after some trouble we decided to scrap the idea and start over.

The next blog post will include our new ideas on 'Homophobic Bullying'.

A message to Group Five

By Wednesday morning, each of you needs to write a brief pitch for an idea for your film. You have all agreed on addressing the topic of homosexual bullying.  From that point, Mr Dyas and Ms Taylor will give you feedback and tell you which would be the best to do. For your pitch,

1. What is the basic narrative? ("It is a story about . . . )
2. HOW will you tell the story of what happens in the beginning, middle and end? (What does the audience SEE and HEAR?)
3. Who are you characters and potential actors? For a doc, who will you interview/film? How accessible are the interviewees? Do you have a variety of sources of info?
3. Where will you film? Discuss how accessible the locations are.

Initial Film Ideas

Our idea would be to base our group film on the issue of homophobic bullying. This could be done through many different story lines, the examples I have come up with are as follows:

- A homosexual teenage boy/girl being bullied for being different in his/her sexual orientation - possible suicide, depression etc.

- A homosexual teenage boy/girl being abused to keep a relationship secret by his/her 'popular' partner - domestic violence, accidental death/murder etc.

- A homosexual teenage boy/girl could be dealing with the consequences of 'coming out' to their parents - homelessness, being disowned, split in parents etc.