Group Project Blog

We faced a lot of problems while making this documentary as i say did a lot of the other groups did when making their group project. We had a few: The big one and the most obvious is that the coronavirus stopped us from filming. We weren't able to get anymore b roll because we couldn't go anywhere to get more as everything was closed and we're not meant to leave our houses so to come over this problem we got b roll online but we weren't able to get b roll that told a story. We also had a problem with communication due to the virus and we it wasn't as easy to have meetings because we weren't able to meet up in person we had to schedule meetings online. We also had the problem of the way were interviewing the students we first stared it as a a vox pop but realised this wasn't the best approach for the documentary so solved this by having long sit down interviews with people who had religious experience We has the problem of where to take the documentary ...

We held a group meeting where we sat and discussed potential people we might interview. Our documentary is focused on the views of college students so we thought it was best to approach religious/cultural college societies. We thought this was the most efficient and sensible way to find students who have or may have had religious experience. We also hoped to find some students who grew up in Irish catholic culture but practiced another religion to bring in a different view for our documentary. We visited the Maynooth University, Dublin City University and the Technological University Dublin website to locate contact information for these societies. We then picked all the societies that met our criteria and sent them all an email explaining what our documentary was about and asked if they would have any society members who would be interested in featuring in it. We also emailed the student union president of TU Dublin as one of the members mentioned that he had a strong LGBTQ b...

                                      Rough cut  We made a few rough cuts as we kept making more and ore improvements to our film. We kept adding improvements but we really learned what improvements we had to make when we had our meetings with our supervisor Ian. We had a few meetings with him but we learned: We needed to add music to help with the flow and tone of the documentary. We needed to add more b roll and for it to tell it's own story but we had problem which was due ti events out of our control we couldn't get any new b roll of our own so we to find some online so therefore we couldn't use the b roll to tell a story. We also had to change the pace of our documentary as it was too fast and that there wasn't enough breathing room between the answers. So these meetings helped us improve our documentary a lot and we learned a lot from it. We made these improvements t...

                                          Voiceover We decided to go with an investigation style for our documentary. So for this we recored a voiceover to help with this style and to help guide the viewer through the documentary.The voiceover was to explain are thoughts when making the documentary and when we finished filming it.​ We had a lot of thoughts when we were making this documentary we wanted to use this so used the voiceover to explain our thoughts. This let the viewer see the documentary though are eyes and helped guide them through the story.This voiceover explain are process when making the film how we decided to change approach to are questions we asked.​The voiceover also explains the conclusion we made after we were done filming.​ We first wrote the script for the voiceover and then it was recored on a Iphone by Jamie who also did the interviews so it keeps t...

                                          ITB VOX POP We  decided to do a vox pop style for our documentary. We wrote down a few questions and we went around our college ITB. We interviewed six people. We stopped random students to see if they could answer are questions. At the start the students a few student's didn't want to answer our questions but after a while we able to get a few CDM students to answer our questions. We filmed this first set of questions in A block on the third to get a quiet place with good lighting.After this we move to the s block to try and find some other students and we were able to find new students that were in different courses. This was a great day of filming because we learned a lot from this We learned from this that we need to change the wording of our questions and that we need to go to a different college to get more interviews and h...

Settings Camera settings: Frame Rate For all of the interviews and b roll we shot it in 24fps. At the start of the filming I didn't understand frame rates but now I feel like I fully understand them. We chose 24fps so we could get the cleanest look with natural motion blur. We didn't use any other frame rate because we didn't plan any slow motion  Shutter Speed Unfortunately I messed up a few interviews in this regard. It isn't very important because there wasnt alot of motion in our interviews and b roll so motion blur wasn't very common anyways but still. I did not understand at the time that the shutter speed should be 2x the frame rate in order to get natural motion blur. I just adjusted it to find the best exposure. Not great practise but it isn't very noticeable.  Aperture We were using a very fast lense so it was very easy to get a good exposure whether indoor or outdoor. I went a bit crazy with the bokeh and shot almost all of th...

Equipment Equipment list: Canon EOS 650D We used a canon dslr in order to have more control over our camera settings and to get the highest dynamic range out of the locations. A dslr also gave us room to play around with frame rates and aperture. Using the dslr gave our film a more professional and “cinematic” look. Canon 50mm 1.8 stm The nifty 50! This lens performed extremely well considering its price. My camera body had automatic corrections built in so I didn't have to worry much about chroma aberration or any distortions. Its fast aperture meant I was able to keep my iso low and it gave the interviews great bokeh! My canon is apsc but the focal length looked great in my opinion. Zoom H1   After our prototype we realised the in camera audio wasn't good enough. The zoom fixed that problem instantly! The zoom gave us a crisp sound that we could sync with the in camera audio in post. It also gave us control over the position of the mic which is impo...

The main questions that we asked our interviewees were the following few: Name/age/where there from Did you previously attend a religious school Do you consider yourself religious and why Do you think that it is okay for a parent to indoctrinate their kids into religion before they are of age These questions were just a guideline as to what we would ask each person, but most peoples answers would lead into more developed answers. We would have these as our 'main' few questions but a lot of people, depending on their opinion, would link into something different, such as there personal experiences and there reasons for having their specific opinion on religion. 

We filmed quite a few interviews in Dublin City University (DCU) and got very good answers. Myself, Jordan and Jamie all went to DCU one of the days after college and we set up the camera and boom microphone in front of the DCU sign at the entrance of the college.  We had all of our questions already wrote out and ready to be asked by Jamie who was the interviewer. The questions that we had written out for us to ask every interviewer was: Name/age/where there from Did you previously attend a religious school Do you consider yourself religious and why Do you think that it is okay for a parent to indoctrinate their kids into religion before they are of age These are the main questions that we would ask each person but their answers would lead into more. The first two girls that we interviewed in DCU we shot outside of the canteen and these two girls were very good interviewees as they were open and truthful. The r...