Evaluating the Final Product

Today I am asked to talk about three skills or abilities that I deem detrimental to my documentary. These skills will then be used to grade and assess my production. So what do I think is most important? The most important is good video, because with out good pictures you can't tell a great story. While producing this documentary I was often very worried about some shots, but loved others. Sometimes I caught moments I didn't even expect and they enhanced my story that much more. Sometimes its about patience keeping a shot an extra couple minutes to capture the moment. Though I believe it will help and hurt my assessment at the same time, I believe that you have to have good video. Second is how you put it together so the editing of it should be second most important. If you don't follow some type of chronological or storytelling path then your story looks randomly put together. Making sure every interview makes sense and works with what you show is extremely important. It was a lot harder for me to make a story out of mine with out a narrator, but I believe when I'm done it'll make sense that I didn't have one. It might come to no surprise then that the last skill is audio. This where I've got the cat in the bag, but first I'll explain its importance. So you have interviews, music, and audio from your b-roll which we like to call nat-sound. I imagine telling a story to a little kid when I think of using nat-sound. I know that it helps them with their imagination to hear the sound as its being read from the book. I take this and I use the same style for adults and thats how movies help books tell their story. I love the fact that I have suiting music for my documentary that flows with the style I present it and nat-sound of children reading and learning. All of this will help towards telling my story which comes to another trait that I think everything goes into which is storytelling. Okay at the beginning I told you I had to pick three so I did and to me those are all important because they tell a great story and story telling is the name of the game in a documentary. Therefore it would be unfair of me to at least recognition the importance of storytelling. How do you determine whether or not you like a book, a novel, a movie, ect? That's right storytelling is how and these three traits used correctly enhance the story that much more. So when my professor, the audience, and whom ever else watches this later on decides if they like it or not. I hope that they hold me to these three things, because I'll be focused on keeping them in check.