Evaluation

Since I have now finished most of my project, I now need to dissect this project and figure out the parts that went wrong and figure out how I could improve on these problems for my future ahead in this industry. 

Idea 

so let's start with the idea stage of my project first off I stuck to only one idea as I thought it would be easy and make getting interviews sustainably easier for me which ow I consider is my first major problem in this project as I should've come up with a few ideas instead of just one as that I would be able to fall back on the ideas I could've had instead of realizing how hard this idea is so close to the deadline. 

Due to this I didn't have good time management during this project as I have only had done one interview and have only 3 minutes of stock footage which is not enough to present my idea for this documentary and present the purpose behind the documentary the idea originally was to present the question of how a small business can become a county wide success but I ended up changing the question to how a change of identity can affect a business which I'm my eyes reflected on what the deli had gone through since being taken over by the current owner Janie Thompson. 

Research 

The research I've done about  documentary's is good as I have looked into the codes and conventions and used two examples of documentary's considering one is a docudrama but I thought it's a good example as it uses techniques such as archival footage and photos and also uses archival recordings but it also uses a commonly used technique called a re-creation as it gives the viewer a visual example of the information they were just given so that it helps the audience understand the information they were given. 

what I should've also investigated was similar business to the deli which had gone through a complete identity change and compare what praises and criticisms they received. 

Planning/production 

the planning for this project originally started good I had planned out the questions I was going to ask Janie and had identified my potential interviewees by just looking at the positions present in the deli and had already thought about the potential outcomes of the questions I would ask and had started to think of potential questions I could ask the other two potential interviewees Denise and Gemma I also had thought of what type of footage I could use during the interviews to keep the audience interested. 

This was all fine until it came to the time for me to conduct the other two interviews as I wasn't able to conduct them due to my poor time keeping and unforeseen events such as hospital appointments pre-booked holidays and sadly surgeries the way I solved this in the end is by using a voice of god narration to explain some key facts of the deli some information the viewer needs to know before certain parts of the documentary and to help present the conclusion with the use of the voice of god system since I couldn't get any interviews due to the prior mentioned circumstances. 

Another problem I encountered while making the doc is that the creation of stock footage as it was harder than I originally thought for example when I first went in to get some footage I had some difficulty with space as I had a large Panasonic and that would limit the areas in could shoot in both the deli and the kitchen so instead I reverted to recording stock footage on a small more portable DSLR  but the recordings would be at a lower quality but that would make the footage look more realistic. 

What went well was my Janie interview as she reiterated the questions she gave me long answers so I could draw information to create my narrations and my questions for the other interviewees and provided some much needed background for the deli which would help me write my conclusive narration the only criticism I had was to limit the space behind her so it didn't look so empty but except from that it was good. 

Conclusion 

so writing this has led me to relies documentaries are not that easy to make as you need to have a lot of Information and footage to make it possible this is what I didn't have much of the skills I presented in the documentary is my knowledge of camera angles and editing mainly which needs great improvement on if I want something like this project to be successful if I would do this project again I would look into my time keeping and the use of fracturing the images and the interviews to make space for more narrations to help space out the Information so we can give the audience time to understand and process the information they just received . 

I would also change the subject of the doc from the deli to something more personal to me so I can have a personal influence and ideals towards the doc and I wouldn't have as much restrictions on what and where I could shoot and hopefully lemmatize the amount of problems I would have with permissions especially if I'm filming in a public place. 

In conclusion what I originally proposed didn’t really happen because I didn't include all the people, I wanted to in my interviews but as I stated in the proposal my project did end with me narrating if the doc had answered my question. 

I also mentioned in my proposal that I would look into the growth of the deli but I only managed to show how the team grew over time and only how Janie acquired the deli this is another point if had to do this project again I would look more into the growth of the deli not the people. 

In conclusion I don't think this project wasn't as successful as I wanted it to be.