Documentary: Footage Viewing Meeting

As part of the post-production process, our group met at the studios to watch back all of the footage we had shot across the three shooting days.

FOOTAGE VIEWING MEETING

In preparation for the meeting I organised all of the footage into folders so it was easier to locate on my hard drive. In total we had almost four hours of footage to watch, which took 9 hours each day to transfer onto the hard drive. The point of this meeting was mostly to watch the interviews and decide what should and shouldn't be left in.

Before the viewing began, I hooked my Mac up to a television so we could watch the footage back in a high quality. I then set up a document in word that would allow me to take notes for each individual piece of footage.

The first three pages of the Post-Filming Shot List

We started by watching the footage from day one, keeping a note of anything we liked. I kept the script on the desk so we could attach certain clips to certain parts of the story structure. After watching all the footage from day one, which consisted entirely of GVs only, everything was looking pretty positive.

Next we began to watch the footage from day two, which included some interviews with our main characters. This was when things started to not look so good. It was noted that all of the interviews were shot handheld, which, as the director, was my intention. However, whilst viewing the footage it was becoming clear that maybe some of this footage would not be usable, and so we began discussing the possibility of some re-shoots. I found it difficult to explain to the rest of the group that I intended for the footage to be handheld, and that it was all part of the theme of the documentary. In the end, we agreed as a group to carry out some re-shoots.

As a result of these discussions, we never got a chance to watch the footage from day three as a group, however after the meeting I did get a chance to view it myself, and make some notes.

The next stage is the rough cut edit. I will use the notes taken during this meeting to help me edit the documentary together.

In the end some re-shoots were arranged but they never happened, instead the handheld footage was still used in the edit, and ultimately looked very good anyway.