Evaluation -Victoria

Throughout this project as a group we've definitley hit some highs and lows

Editing fun strong point assigned

How Well Our Group Coped When Problems Arose - Ellie

I think our group fared okay with problems as we didn't encounter any hugely disastrous ones.
I think this is because of the simplicity of our idea, and how it mostly involved interviews and easy to film footage, so mostly the only thing we had to worry about was coordinating our schedules with our interviewees for when we were able to film them, and if the studio at college was free when we needed it for some of the interviews - scheduling interviews prior to when we would like to film prevented us from having the issue of our interviewees being unavailable when we wanted them.

However, although we did not encounter too many big problems during filming, we did have an issue with sound when in the studio filming some of the interviews. This is because we were relying on the camera's inbuilt microphone and, in the echoey studio, it could pick up loud sound from the adjoining room. We watched the footage back and decided that, for the most part, it is only really noticeable when you focus on it (if you know it's there) and when the interviewee goes silent - so, to fix this, we cut the footage affected in such a way that there aren't pauses where you can hear the background noise, as well as added faint background music during the interview answers; this solved the majority of this problem as well as, I believe, simultaneously raising the quality of our documentary by making it more professional and easy to watch. We were planning on including faint background music anyway but the volume we made it was sometimes affected by how loud it had to be to cover up the background voices without washing out the interviewee's voice.

We also faced a rather large issue when using Final Cut Express: there was an error and almost all of the editing we had completed up to that point was deleted and we had to start practically from scratch, thereby losing the time we had spent editing up to that point - following this, however, we made sure to save regularly (especially after editing difficult areas of footage) so that Final Cut would be able to keep up and so that if there were any more errors we would have a recent save to fall back on and would not lose nearly as much work.

We have also encountered the problem of Victoria being absent on the day of the deadline, our project being saved on her account, and it being almost but not quite finished; to fix this we have attempted to contact her for her mac login details so that we will be able to complete the final stages and touches of editing and meet the deadline.

Although I feel that not too many problems arose, I think that when they did we handled them calmly and logically, and generally managed them quite well.

How Well Our Group Managed Time - Ellie

Time management was a key part of this project; this is because we had to ensure that our pre-production tasks were completed before we could begin filming as we would need some of them to successfully film (such as the interview questions, the script, etc) and then we would need to leave enough time after filming to edit our footage to a good standard.

Even though we ensured that we left enough time to complete each part of the project (pre-production, filming, editing), as well as time to face any possible problems that could arise, I think we underestimated how time consuming the editing would be. This then caused Victoria to stay behind out of lesson a lot (as she was our main and head editor) to ensure it was completed and at a quality we were proud of.

Although I feel that we managed our time quite effectively, I believe we could have managed it slightly better by being more focused on our tasks during some of our lessons; as sometimes we were slightly behind with tasks that we needed completed and so we had to postpone filming. (This happened with our interview questions, and we had to postpose the start of filming for about ten minutes - not a very long time period but the delay still put us behind on our schedule and meant we weren't able to film as many interviews in that period as we'd have liked.)

I think that, although our time management was most definitely not faultless, we still managed it quite well overall.

How Our Group Managed People - Ellie

Overall, I think our group managed people quite well.

At the very start of the project, we took on an equal workload (within the independent tasks) each and ensured that we communicated so we were able to complete these tasks as well as possible - for example, to ensure that Becky and I were able to do the bibliography correctly, we had to talk to Victoria to know where she was finding her secondary research.

Also, when it came to filming, we took on roles that we felt were suited best to our individual abilities (such as Victoria being the interviewer, myself and Cheryl writing the interview questions, Becky managing the lighting, etc) so that we would have good and useable footage when it came time to edit.

Outside of our group, I feel that we managed people just as well. I think this is partly because, because we had multiple people as interviewees, to be able to film their interviews we had to be organised and clear about:

• how long each interview would take;
• when our interviewees' (and our) schedules allowed enough time for us to film;
• where we would be filming;
• explaining to the interviewees how we would like them to answer certain questions (for example, their favourite social network - just to say its name so we can use it for the beginning of our documentary);
• how we would light each individual shot, if we could use the studio lights, if we would be using lamp light or daylight for other locations, etc - as we could not waste time figuring it out on the day. 

Communication is of utmost importance when managing people and I think that our group communicated rather well - both with each other, and those we were filming - which made our managing of people quite good.

How well the group copes when problems arose - Victoria

In the process of making our documentary we definitely stumbled across many errors that were mainly technical. An example of this would be when using Final Cut to edit, there was a point when the system must of glitched because we lost the entire intro/other items we'd uploaded from our timeline, we tried everything to recover the items but it was a lost cause and it resulted in us having to start from scratch all over again which didn't help us for time.

We also encountered problems with filming this was only when recording sound as we weren't using a microphone so we relied on my camera to pick up sound which worked well but it also managed to pick up background sound, especially when filming in the studio as any background noise is immediately picked up in such an echoey room. Luckily the background noise isn't detectable when our interviewees are speaking it's only when they're not, even so weve added music to most of our documentary which helped drain any unwanted background noise without dimming out wanted audio.

How well our group managed with health and safety - Victoria

I think as a group we had minor issues with health and safety, this may be due to the fact that we were pretty organised in terms of equipment which I would imagine would be the main source of possible health and safety's concerns. The closest we got to running into any health and safety issues was probably whilst using the studio, we were using a lot of the equipment in there and this obviously highered the risks such as the lights. The lights were a concern to almost everybody because of how bright they were meaning in order to experiment to get the best lighting we could to highlight our interviewees meant moving them at different angles constantly, this May have caused discomfort for our interviewees as we ran the risk of shining the light into their eyes, the lamps themselves were actually quite hot so if we touched them in a way they weren't meant to be handled we could have burnet ourselves, this is all down to the fact that we didn't really have any knowledge of how to use the studio equipment.

How Well Our Group Coped When Problems Arose - Becky

I think our group when it came to problems, coped well and very calmly. We managed to have a lot of patience when the problem with Final Cut Express, as it deleted our documentary.  This meant that we had to start over and calmy cope with a more tighter time limit to what we were working with. After this we made sure that we saved our work after every little bit that we did to allow the programme to keep up with the work that we were doing. There was a few problems when it came to trying to interview such as, having the studio free and the right people at the time that we needed them.
Overall we didnt really suffer that much with any problems, our idea helped us meaning that we were able to keep it at college and not have any problems at a place we were trying to be at. This allowed us to keep calm and work well. We were able to get on with out work without having any major problems stopping us.