Commission Documentary Unit 3: Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment.

To make sure we was well prepared for our filming trips we created a risk assessment that helped us identify risks and hazards that way may face. As we're in a building zone and a stone workshop with a lot of heavy equipment and scaffolding we needed to make sure we knew the correct clothes to wear including safety hats that are given to us when we enter the scaffolding area. We looked at how we could prevent the hazards in a sensible way to make sure ourselves and contributors are safe throughout the shoots!

Here is the risk assessment below.

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Locations

After visiting the stone masonry workshop and drawing room at Canterbury Cathedral various times, and also taking a trip to the Stone Yard in Canterbury – we decided that our main locations would be the workshop room and the drawing board room. We decided we would film some footage on the scaffolding as well when the stone is being put in to show how the Great South Window project was slowly but surely being developed. 

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Contributors

After considering all possibilities for our contributors - including whether or not to have more than one, or have a mixture – we decided on choosing;

Steve Manuel – the apprentice master

Marella McGee – apprentice

Darren McCulloch Smith - senior setter out

Jake Wood – apprentice

Scott Wiseman– apprentice

Although we've definitely picked these as our main contributors, in the edit we may still cut one out as we don’t want our documentary to have too many people that aren't as important in it. 

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Stoneyard visit

Today Vic, Andrei and I all went to Canterbury to visit the stone yard. We went there on location scout and to also see what the people working there were like to get a sense of if they would be a good character and talker for our documentary. We looked around, taking various photos and short videos of the workers to use as research, reference material and test shots. We spoke to Emlyn who was in charge of the stone yard, and also spoke to some workers there whom we briefly spoke to to try get a sense of who they were, their background, and if we could use them in our documentary. We also met an apprentice named Jake Wood – Jake is currently an apprentice at Canterbury Cathedral studying on the CWF programme, which is the Cathedral Workshop Foundation. After speaking to Jake for a while and getting a sense of the character he is we decided he would fit well in our documentary as he was currently experiencing the apprenticeship and doing written work and also practical work. As we want our documentary to be interesting and show that not everyone who works at a cathedral is boring – we want to show the lives of the apprentices in their free time. To do this we had the idea of asking Jake what him and his fellow apprentices get up to at lunch time, expecting the answer to be something like they go to a café for lunch, however Jake told us that they play card games in the workshop. This could be an interesting part of our documentary to see the apprentices’ and teachers playing games with each other to see their personalities outside the work area. With the apprentices and craftsmen’s busy workload we decided to leave them to it as they were on a tight deadline. We told Emlyn that if he was happy to be in our documentary, prior to the filming and interviews we would send him over a schedule and interview questions to prepare him so that we didn’t have to keep stopping or he didn’t have to think too much on the spot.

The day was quite productive as we all felt that Jake was a great person to have in our documentary and we’d further developed our knowledge on the work that was going on at the stone yard and at the cathedral. So far we are all happy with the process!

During the car ride home we began talking about who are contributors could be, we made an abrupt decision to cancel Emelyn out of the documentary as he wasn’t a major part and we already had Marella, Steve, Darren, maybe Scott and our new contributor Jake which was already enough people.

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Library Meeting

Today we met up at Rochester Library to go over ideas for writing our treatment. We watched a video off YouTube which explained what we can put in our treatment and how we can write one. It was quite helpful to watch and gave us a few ideas. We also discussed how Vittorio and I had met one of our contributors Steve Manuel (the apprentice master) the previous day when we went on a field trip to Canterbury Cathedral to create a short documentary on the stained glass and stonemasonry conservations. We talked about what he was like and how he was informative with anything we wanted to know. Steve was also very helpful when we began filming at the stonemason workshop room as he said if there are any shots you need just let me know. Throughout the meeting we talked about who we wanted our main contributors to be and decided we would have Steve introducing himself first, and then follow on to the apprentice Marella. We then decided we wanted to have some interesting shots of what they get up to at lunch or after work so we could cut to that during the middle of our documentary to show that people at the Cathedral aren’t stereotypically ‘boring’ people that don’t have fun too. We also want to feature another apprentice Jake in our documentary as he is currently also following the CWF (Cathedral Workshop Fellowship), and is one of the youngest apprentices. The CWF this is a course which the apprentice take over a few years and develop into a degree course, they learn about skills needed to be an apprentice and also have to study the theory behind stone masonry - they get hands on experience and are privileged to work with professionals whom have been in the busy for years - 30 years to be exact!  Another main contributor we want to include is Darren whom works in the drawing board room and on the scaffolding taking measurements and he also works closely with Jake which we thought would be interesting. In conclusion the meeting today was very successful and we all agreed on what we wanted to do.

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Flat Meeting

Today Vic, Andrei and I had a meeting at the flat to discuss research we had found and talk about what we wanted to film in preparation to create the script. We caught up on anything each of us was unsure or worried about and made sure we all knew what was going on. The meeting today was successful and helped us become more confident in what we was going to film.

Commission Documentary Unit 3: Peter Lloyd-Williams

Today we had a workshop with Peter Lloyd-Williams whom is a director of photography. Peter is from the BBC and has a high knowledge of experience of the TV industry and was extremely helpful throughout the day.

Peter taught us tips on how to film an interview which included making sure we had three main shots. The first shot is a shot of a close up of the interviewee talking by themselves, the second shot is of the interviewer talking, and the third shot is a shot of the interviewee in shot with the interviewer in the corner of the screen with their shoulder in shot (basically an over the shoulder shot). Peter also taught us about tips on what to do when we need to either trim footage and it not be choppy or have audio added in that wasn’t in the original clip. To do this you would film the interviewee, and then film a wide shot of them with something in the corner of the screen and them blurred out so that the audience can’t see that the interviewee’s out of sync or not talking at all.

Another tip we was given was how to get a good panning shot so that you could get three shots from it. The idea was that you record for 5-10 seconds, do your pan and then record for another 5-10 seconds so that you could take three separate shots from a simple pan.

Throughout the day we filmed some short interviews and followed some other tips that Peter had given us including how to make an interview less boring – especially if the person doesn’t want to be identified. What we each did in our group was shoot an interview and then film close ups of their hands playing with an object and also film them from far away with an object in focus and them blurred out in the background. Another tip Peter gave us was to record nodding shots of the interviewer so their reactions look better – all these tips and shots made the interview much more interesting to watch instead of seeing someone just sat there for 5 minutes.

We also had to create a short interview outside which used a variety of shots including wide shots, medium shots and close up shots. I worked with Vittorio Falcucci and Sam Babington, Vic was cameraman, Sam was interviewer and I was interviewee. We had half an hour to film the interview and pick a subject to talk about, throughout the task we tried to find an interesting background for the interview and then tried to pick some interesting shots of us walking towards the spot we was going to stop to talk. We then had 5 minutes to sit in our group in front of Peter, Fergus and the class and edit our short interview together. As there was one computer and three of us it was stressful to each have a turn to edit, so only one of us edited and we tried to give opinions and eventually we produced our short interview.

Here is our finished video.