DOCUMENTARY UNIT: UNIT EVALUATION

For this unit I feel that me and my team worked really well together. 

As a team, we always worked professionally and communicated well. We divided up all the roles equally and everyone contributed to pre-production, production and post. When choosing the idea we all came to an equal agreement and if there was ever an objection we would sit and discuss the issue and resolve it somehow. During the pre-production stage we all worked together on the script, shot lists, choosing the presenter and we would consult each other when we got in contact with our selected interviews. 

Our main strengths here were definitely our choice of interviews, communication and how well we handled the issues of drops out. As well as rising the money and choosing to go abroad for this documentary. This was a huge task and production to take on and we are also the only first year students on the course to have gone abroad but this really helped push the documentary higher and made it as good as it was. As well, we managed to keep our interviews onboard as well as our presenter throughout the entire project. As well as getting really interesting and relevant interviews for this topic. We didn't make assumptions and didn't give off a bias opinion from the Presenter. Simply had him question and look into the topic and ask the experts their opinions as well as getting the opinions of the Holocaust Survivors. 

Our post-production had good strengths. Specifically, our turn around of the edit from going from a linear structure to a non-linear structure and making our documentary work well, despite not being able to record the voice over and beings stuck with what we had. We also concluded the documentary well based on what we had found out throughout the filming. 

I would say our weakness for this unit was our timing and organisation on certain aspects. Specifically, with the Holocaust Survivors. Due to miscommunication, we got the wrong address and ended up going to the wrong location at first. Although we worked around this and got to the survivors centre in the end we did go over schedule. Also with filming the survivors, we had the issue that we didn't mix up the shots, so all the survivors are framed the same which is very noticeable in the edit, we did manage to work around this once we had cut Sam from the documentary and we used one of the angles for Ziggi and another for Miriam. 

Another weakness I would say was during pre-production when we took on far more interviews than was needed. This nearly broke the documentary as we would have had far too much to edit through and fitting all of that into a 10 minute documentary would have been near impossible. 

But, overall I think this project went very well. Filming both in the UK and Berlin went smoothly as well as working through the editing process. Some issues along the way but nothing we couldn't fix as a team.