Please help criqique my first documentary

[jonE5]

This is a 2nd draft of my first documentary.

Santa Fe Boxing Club: Beat the Streets in the Ring


This is about non-profit boxing gym that runs a boxing after school program to keep kids off hte streets. These guys volunteer their time and money for a really good thing, and i wanted to showcase that.


http://www.vimeo.com/7094895
password: santafe

The final product is due Monday 10/26.

This was shot on a D90 with 28mm 2.8, and 50mm 1.8 lenses.

We had a lot go wrong and it was a learning experience. My sound guy
lost the tape he recorded sound to (arghhh!) so we had to use the onboard sound from my D90 which isnt to great.

We only had about 2 hours to setup, and shoot all of it (i got a little more supplimental footage at the actual boxing match thats sprinkled in).

Please give me some feedback that i can use for the final product in making my final edits, go on I can take it.

 

[thetvirus513]

Ok so heads up I am watching this without sound right now and I am in no way professional in fact I think you saw my trailer at the moment but here are my opinions, and I will try to watch it with sound later. First that opening frame has too much text on it, I would reccommend either cutting that quote or cut it up into frames that are only two lines long or so. It is easier to read that way. The first shot of the kids boxing looks overexposed to me but I might be wrong. Without sound the shot of the car passing the red truck before "coaches" comes up, seems pointless but maybe there is important sound there. In general jump cuts during an interview can be rough and not aesthetically pleasing, I would recommend covering that with b roll. For example, the cut of the two coaches talking and then it cuts to a later part of that interview. The shot at :54 is too long and shaky, you seem to be doing like a 270 degree spin, that is too much imo. I would cut that and either re shoot and make it smooth or depending what you are editing with try to throw a smoothcam effect on it. Also on that is seems that you are not simply panning but also tilting, it is very apparent when the road and telephone wires are crooked. At 1:58 you sped up the footage from a slow motion shot, I would just cut it or keep it the same speed. The camera is moving too much in the interview with the girl at 2:40 imo, it is distracting. I think the shadow of your boom pole is in the shot across the face of the guy you are interviewing at 3:20. If that is your boom, I would reshoot that or not use it, but that might be something else. At 3:31 you have like a half second clip of someone If he is saying something important I would just cover that with b roll or make it longer. The interview with the guy at 3:45 and all the other times he shows up I would push in on him in post, Imo he is too small in the frame. I would let the quote at 5:00 sit a little longer I didnt quite get through it. From 5:23 to to 6:12 your aspect ratio or whatever you call it (cant remember name at the moment) is messed up, you need to fix that. I really like the shot at 6:37. at 7:45 you go from in focus to out of focus to in focus again, maybe cut it and either stay in focus the whole time or quickly go from out of focus to in focus. One last thing, I would think about doing less interviews in front of that gray or blue wall, you have like 3 or 4 people in front of that and it is a bit repepttive. I know these are mostly things to work on but there are certainly things I like about it as well. Again, I am in no way an expert, and these are just my observations, but I appreciated your words on my doc so I thought I would give you all the suggestions that I can, I have not seen it with sound yet but I will try to at some point. Hopefully you get something out of my response, it sounds like you ahd some problems, and it just needs some refining is all. Good luck with the finished product!

-Bobby

 

[jonE5]

Thanks so much for your opinions.

I have now completed the final edit (link is updated), so check it out and let me know what you think.

We ran into several problems shooting.

As i said we did record sound through a boom mic but somehow the tape went missing). So i had to use the sound off my D90 (which is horrible and picks up every background noise imaginable)

We didnt have a ton of access to the place and its kinda far, so really we only had about 2 hours to shoot everything.

The pans are a little sloppy especially the ones driving (beacuse its hand held and apparently i have the shaky hands of a crack head).

When we got to the location we realized that they had no power anywhere near the front door so we couldnt run our extension cords outside to continue the interviews where it was a little quieter. Forcing us to go inside (the last few interviews) where it was MUCH noiser.

3. I should have asked the questions better. It wasnt until towards the end of the interviews that I realized my interviewer (who has since dropped the class and never came back) was not sticking to the qustion list we wrote). She was missing or skipping questions and i had to step in and ask a few, the downside as you mentioned is that the kid is looking all over the place.

We didnt anticipate the one word answers we were getting from the kids (kids are shy afterall), and we had no plan to keep asking them the same question different ways until we got elaboration. Because of this a lot of the kids interviews had to be tossed.

I really kind wish we had more time to shoot on several different days, i think it would have come out a lot better. I may go back eventually on my own and just re-shoot some stuff (now that i have purchased a dedicated sound recorder of my own (Zoom H4N))

The exposure problems were due to me switching lenses and not getting the aperature settings all the way right resulting in some shots that were over exposed (grrr), i need some sort of view finder because in some light its hard to see the LCD screen correctly.