Thursday 31st March

Lainey was able to give me feedback on my script today which was really useful. She said that she really liked it and felt it was pretty complete. She said the only thing she thought I could benefit from was turning the script into a shooting script. Luckily, I had already planned to complete my shooting script today.

Thanks to Lainey's feedback, I moved onto marking up my script. This was quite a long procedure as I made sure to go through it several times and to make sure that I talked about everything I felt was important to note on it. I started with looking at my interviews. For many of these, I plan to use two different shot types. My master shot will be a simple mid-long shot where the person will be slightly off centre and they will look just past the camera. This sort of framing is the traditional that is commonly used in most documentary series and so starting with this shot makes the most sense in my attempt to emulate this style. My secondary angle is the going to be a closer mid-mcu at about a 3/4 angle so that the persons side and front of their face is both visible. I will make sure to shoot the correct side of the face so that the eyeline is kept consistent between the two shots. To mark when I would be using these different shots I used different coloured arrows and placed them around the dialogue that would be used for each shot. I felt this was the best way to split up which dialogue sections would be included in each shot.

Although, I am mainly the only person creating and producing this piece, when marking up the script, I used terms such as Art Department, Sound Department and Animated Parts. This is partly to make the script seem more like a professional one, but also I was highlighting these features anyway so these were also the best descriptions for each.  For each of these three sections, I gave them a different coloured highlighter. I then went through the script and highlighted sections or parts that were relevant to each of these sections. For example when a character is in a voiceover I highlighted it in the colour for the sound department.  The purpose of these section is to highlight the different parts I need to keep consideration of as well as things I may need to create for the scenes, or voiceovers that will go over the top. It also allowed me to add in some things onto the script that weren't there originally.

My penultimate task was adding additional notes. These notes were quite varied and included things such as rough storyboard plans, shot types and more descriptions of the scene. This allowed me to add any additional information that either wasn't there originally or I felt needed to be expanded on. These notes really helped me to expand the story and world a bit more and will aid in the shooting script which can then be more descriptive.

The final thing I completed on my script mark up was to add to more highlighted sections. These sections used a green arrow or purple arrow that were drawn next to their relevant sections. The green arrow was drawn when the scene was using a handheld camera and the purple arrow was for when it's a static camera. This is another way of keeping track of what is needed and happening in each scene and will also help me plan what equipment I'll need for which scenes.

Overall, this script mark up was very helpful in helping me understand my story and expand it a bit more, and it will now allow me to move onto the shooting and audio scripts. But while going through and marking my script, I realised there were a couple of mistakes or parts that could benefit from more description. So even though Lainey said it was very good, I'm going to go back and develop the script more to make my final version. The dialogue will mostly be kept the same, but the descriptions and character actions will be expanded on more. I think this will help the overall story and script as well as helping my actors when I provide them the script for lines.

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So, I then started creating my shooting script. Using both my script, as well as the storyboards I created yesterday, I was able to fully complete the shooting script in lesson. Similarly to the storyboards, the shooting script will aid me when further planning which shots to shoot when and where as well as helping me to keep track of the story, and how visually it will eventually look. And the shooting script allowed me to take a step further in understanding my own piece, as the storyboards had started in me being able to visualise it.

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I then completed a piece of work that goes largely in hand with the shooting script which was the audio script. I was able to use my completed shooting script to aid in the audio scripts production, mainly for the timecodes and visual cue’s. Currently, all the timecodes, visual cues, foley, dialogue and atmospherics are completed in the script. The foley is a lot less in comparison to my previous projects. This is mainly due to traditional documentaries not making too much use of foley as they are traditionally factual pieces. So, I have mainly only incorporated foley into places where I felt it needed to go to emphasise a certain action or where it needed to go in order to serve a purpose in the story. Otherwise the audio is largely, atmospherics, dialogue and music. Regarding the music, I currently have place holders in my audio script in which a brief description of the type of music is contained. This will be updated next week when I have chosen my specific pieces of music. But currently I have just given brief descriptions for what I will look for. And finally, the cu/cut reference. I initially wasn’t 100% sure of what this section meant. So I asked Nigel and he said it was pretty similar to the visual cues. So I have used it in order to really any additional information regarding the audio, for example whether a character is speaking via voiceover or when the cue is very exact. But aside from having to update the music, I have finished my audio script. And I think it had definitely benefitted me a lot. Audio can sometimes be a thing people forget about. But by completing this audio script, I have put a lot more thought and consideration into my audio and I’ll be able to keep this in mind, particularly when in production, as I will have this document to refer back to.

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Overall, today was very useful and productive, allowing me to really further my pre-production. Tomorrow I plan to look at my resource list and character designs. By the end of the weekend, I will have completed many of the creative forms of pre-production. These will then allow me to look more at the technical side, with my production schedule going to be a huge part of this.