My main art form is Film making, because I like the symbolism you can create whilst also showing people things they might not have seen without documentaries.
This is my Media Studies mock exam from last year. This is one of the first films I made…
PASSWORD: TREASURE682
The New Skill I would like to learn is Editing because I am interested in how different artists can use the same material to create entirely different narratives and manipulate audiences.
Introduction
I made a movie trailer for my media GCSE’s. Since then, I have been very interested in documentary making for a while after finding the Dogumentary tv channel & Ghengis con films channel on youtube.
Generating Ideas
Channels with documentaries, and documentaries I enjoy
https://www..com/user/GenghiyoutubesConFIlms – a channel that shows the lives of MMA fighters in Miami, in two different series, both centred on fighter Jorge Masvidal and his journey through the sport, and also a multiple season series on the life o fighters a Phuket Top Team in Thailand
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpejL4mTlUJ_hfQY1PiCW6Q – Dogumentary TV is a great channel for information on dog breeds, the business of breeding dogs, and dog training all in one
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81157840?ad=true&tctx=0%2C0%2Ccc524dd9-5768-47d5-ba8f-7c1be773801f-374164330%2C%2C&trackId=13752289 – the game changers documentary on Netflix. while it is both biased and heavily disputed, still a very interesting film on the science behind the vegan diet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ted-vl-Vd0 – a great documentary on trying to achieve fitness goals, showing how it is all possible, but how much you also need a good deal of discipline
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
| Strength | What I have done in the past to show this strength |
| Working independently | Completed my silver arts award during quarantine |
| Working with clay | Making a clay mask for silver arts award |
| Being inspired by other artists | Looking at horror masks and aliens from Rick and Morty for inspiration on my mask |
| Understanding complementary colours | Using complimentary colours in my mask design |
Weaknesses
| Goal | Why I would like to develop this skill |
| Creating a professional finished product | So I can open up other job opportunities in the future |
| Telling a story with my artwork | So I can make a film/documentary with a comprehensible storyline |
| Using sound to express emotion | So that I can make a soundtrack that can express emotion from myself to the viewer |
| Creating a product that has a practical purpose | So I can use the product to measure how useful other projects i create can be |
Working With Practitioners
Melanie Jones – Photographer
I completed a photography project with Melanie and part of that project helped me to develop my editing skills.
Melanie is a photographer based in south London, who got her degree in 2005, and has been working in the field ever since then, while also tutoring at different schools and universities since then.
Unboxing the lights: We got a new set of studio lights at school and unboxed them as a class so we could learn how to use them independently.
Learning to use studio lights (and the types of lighting – 1 point 2 point etc.) Melanie taught us about different kinds of lighting and we experimented with them.
Learning to use the camera: I have used an SLR before but only on auto mode, Melanie showed me how to manually set the exposure and focus so I could make my own decisions about how the image would appear which is a kind of editing of the subject.
The new skill I want to learn is editing, so for me, editing images in Photoshop was the most important part of this mini-project. Melanie gave me a brief to follow as this is what would happen in a professional setting:
My brief: Create a fight poster using photographs taken in the studio.
The pictures – I decided to play both fighters in my fight poster. So I set up the studio lights using a three point set-up and then used a remote trigger to fire the camera.
The final product
Aidan, you did really well in this mini-photography project. You learnt how to use the camera and studio to tell a story with your images and was able to work independently and help others. I know that editing was the most important part of the project for you and I was really impressed with your Photoshop skills. Not only did you learn the basics, you also started thinking about “best practice”. When I look at the original raw photo from the camera I see a young man who looks a little nervous. In the final poster, I see two hardened fighters. This really shows how your use of EDITING achieved a completely different emotion and narrative in the work. The difference between the two halves of the image also shows this.
Feedback from Melanie on the product
How I developed each of my chosen skills through this project.
| Goal | Why I would like to develop this skill | Melanie’s Comments |
| Creating a professional finished product | I worked on making a professional finished product with Photoshop, editing the images I took into a fight poster. I worked on setting up the lights to take photos, editing pictures in Photoshop using tools such as lasso, and I worked on posing for my pictures. | The product is completed to a near professional standard and certainly matches the brief. There are a few tiny tweaks Aidan could have made like removing the hook and a few of the marks on the wall using the clone tool. |
| Telling a story with my artwork | I worked on telling a story with my product through expressions and colours in my poster, and with text to help it along too. | The narrative of a fight is conveyed well in the poster through colour, the lines and the steely facial expression. |
| Creating a product that has a practical purpose | The purpose of the product is to advertise the fight. | This poster would make a good advert for a fight and Aidan could use these skills in the MMA community. |
Eric John Campbell – Editor
I wanted to work with a film editor as well as a photography editor because my main skill is filming and I wanted to learn more about editing my films. In the past I just used jump cuts or templates.
Because of Covid-19, I was unable to connect with a film editor face to face and I had to stop trying to find one. Instead, my teachers set me up with a Udemy course taught by Eric John Campbell.
Feedback – This course asks students to post assignments on a public forum. Becuase I am under 18, and the school set up my account, I couldn’t submit films of that had other under 18 year olds in them. So I couldn’t get feedback from the instructor. But I do have a certificate of completion.
| Goal | How I developed this skill on the Udemy Course |
| Creating a professional finished product | This course had lots of professional techniques. My Media studies movies looked a bit childish but this course helped me to create more professional looking products. |
| Telling a story with my artwork | The course talked about narrative and how this is important to documentary |
| Using sound to express emotion | Before, I had just used the built in iMovie sound effects but this course allowed me to download a pack of sound and made me realise that I should curate the sound properly for my documentary. |
| Creating a product that has a practical purpose | This course showed me how important editing can be as a skill in the workplace. |
My project plan
To collect research I will:
- watch similar documentaries to what i plan to make
- watch possible videos to use in my project
- look at stories on Viktor Postol
- look into other Ukranian fighters
To plan, practise, and prepare for my project I will:
- work on my editing skills
- practice making a soundtrack
- do a work placement at a film studio or with a documentary maker
- look at other documentaries made on the same subject
To create my project I will:
- Find all of the clips that I need to make my documentary
- Write a structure for the documentary and plan out how to tell as story
- Download the clips and music that I need
- Use iMovie to edit the movie together
To evaluate the success of my project I will:
- Show the movie to my teacher for feedback
- Organise a showing of the movie at an end of year exhibition
- Send a survey round to everyone who sees the movie
- Measure my success against my goals
Preparing for the New Work
The first thing I needed to do was gather my raw material. I am creating a narrative documentary using found footage and my editing skills so I need to gather all of the raw material. Most of what I need is on Youtube and I wanted to get a 30 day trial account so that I could download the clips that I need. Before I sign up for the free account, I did research on Youtube and started making lists of the video clips I would need:
Sometimes I worked on paper like I did above, but I also had a Google Doc where I could copy and paste all the links that I needed.
These are all the videos I found: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AKkDzyyduDWhRWlV_UUWCtmhtDLnIRHX?usp=sharing
Feedback I got from Melanie during the making of the documentary.
You set yourself the task of making a list of all the clips you needed but you have done more than that, your work on paper shows that you are starting to consider the narrative that you are going to build. In your evaluation, I think it will be interesting to discuss different spins you could have put on this material if you wanted to.
Feedback from Melanie
Hi Aidan,
So far you’ve made good use of slow motion and I like the choices you’ve made in cutting things together. The audio comes out at different volumes throughout at the moment and this can be adjusted so let me know if you aren’t sure how to do that. I think a voice over is a good idea as you will need to explain some things to viewers that don’t have background knowledge. Also, you currently have some still images and I suggest you put a pan or a zoom on these to add some dynamism. I’m sure you were planning to do a lot of things anyway!
Melanie
Creating The Final Version
I used iMovie to make my documentary but I did it at home because school was not open.
Aidan did a lot of this work at home when he was unable to come into school. This means I don’t have a lot of photos or screenshots of him working on it. However, Aidan would bring his laptop to school on the occasions where he could come in and show me his progress. which is how I was able to give trhe feedback above.
Melanie
My final documentary – Password: TREASURE682!
Feedback
I planned to create a feedback survey to share with others, but I didn’t have time. Because of the school closures I was behind on finishing the documentary.
My Evaluation of this project
Arts Award project evaluation
My original artform going into my project was filming, so it made sense to transition into editing to achieve the skills I wanted to work on in this project, which were: creating a professional finished product, telling a story with my artwork, using sound to express emotion and creating a product that has practical purpose, as the ability to edit footage makes films and documentaries more professional and practical as they are easier to process information from than raw footage.
The project itself was to create a documentary, using only news and videos I found on the internet and iMovie tools, about the corruption in a specific boxing match. My original plan was to make the documentary on the Terrence Crawford vs Viktor Postol fight, but i decided to change it to the Oleksandr Usyk vs Derreck Chisora fight as that one had happened more recently and had more implications for the present boxing landscape which therefore helps me with my skill of editing a project with practical purpose. My research for this project was mainly watching other documentaries about boxing and mma, and seeing how they told narratives and presented the fighters.
There are also a couple of youtube channels that I was already watching in my spare time who had made similar videos on the topic of corruption in boxing, which both inspired me and helped me to create the project. Unfortunately the whole time i was working on my documentary, England was in the middle of a pandemic, which stopped me from being able to go to any events, and also was a big problem i had to overcome as during this past school year there were some months where schools had to be closed, which meant that all learning was virtual and my timetable was much more restricted, as well as the fact that i could not access applications such as photoshop or iMovie to practice for my project. I had to overcome this by focusing heavily on my project over every other lesson in the last term of school, and by watching more boxing matches to see how they edited the footage as well as how commentators and pundits tell a narrative about fights even when they are supposed to be fair and unbiased.
A second challenge I faced was being unable to download the videos I needed onto my computer thanks to Youtube’s premium mode only allowing downloads on mobile devices. I got around this obstacle by sending the videos to my teacher who had software that could download the videos outside of school then she put them into a google drive folder for me to import to iMovie. Another challenge I ran into was that the school google accounts are on restricted mode, which unfortunately blocks swearing and boxing matches, meaning that more passionate reviews of the match were blocked on the account I was using. I got past this problem by signing out of my google account for every video i wanted then pasting the links into a google doc, which signed me back in to the google account but i just repeated the process for every video i used. While creating the documentary i got feedback from two of my teachers, who both pointed out that to a non boxing fan a fighters gloves seem like a very trivial thing and that i should explain better why that matters, as well as adding music to make the video easier to understand, and adding in more slides to explain the reason for this corruption, and creating an intro to get people more invested, as well as the possibility of a voice over to narrate the documentary better. I worked on all of these except the voiceover as I wanted to stick to my idea of only using content I found online to challenge myself to use my editing skills more. To take these skills to the next level I would like to keep working on my editing skills and maybe create more boxing film studies, possibly creating a youtube channel for them so that I can have constant feedback helping me to improve. I think I did well with this project, as once it was finished it told a good story about the match, but was also simple enough to understand for people who may not be as into boxing as myself. I really enjoyed the research for this project, as well as learning to edit in iMovie, which is a great skill to have and I am happy I chose to work on that over other possible artforms as it is something I see myself doing more of in the future. If i had to do the project again i might try the voice over, and I would make the clips of the fight and youtube commentaries section longer, as i felt it was one of the strongest areas of the documentary.
How I progressed on my skills
When it came to creating a professional finished product, which was the skill I was most excited about working on, my main source of development was an online course I did teaching me how to edit in iMovie, which showed me what the requirements were and how smooth I would want my final product to be. At the start of the year I was fairly lost with this skill but now I feel very confident in my ability to use it. Telling a story with my artwork is something I felt much more ready to do from the start, but watching the documentaries and matches I did helped me understand the level I wanted to achieve with this skill much more, and then my time working on and improving my project allowed me to really focus on creating a narrative in my artwork. Using sound to express emotion was something I came in fairly unacquainted with, as I was never really a big music listener so I felt a little lost with this one at the start, but the online course taught me how to use audio to express emotion a lot more and I feel as though I really got the hang of it by the end of my project. Creating a product with practical purpose was easily one of the most important goals I had for this year’s project as having a useful purpose to my artwork would be a big deal if I did decide to look for a career in editing or documentary making. My project was very deeply linked to this skill as pointing out corruption is an important thing in sport and so if I could develop a product that could do that for people that would be a huge achievement for me, and especially if my product could teach others how to see these things going forward in other fights or even other sports that would be brilliant.
How I improved on my weaknesses
| Goal | Where I stand now with this skill |
| Creating a professional finished product | The edited documentary is a lot more professional looking than my previous work |
| Telling a story with my artwork | I told a story of corruption and recent events have made that story even more relevant |
| Using sound to express emotion | I used sound in the documentary both diegetic and non diegetic to create emotion. |
| Creating a product that has a practical purpose | The purpose of my documentary was to expose corruption |