As stated previously, I had gone back home for the Easter break and unfortunately, could not be there for the filming on the Friday. I had arranged with Punktured to be there for 12 on the Friday. I had lend my fetching red Panasonic DMC-GH1, Rode microphone and Zoom H1 audio recorder.
I had told the group chat 12 twice, however I made a mistake once and forgot to put a 2 at the end and George assumed it was 1. When he rang to confirm, they thought they were going in for 12. George persuaded them though to let us record on the Tuesday and they put on their website that they would let someone get a free piercing for us to film. Photo below of the Facebook post.
I gave a draft of questions to George which he then mocked them up to be the final questions that he asked during the interview:
- What is your name and role at Punktured?
- How long have you been working at Punktured?
- Can you tell us a general overview of goes on at Punktured?
- How many other people work here besides yourself and what are their roles?
- Why did you choose to go into this profession?
- Do you need any certificates or qualifications to work here at Punktured?
- Tell us about some of the tools you work with at this facility?
- What’s the most common piercing you do?
- What’s the most difficult piercing and why?
- Can you tell/show us how a piercing is done?
- What do you think makes Punktured unique?
- Can you tell us any interesting or quirky stories you have surrounding your time here at Punktured?
- What is your average day like here?
- What do people need to know before considering a piercing?
- Would you say you are the most popular piercing place in Brighton? If so, why?
- What do you think the reasons people get piercing?
- Why do you think people should come to Punktured?
- Do you think the success of Punktured is to do with location?
- What do you think the future holds for Punktured?
We had rearranged and were ready to film Tuesday. George and Roshana were the ones to go film. I don't know where the other member was but I was travelling back that evening. I was told they had done well with the footage. Myself and George then that evening at around 2100 hours tried to import the footage into our group media drive. Unfortunately, the files were AVCHD and the codec doesn't compile on macs. We left it for then as we had tried to do as much as we could.
The next day, I pirated some video converting software and converted the files to the highest quality H.264 I could. Myself and George then began to edit our footage.
Our first thing to do was sync the video from the camera with the sound from the audio recorder. Once we had done this, we then proceeded to cut down the interviews to usable clips. From then on, George became hard on what was needed and what was not. We averaged 2 minutes of Julie (owner of Punktured) and Alex (staff member) footage. We then developed the cutaways into usable segments. George made notes on what we needed and an image is provided below:
After splicing it altogether into a very rough edit. We realised that we didn't have enough relevant cutaways, so myself and George went into Brighton and filmed some more.
We then polished it off by adding in intro and outro credits, music and colour correcting and grading the footage. Myself and George did all of this. We had asked the other two members to search for music and do the outro credits as they didn't know Premiere Pro well and we didn't have enough time. They didn't search for the music when we asked and the outro credits were looking poor and didn't fit into the style of the documentary.
We then had to export it but not before our consultant, Peter, had viewed it.
Overall, I am pretty much happy with how it went. I enjoyed making my first documentary and realised the successes you can have and pitfalls. I have learnt that communication is key and that you need a strong team who are just as skilled and determined as yourself. If I were to do anything differently, I wouldn't have media practice and media communication students in the same class as I don't think the media communications people are as passionate about video as the media practice people. And I'd maybe plan a bit more. Mainly on the cutaways afterwards rather than the interviews themselves.
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