Barnsley Rocks!: 2011

My media film was about two small bands from a small town and what they do. It stuck to a lot of the usual band documentary conventions, but because the bands were small, a lot of the key elements had to be scaled down. I believe the film is enjoyable to watch but may challenge the conventions of what people think a band documentary should be about. Most people may think a band documentary has to be about a big well known band, but I wanted to challenge that with the idea that ‘all band have to start somewhere’. I watched a lot of real band documentaries before I started filming for mine, and I realised that a lot of the things they show in the documentaries for famous bands, we couldn’t have in my documentary. There couldn’t be hoards of fans, band merchandise or shots of our bands playing to sold out stadiums, but I thought I’d sort of play on that point.
            I think I observed the conventions of continuity quite well, although I did find it quite hard when trying to piece together interviews which were shot with two different cameras at the same time, so I did find that difficult, but with the rest of the film I thought it was relatively simple. I didn’t have any problems with the language of film and editing, because I learnt a lot of it during my media project last year.
            My film mostly stuck to the conventions of a usual band documentary, a lot of the main features were the same. Both my documentary and the documentaries I’ve watched contained interviews, footage of bands practicing and footage of band members going about their daily routines. I would say that my film was a little more laid back because of its teenage target audience. The film lack footage of the band playing live, which would possibly subvert the audiences expectations, but the bands on the film are only from a small town, and don’t play live shows often, therefore the documentary if only sticking to the real story.
            My film didn’t have any parodies of others because it was a documentary, and couldn’t be planned to have any parodies. I suppose in a way we were playing on the history of documentaries because all the key parts of a documentary were included.
            I was hoping that the audience would get the pleasure of seeing these young bands who are just starting up and take the band names away from the documentary and look them up, and seeing how they progress through the years. In the documentary the bands website address is shown, so the opportunity for a viewer to learn more is there if they want to use it. The bands myspace is given out during the documentary, which links to another form of media, the internet, this is another way the aduience can follow up on the band.
           The media text I studied when I decided on making a band documentary was one that I saw about the band Paramore.

Although Paramore is a very big band, and my film focused on smaller relatively unknown bands, there were a lot of similarities. There were a lot of shots where the band were sat around together, and I tried to incorporate that into my film because I liked the sense of togetherness that it put across to the viewers, like the band were a family of sorts. In the documentary there was obviously a lot of music played, and although there’s probably more talking in my documentary, the music that’s in the background is the band playing, so the music is still there just very subtly. The Paramore documentary followed the band when they were on tour, which gave it a lot of different locations, which made the documentary exciting to watch. I tried to get a variety of locations for my film also, but with the bands only being from a small town there was only one studio available, which was disappointing and may make the film a little tedious.

I think that the combination of our main product and our ancillary texts was fairly effective. All of the products went well together and kept within the documentaries genre, which is definitely a positive thing. I think when the ancillary texts are put together they do a really good job of advertising the documentary and giving viewers a good idea of what they’ll be seeing in the documentary, without giving it all away, which I thought was important.

I think the two ancillary products were very good at selling our production, both for different reasons. The radio trailer was a good way to let the audience listen to a little bit of the bands music before watching the show, which was a good way of drawing people in, I thought it was pretty safe to say that if the audience liked the music from the radio trailer, they’d want to watch the documentary. I wanted to make the poster look like a band poster that would be up on walls promoting a gig, and I think that was achieved. I hoped it would catch people’s eye and get them interested in the documentary.
Other band documentary posters that I’d seen that also looked like posters advertising a gig was the poster for U23D. I really liked this poster because although it’s quite simple, it’s eye-catching.

Another poster I liked was the Metallica documentary poster, I liked this one because not many colours were used, which again made it simpler, and a photo of the band was included, which I thought was a nice touch. So in the poster for my film I took those main ideas of; simple, not many colours, and photos of the bands, or in our case bands.

Unfortunately I didn’t learn nearly as much as I wanted to from my audience feedback. Although some things were changed because of it, I still feel like we should have asked some more people what they thought, as we only asked a limited amount of people. One of the main comments we got was that there was too much talking in the documentary, which was boring. To solve this we cut out a lot of the talking scenes, or when they couldn’t be cut out we put music behind them, to liven them up.
The first lot of questions we asked our audience were things that helped us find out whether people would even want to watch a band documentary about small town bands, and what time they’d like to watch it, and what things they’d like to see in it. The answers we got were helpful, and made it a lot easier to plan out the documentary.
We wanted the audience to get a feel for the two bands and feel as if they really knew them. So when we were editing we felt it was important to introduce the band members to the audience as soon as possible. We also wanted the audience to hear the bands music that was the main point of the documentary, so of course there was a lot of music in the documentary, and we even put in the bands music behind the interview scenes.

The audience responded really well when we showed them some of the scenes from our documentary. I don’t think there are many different ways that an audience could view our film. If the person who’s watching the film likes music, and likes bands, they’ll like the film. If the person watching it doesn’t like music, and doesn’t like bands, they’ll probably not like it. But based on a cultural situation, I don’t think there would be much difference in the way the film is viewed. Music is music, I don’t think that changes with culture. We showed the audience scenes that were mostly music, because we thought that the music is the most important part of the documentary.

During my project I used the internet to research, and also create a blog to display my research. I used YouTube to watch the band documentaries I was researching, and Blogger was the website that my group used to set up our blog.

While filming we used HD cameras, and also one handheld digital camera, unfortunately the handheld camera was difficult to keep steady, so none of the shots ended up in the finished film. The HD cameras were pretty easy to work with, although I did have some trouble trying to work out how to watch what we’d filmed, but worked it out eventually. To edit the film we used final cut express. I thought it was really simple to use, especially when cutting out sections of film, and adding in music.

The editing software was probably the piece of technology which helped us express creativity the most. It was really easy to use and we were able to try out a lot of different sequences and editing techniques before choosing the ones that made it into the finished film. Sometimes I felt that the HD cameras obstructed our creativity a little bit, because they were so bulky and heavy that it was difficult to get them into the right position to film, and they could be a little shaky if they weren’t handled just right. Other than that I think that the technology really helped boost our creativity.