DOCUMENTARY - ANNIE & SOCIAL MEDIA
After struggling to find an idea for a documentary, me and another member of my course (Anya Lillie) joined forced and decided to work together on one big documentary. This was SRC's ANNIE: The Documentary.
We set out to make a documentary on the crazy world of musical theatre as they put on their Christmas production of Annie: The musical here at college. We followed the process of what it takes for students to put on a professional production in a professional theater.
From the initial idea, to auditioning over 140 children to the final show night and everything in between.
Even though Annie was going to be a very large project, we decided to make a second documentary to make sure that we had enough evidence to support our assignment as me and Anya were now working together.
For this me and Anya came up with the idea of making a documentary on social media, we were going to show different generations views on it and how it effects people.
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ANNIE: The Documentary
We started with a plan of what we wanted to capture throughout the process and what we wanted the finished doc to show, this was going to be the process the students go through to put on a professional show in a professional theater.
For the first week me and Anya spoke with Sara, who is the creative director of performing arts at college. She told us a rough timescale of their production process so that we could work with it and make it work around our other projects but more importantly so that we didn't miss the chance to capture important parts of the process.
This was not going to be a quick project, it takes months to plan and produce a professional show and if we were going to show this process properly then it was going to take months of filming and editing. To help us we then made a production schedule so that we had a plan of what we needed to do in the upcoming months of production.
We started with coming up with story lines that we could use in the production, we choose to follow the following points:-
Now that we had done the production paperwork, it was now time to start getting some footage and capturing some important moments.
We started with getting a team ready and heading out to film the first set of the children's auditions.
and the process went on we made sure that we had a crew to help us get the footage we needed to create a storyline, this included interviews with staff working on Annie, the students in the show, behind the scenes roles and the Annie's playing the role.
We captured important events in the process such as the roles being announced and the musical theatre team moving over to ARC, a professional theatre.
Once they had moved over to ARC, their big rehearsals and shows started. We created a filming rota so the crew could take turns filming the shows and performances. Once the shows came to an end so did the story for our documentary.
Now that the musical theatre team had finished their production, we now had a storyline to start editing our documentary together. As we looked through the footage we saw that we had a good amount of shots and interviews.
I made a start on the edit while Anya worked on the social media documentary, the edit was going to take a long time as there were hundreds of hours of footage because it was such a big production.
As I went along with the edit, I tried to create an understandable and entertaining storyline for the audience. I believe I did this well and the finished edit has a stong and entertaining storyline.
The finished edit ended up being around 40 minutes long, which is longer than we thought it was going to be but we are more than happy for it to be this long as it includes a lot of content. Of which includes, interviews with the cast and crew, a tour of the ARC from students, rehearsals and montages.
_________________________________________________________________________
Social Media Documentary
Me and Anya wanted to make this documentary as its something both of us are interested in, we wanted to show people the statistics of how dangerous social media can be but also how much people actually use it.
We started by doing research on social media usage, its dangers but also what people like about it and why they use it.
We filmed interviews with people of various ages to see how their age changed their view on social media and how they use it. This was made up of interviews from James,Laura, Dannellia, Ethan and anyas grandad.
From the initial idea, to auditioning over 140 children to the final show night and everything in between.
Even though Annie was going to be a very large project, we decided to make a second documentary to make sure that we had enough evidence to support our assignment as me and Anya were now working together.
For this me and Anya came up with the idea of making a documentary on social media, we were going to show different generations views on it and how it effects people.
_________________________________________________________________________________
ANNIE: The Documentary
We started with a plan of what we wanted to capture throughout the process and what we wanted the finished doc to show, this was going to be the process the students go through to put on a professional show in a professional theater.
For the first week me and Anya spoke with Sara, who is the creative director of performing arts at college. She told us a rough timescale of their production process so that we could work with it and make it work around our other projects but more importantly so that we didn't miss the chance to capture important parts of the process.
This was not going to be a quick project, it takes months to plan and produce a professional show and if we were going to show this process properly then it was going to take months of filming and editing. To help us we then made a production schedule so that we had a plan of what we needed to do in the upcoming months of production.
We started with coming up with story lines that we could use in the production, we choose to follow the following points:-
- Finding our Annie
- Auditions
- Student Auditions
- Rehearsals
- Moving to ARC
- Tour of ARC
- Opening Night
- Closing Night
We thought by following these points it would give our documentary a structure to follow instead of just a bunch of random clips of different parts of the production.
Now that we had done the production paperwork, it was now time to start getting some footage and capturing some important moments.
We started with getting a team ready and heading out to film the first set of the children's auditions.
and the process went on we made sure that we had a crew to help us get the footage we needed to create a storyline, this included interviews with staff working on Annie, the students in the show, behind the scenes roles and the Annie's playing the role.
We captured important events in the process such as the roles being announced and the musical theatre team moving over to ARC, a professional theatre.
Once they had moved over to ARC, their big rehearsals and shows started. We created a filming rota so the crew could take turns filming the shows and performances. Once the shows came to an end so did the story for our documentary.
Now that the musical theatre team had finished their production, we now had a storyline to start editing our documentary together. As we looked through the footage we saw that we had a good amount of shots and interviews.
I made a start on the edit while Anya worked on the social media documentary, the edit was going to take a long time as there were hundreds of hours of footage because it was such a big production.
As I went along with the edit, I tried to create an understandable and entertaining storyline for the audience. I believe I did this well and the finished edit has a stong and entertaining storyline.
The finished edit ended up being around 40 minutes long, which is longer than we thought it was going to be but we are more than happy for it to be this long as it includes a lot of content. Of which includes, interviews with the cast and crew, a tour of the ARC from students, rehearsals and montages.
_________________________________________________________________________
Social Media Documentary
Me and Anya wanted to make this documentary as its something both of us are interested in, we wanted to show people the statistics of how dangerous social media can be but also how much people actually use it.
We started by doing research on social media usage, its dangers but also what people like about it and why they use it.
We filmed interviews with people of various ages to see how their age changed their view on social media and how they use it. This was made up of interviews from James,Laura, Dannellia, Ethan and anyas grandad.
