Evaluation

 

My final piece for my documentary project is my video which includes a small portion of the photographs taken while on my trip to Birmingham. I am happy with most of the photographs that I took, though I only wanted to include a small amount in my video.

 

Overall I think the video turned out well. The intention for it was to help the viewer be immersed in the environment that I photographed, using sounds that are appropriate to that environment. I used a large amount of sound effects, some of which I recorded myself and some I used from various YouTube videos. This is one of the weak points of the video, as I would have preferred to record all of the sound effects myself, though I found it hard to get some specific sounds and so this is when I had to use other sources instead. Aside from this, I think the sound effects work very well, and do help immersion.

 

I am also happy with the photographs that I selected. I wanted the video to have 3 sections – city, market and outskirts. The city would show more build up areas and roads, while the market shows the busy streets during the German market and the outskirts showing the more run down areas filled with factories and litter. I feel that this was shown fairly well, although I could have included more photographs of the market, as there were very few, and for some of them it is hard to tell that they were taken during the market

 

I feel that the editing for the video was appropriate to the environment. Most of the video is fairly slow paced with each photo fading into the next, though for the photographs inside the shopping centre, I instead used cuts which were in time with the loud noises heard in the background audio. I think this is appropriate as in the shopping centre people were moving a lot faster, and so the pace was faster. Other than that, I think some of the timings for the photographs could be improved, as some were on longer than they should have been, and others were not on for long enough.

 

In conclusion, I am happy with my final piece and the unique way it was conveyed - via the use of audio. There are small issues with the timings such as some images being shows for too long or not long enough, although these are things that are quite difficult to notice unless you’ve watched it multiple times. I am also happy with the photographs that I took, in terms of the composition and lighting. My favourite of these photographs are the one taken on the ‘outskirts’ where it is a lot dirtier and run down. This is because I find this environment a lot more interesting, and so there is a lot more I can do with it.