Reflective Essay on my Experience.

As I reflect over my documentary experience, I have had both ups and downs. Now naturally, this happens in every single production because nothing will ever run smoothly, that’s not how life works.

I feel like my partner and I didn’t connect as much as I had hoped. While this has its disadvantages, it also had its advantages. We were able to create two completely different edits; Jamie’s focused more on a montage piece of the knitting group whereas mine dove into a more personal element with my Mother along with the knitting group as well. I personally prefer working alone on the editing side of film making and with us both having two very different views on how we wanted our projects to turn out, I think the editing process was a lot easier working separately.

The disadvantages outweigh the advantages however; pre-production meetings were few and far between (despite them being regularly organized for certain days and times) and a large majority of our communication was done over Facebook. In my past experience, using Facebook as a primary source to communicate with a group hasn’t always worked out well, so I wasn’t a huge fan of using it this time around. I feel my partner and I had very different ideas from the start and it took us a few weeks longer than other groups to actually choose our subject. Both having different ideas isn’t necessarily a bad thing but when one has to compromise for the other, I feel like the other person will always have more of a passion for the subject than the other. Even when we first started speaking about knitting, it was clear that we both had different visions for what we wanted our documentary to be and because we are both inspiring editors, we both wanted to edit as well. I’m very glad that we had the opportunity to do our own edits because I didn’t want my favourite stage of the process to be dampened with questioning and debating each shot with each other.

Going into the knitting groups, I was very nervous about walking into a part of these people’s lives and having a camera sitting in front of their faces. I was worried that they wouldn’t want us to film, or we were getting too close to them or that they would be very uncomfortable in our presence, which is something I definitely didn’t want to happen. I know being a part of a documentary is that you stage reality to a certain degree but before the subject was knitting, I didn’t want to walk in and have to ask some-one to knit that again or distract them, causing them to make a mistake. We didn’t have to stage any shots in the knitting group and maybe we should have done it for one or two shots, just to have something extra but I honestly don’t think we needed it, which made me very happy.  

For me, my disappointment happened when we came to the realization that we would have to re-shoot the knitting groups again. At the time, I thought I had done something wrong but I came to learn that there aren’t many film shoots that don’t have re-shoots so that made me feel a little better. As we finished our re-shoot and looked over the footage, I was shocked at how much better the re-shoot footage was compared to the first. Our main mistake was not using a tripod and we should have used one from the start; we didn’t think we would need one because we wanted to do a lot of moving and close up shots, and using a tripod, this is a lot tougher. So the second time around, even though I wasn’t able to get as close as I wanted to the wool, especially at the knitting group, the footage came out clearer and more smoother, so I didn’t mind compromising on moving shots so much.

I have played a small part in documentary film making before but it was very unstructured and I didn’t like the end result. This was a lot more structured than my previous work but I feel like for this documentary, it could have been more structured than it was. I would have liked to work as a team more but I fear that our edit and both our visions would have been compromised if we had to do one single edit because of the different ways we wanted to go. I’m very happy with my edit and how it turned out; I gave colour correction my best shot when it came to the interview stage but that was a small problem with the lighting in the room so I don’t feel it takes away from the documentary. My music is quite quirky and could be called cheesy at times but that was the style I was going for because of the subject matters, and I think it fits the shots, the vibe and the story well.

Overall, I enjoyed the majority of the documentary experience and I would say the only large negative I have is the lack of communication at times. I find it very stressful when I don’t know where projects are headed, and meetings help me get through that struggle.

I don’t feel like my documentary is just your average short documentary; I believe it has character, as well as being insightful and entertaining about a hobby that everyone has heard of but doesn’t know much about.