As a late comer to the group I found no problems fitting into the new swing of things and was accepted into the works of the group straight away. This involved being given briefs on the group’s plans for the production and delegating me a role. My role within One Loud Cat Productions is Line Producer which means that I am in the front seat of our documentary from budgets and promotions to contacting primaries and maintaining group professional practice. This suited me well as I like to be involved overall across a lot of areas of production and this position gave me that opportunity to do this.

With our Superheroes idea being chased by other group members, I took responsibility into looking at EACH/East Anglia Children Hospice which became our group’s backup idea along with my own. So I focused my initial research on this idea looking at the structure of EACH and how we would go about making the documentary if we went forward with it. As my mum is a manager within the company she became our primary contact and so Id liaison with her as she organised meetings with chief executives and the charities head of promotions Simon Henpsell. As the charity is based in East Anglia and I’m from Essex the locations would not be a problem with regards to travel by car and my knowledge of the area itself would be a great advantage. Treehouse Hospice is newly opened in Ipswich and would be the best location to film and interact with the children, parents and staff because of the facilities now available there. This idea is in the process and if the superheroes idea falls through we have this as our primary backup as anything could happen over the next few months and it is best to be prepared.

As well as being line producer I took on the role as co-marketer to work alongside Chris to produce the company’s promotion material. At our group meetings we would both share our ideas with the rest of the group and use there feedback to then create working drafts. Our promotional material includes our selection of trailers that were filmed at ST Giles’ hill looking down at Winchester City, this trailer was my initial idea and was planned to be short and simple but highlight what our documentary is focusing on, so we have a dominate female actress portraying the superhero over a setting sun. When going to shooting this we encountered one major problem which was light, because it was December and the sun sets in the late afternoon added with the need for it to be a clear sky did demand a lot for this time of year. However we set a date after researching into some days which were expected clear weather and one December afternoon we went out and shot the short piece and managed to capture it just at the right movement as the sun set. Also I designed the idea for a poster we can use, this was going with the same idea as the trailer however it would be a still photo of our costumed superhero standing in front of Winchester city as the sun set to create the same desired effect like the trailer of not revealing much information but making it visually recognisable as a superhero genre film.

To further my knowledge specific for our documentary I researched and watch four separate superhero based documentary’s that had been made both in the UK and America over the last few years. They were Confessions of a Superhero, HBO’s Superheroes, Superheroes of Suburbia and Superhero Me, these documentary films all had similar themes throughout but all approaching the subject manner in a slightly different way. This really helped me scope out how the themes and topic had been covered previously by other documentary makers, plus it made me start to think how are production would differ from these and what our unique selling point would be.

As line producer I took responsibility of such things like finance, rules and ethics. So I produced the groups budget which at this time was hard to do as a lot of things a normal production would entail are free to ourselves because of university facilities plus the production team are all doing it for the module, there were off course other key costs like transport, food and accommodation which made up the majority of it. As mentioned I then took a detailed look into rules and ethics of documentary productions, this entailed looking at OFCOM and the University’s website too. From this I managed to get very specific rules we would have to follow like 3.1 which instates we cannot use footage that incites crime. These were really important to research into and gave me and the group a good prospectus on what is and isn’t allowed in our final documentary something that you just do not want to find out on festival day.

The photo essay task of the module was a great experience for developing me as a photojournalist and documentary maker as it developed not just my technique ability with the SLR cameras but also my knowledge and eye for capturing the best moments. By doing ST Pauls Cathedral in London meant I was able to observe and discuss with other professionals at work and gain knowledge from them, what I learnt most was though how quick you need to be when shooting out there in the real world as if you switch off for just a moment then your camera could miss something important. It’s all about personal judgement and a keen eye, both things that improve with practice. As well as doing ST Pauls I also did a second photo essay, this was done on The Medina Mosque in Southampton. This task was part of Masterclass however I used some of the photos I took that day to form my second photo essay. This one is a more personal set of photographs as I was in close courters to the subjects during their prey session. They came out well overall I feel as I was limited to movement around the mosque and therefore meant a lot of them are from the same angle however this just was a comprise that I had to deal with. 

Our presentation at the end of the semester had both positives and negatives when we got our feedback. It was that our pitch overall was very professional and slick with how we presented it to the class however what mistake we made was not talking enough about our actually documentary and its primaries. When looking back I see how important this was because the documentary story and the primaries are a key factor, the reason was we wanted to make sure we had covered all other aspects and got a little carried away with the bureaucracy of the actual project however this was a good learning experience for pitching ideas something that will always be useful both for U Doc next year and in a professional atmosphere too.

Thus I feel now joining the new group worked well as it gave me a chance to work with new people and acquire new skills doing so, plus it helps having different groups for different projects as it means you separate the modules and work towards each one more specifically and efficiently. Having the larger group also helped as it meant we could focus more on our specific rules within the production and made it feel more like a production team even if it is not the norm for documentary productions. I feel the semester went well overall with little setbacks and now we have established ourselves as a production team with a complete research site, film site and promotional material to support it.