For this assessment, we were asked to form groups and between us, develop an idea, the supporting materials and a presentation for a documentary which we would be filming in semester two. In this analysis I will be detailing the role I took in pre-production stages of this project.

My role within the group was marketer. This meant that I worked on ideas such as our website and promotional packs and within the production I will be worker to get as much buzz around our documentary as possible. This will hopefully draw more people to come and watch it. I plan on doing this mostly by developing a series of posters, flyers and trailers for people as well as advertising it online and hopefully within local newspapers. As well as marketer though, I also had to do alot of research in the topic I chose to look at for documentary which was real life superheroes. As this became our main project I continued my research into this topic finding out as much as I could about the underground culture. I felt like this would be a good subject for a documentary due to the rise of films like “Kick-Ass” and “Super” which asked the question, why can’t superheroes exist? Even though the phenomenon has been explored in the documentary format already, through research into documentary theory as well as practitioners I think we have developed an idea which is quite original. As well as theories I also researched photojournalists and other documentaries to get an idea of what works well within documentary which I could possibly try to emulate. To research my documentary, I relied heavily upon secondary sources rather than primaries as I don’t actually know anyone who is a real life super hero. This meant that I read alot of news paper articles around the subject, I researched individual superheroes on Facebook, twitter and their own websites, I looked at forums based around the topic and I generally researched the subject of real life super heroes.

I attempted to contact a series of primary sources though to try and find out more information about real life super heroes. But many of these did not reply and therefore most of my research fell onto secondary sources.

In order to get an understanding of the documentary industry I also looked into many photojournalists and other documentaries. This gave me an understanding of which techniques work within documentaries and which ones don’t. It also helped me to develop which techniques I would like to emulate in my documentary. I think this research will thoroughly help me when it comes to my own work. I have noticed in many of the documentaries that I’ve watched that they have done interviews while on the move. As our documentary is going to be based around action I think this technique will help to maintain action.

As well as creating and developing my Yola page I was also tasked with developing marketing ideas for our documentary. One of the main ideas I was tasked with was developing the poster designs. For this I looked at several ideas. One of my ideas was taking classic superhero logos such as the superman or batman and replacing part of it with the title of our film. I thought this would be a good idea as it would be instantly recognisable and related to superheroes. I also developed another idea which was superheroes performing every day, mundane activities such as waiting for a bus or walking through the supermarket. These would be still images with the title of our film on it somewhere. So I had an idea of how these would work I drew out each of these idea, scanned them into my computer and then drew around them on MS paint so I had a clear understanding of how the posters would work. These would become one of the main promotional tools for our project.

On Wednesday 14^th December, we as a group gave a presentation which we were supposed to sell our documentary idea. We tried to make our idea as interesting as possible while keep alot of the methodical information within it. My role within the presentation was talk about the synopsis of the film, discussing the promotional material and to talk about the moral grey area of real life superheroes. In the Q and A session afterwards, we were told that we focused too much on the methodical side and we should added more substance about our documentary. So we have taken this advice on board. But we also got some positive feedback about our idea which makes us positive.

Overall, as a group we have worked well together which is key importance. We did have interruptions such as a new member joining the group making us a group of seven but we worked through these things to become a really close group always in contact with each other and always knowing what we should be doing.  These group meeting allowed us to discuss any issues we were having and allowed to talk freely about our ideas for the documentary. In these meetings I became a source of knowledge for the documentary as it was my idea and I had researched into the topic so thoroughly. So any questions about the real life superheroes were directed at me.

Within the module, we learnt a lot about the technical things as well as theory. We learned how to do such things as how to use 450 D, the 550 D, how to edit jpeg and RAW files and how to edit in final cut pro. The camera became key in doing our photojournalism projects and the 550 D will be useful when it comes to filming our documentary. The RAW file editing was useful for the photojournalism essay and will be useful when we edit pictures for the documentary. Final cut pro will also be extremely useful when we come to the post production stages of our documentary as we will be able to edit it professionally.

This project has really shown my strengths and weaknesses. I know that I work well as a group, able to listen to ideas but voicing my opinion where I feel it is needed. I also know that I am willing to help in any way possible to make other people’s lives easier. My weakness however is a lack of organization and I hope to rectify this in the next semester though so I can become a more valuable member to my group. I also wish to continue developing my photography skills as I feel like I still have a lot to learn about photojournalism.