Question 1:
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
My product is a documentary on child labor. It mainly consists of information against forced child labor. This documentary talks about how child labor is not as bad as it seems and that children should not be forced to work but should not be stopped either. It targets poverty, child labor and child education, the three biggest issues of society. My project talks about how not all children can afford education and that the hard truth is that they have to earn and they have to work to do that in third world countries. This idea came to me one day when I was sitting at a workshop while some people were fixing my car. There was this kid who was extremely skilled and knew how to do everything in the car, even more than the people older than him, over there, without anything else to do, I started thinking about how skilled he is and how we as respectable members of the society pay huge amounts of tuition fee and take around 16-18 years of education after which we can come close to learning skills. From that idea I just tried to add elements to make a script from it. I looked at the codes and conventions of the style of documentary I was about to shoot and tried to follow almost all of them during production. I kept the scene dark and I also put a lot of slow movement in the camera. My product represents 3 main social groups and 2 main social issues. The groups being; people effected by poverty, children who work in workshops and uneducated children. The social issues being lack of education and child labor. My project talks about how not all children can afford education and that the hard truth is that they have to earn and they have to work to do that in third world countries.
Question 2:
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
With a documentary, it is not apparent as to how it can be representing a brand. The brand my documentary was representing was “Technical Education”. As it has been mentioned many times in the documentary, my product is promoting technical education while still degrading forced child labor. A lot of attention to detail was given in on this documentary. Most of my time doing it went towards little details about skill schools, VAT training institutes (some fillers in final documentary, full interview in the first cut). In my documentary (first cut), I have mentioned that children who are working and learning at the same time should not be stopped from working as they are learning skills that help them make their future better, instead they can be given technical education at their workplaces in free time (Also mentioned in first cut). This documentary was promoted a lot just for the sake of getting this perspective about the brand we were promoting into people’s minds.
Question 3:
How do your products engage with the audience?
As a part of pre-production, I had to make a questionnaire about what to do, my main questions were choices between documentary and music video. Since a lot of people who filled the questionnaire were also studying media, they wanted to see something different hence a good percentage of the audience wanted to see a documentary on some social issue. After I was all done with the shoot of the documentary, I tried to edit a rough sequence but I could not figure out where to start. I decided to edit only the individual interviews first. I did that, it took almost 3 days to do but after finishing, I decided to compile that all into the First Cut of the documentary. It came to being 16 minutes long and I sent it to my classmates to review it, Other than that I shared the link on my Instagram and asked people on story polls to review it for me. Almost all the reviews said that it got boring and it needed to be cut down. My audience needed it to be less so I decided to edit again. It took me around 4 days to edit again, After I was done with the editing, the documentary was 5 minutes and 15 seconds long. This was a much better duration and so I decided to make this my final cut. This Documentary was supposed to be distributed on YouTube, Instagram’s IGTV, Facebook and premiered at college. To maximize the circulation of this documentary, I promoted it using Instagram stories, got shoutouts from all my friends and I used Facebook sponsorship for promotion of my documentary.
Question 4:
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
When I decided I would be making a documentary, I knew that I would have to do massive amounts of research to get close to finishing the product. First, I had to research the camera techniques, crossing the pattern of the cameras to put one camera on me and the other camera on the person that was being interviewed. I had to research about three-point lighting, about how a subject is supposed to be lit the proper way. Using a backlight, a fill light and a key light, we light up the background as well as the subject properly while using one light to separate the subject from the background. I also researched about editing styles as well as other documentaries that matched the genre of mine. I mainly used YouTube, google and Wikipedia to do all my research, the best way to research on a certain topic for me was to watch YouTube videos regarding it. I saw demonstrations of cinematography, angles as well as lighting, saw some videos regarding methods of editing and how continuity editing can be used to make the content interesting. Talking about conventions and whether to follow them or break them, my documentary stands in the middle of following and breaking. In some cases, my documentary follows the unwritten rules and in other cases, defies them in every manner possible for example, talking about the production and editing, it falls right in the footsteps of every other documentary, music, sound design, interviews etc. But talking about the concept or the script, my documentary is different as it targets the semi positive aspects of child labor. My documentary explains that if a child has to work, he should work since he learns while working as well. My documentary targets the real issue which is Forced child labor, that needs to be stopped immediately.
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