The Radio Advert

Last lesson I had a look at Elliott's draft of a radio advert script and re-wrote it with some of my own ideas. I then used an 'Easi-Speak' microphone to record a rough version of the speaking parts that will not be sound clips from the actual documentary. I uploaded my voice recording and put it into GarageBand where I had to triple it up because, although it sounded a reasonable volume through headphones, it was too quiet.


This lesson I have extracted important sound files from our documentary and transferred them onto my memory stick. However. Last lesson I used a MacBook Pro to create the radio advert and everything was absolutely fine. This lesson the MacBook Pros seem to be working at a ridiculously slow pace and refuses to take any faster than an hour to upload the sound clips. Hopefully this will be fixed by next lesson..........

Cutaway Filming

On Tuesday I went out with a camera and filmed a church near school to be used as cutaways. I filmed a few slow angle pan shots that travelled up the front of the church and then filmed it from other sides and different angles. Luckily it was quite a nice day so the sky looked pleasant and not gloomy. These small cutaway shots will be useful for breaking up very long and wordy interviews and making them visually more interesting.

Storyboard

We have finally scanned in our rough storyboard, drawn in pen and ink it reads from left to right.
There are a few blank boxes where we are a little unsure about what to include, but this will be changed as we progress in our editing.

Which Radio Station?

We have decided on BBC Radio 4 as a good radio station on which to broadcast our advert. Radio 4 is a more liberal minded station that broadcasts a huge variety of programmes including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It is a very influential radio station that would be most likely to include a controversial subject such as our documentary's in it's schedule. It also caters to people of our target audience - mature and open minded.

GarageBand

GarageBand is a program used primarily to create and elaborately edit music. However we shall be using it to make a 20 second long radio advert with sound taken straight from the documentary.
We have been given an overview of how GarageBand works and luckily it does not seem half as complicated as Final Cut. After a quick group discussion we have already decided that we would like the majority of the advert to contain public opinion because that outlines a lot of what the documentary will be about. There are certain quotes that we have also thought to include that stand out from the main interviews.

We have listened to a radio advert from BBC radio 4 that is a good example for how we should go about setting up ours:

• A introduction
• A few seconds saying when the documentary would be on
• Clips from the actual documentary itself
• Music that reflects the mood and genre
• Accurate volume that remains constant

A few things that we may have to think about is the type of music we would like to use, which so far seems like it might be religious music free from copyright. We also have to consider who we will use to record the voice over. Obviously a voice over would sound better if it was an older voice so we may have to ask somebody from outside of the group to come in and read out the voice over for us.

Editing

We have managed to upload our new footage successfully and without many hiccups. Since interviewing the public we have been using our lessons to edit all of our interviews on final cut express. We have cut it all up into sections depending on which question asked and placed everything into separate 'bins' so that when we go to find anything it is all ordered and easy to find. We have been putting together the beginning of our documentary by creating quick cuts of the public that flick between positive and negative opinions for a dynamic and engaging opening sequence.

Teacher Feedback

A big improvement to your earlier blog! Well done. You have added images to make this visually easier to read as well as more information about your process.

Cutaway Shots

Today we will be going to Streatham High Street to ask members of the public whether they agree with homosexual Christians or not. This will fit in well with our storyboard as it will serve for the beginning parts of our opening scene, in which short cutaways will be used. We will aim to get at least 4 people giving an answer and get a few more just in case we cant use any of the other ones.

Updated:

We just got back from Streatham and we managed to get 7 people to cooperate and answer our question. We faced a few problems, mostly with people not wanting to answer our question, be filmed, or being too busy to (about 6/20 didn't mind being interviewed).

The majority of the people interviewed gave positive replies, only one person said they were against it and one person didn't have an opinion. We have recieved a range of views which will be perfect for our documentary, especially as it is the public answering - and therefore real people with real views.

Things left to do

As we have completed 2/3 of our main interviews, all that is left is for us to complete our final interview, and some additional cutaways. On the 12th we are going to go to Streatham High Street and record a series of everyday people's individual opinions on homosexual Christians.


Our final interview will be with someone who is anti homosexual Christians, so we can therefore present a more balanced set of opinions and document both sides of the argument (which our individual research has shown a good documentary should).

Our pitch

For our final pitch we created a detailed power point presentation that contained bullet points and visuals to help make it interesting. We had notes that we either read from or had memorised so that we were not reading straight from the power point which would have been dull.

We got positive feedback supporting our documentary, which has encouraged us further that our documentary can be a success with additional teamwork and good planning.

Rev Sharon Ferguson - Additional information

After interviewing Sharon, I asked if she would had any additional information we could use in our documentary.

She gave each of us an official LGCM small leaflet, and a booklet created by her which contains very useful information. In terms of our documentary, we can scan and use pages of the leaflet/booklet as cutaway shots which will be insightful for the viewer - and relevant at the same time.

Additionally, she said we could use her appearance on 'The Big Question' freely, which is extremely informative and embedded here:

Music for our documentary

The problem with music for our documentary is that it needs to be relevant to the documentary topic, Christianity. On the websites that Miss Taylor had given us that offer copywrite free music, there where no Christian songs.


There are plenty of Christian rock, soul, rap, and jazz bands I have found on the internet, but all hold the common problem of copyright. It was when I found this website that our problem was solved.


4praise.com offers "the largest collection of free christian music on the web", and most importantly every single song is "offered freely with full permission from the copyright holders."


We couldnt of asked for a more perfect site. I will now begin looking through the music and seeing which is most suited for our documentary.

 

Hallelujah!

Today’s technological problems in school

Today we encountered a number of problems while trying to upload our newly recorded footage onto the media suite computers. With our previous interview, we had already uploaded the footage, however not checked it. While checking today I realised that there was a sync problem with the audio and footage, which caused a number of problems. I googled for a solution and found a number of different ones. We tried each, however it merely created additional problems, like saying the "scratch disk is full". It was frustrating as not only did it mean our original footage had to now be re-uploaded, but our new footage also.

On the plus side, when filming our newest interview (yesterday) we briefly debated weather or not to film over our first interview as we already had it on the computer. It was lucky we chose not to, as if we did the film would now be lost - or at least corrupted to an extent. This has taught us always to keep original footage, as we are never aware of future problems which may arise.

We are currently waiting upon a solution from Miss Taylor, in hope that we can continue to use the iMac computers.

The Questions

In our interview with Sharon and with our interview with Julie we asked similar questions so as to provide two points of view on the same thing. The list of questions below are the ones that we directed at Sharon during her interview:

1. I know you’re a trained reverend, what exactly where the teachings on homosexuality that you received during this training.
2. Did these teachings differ with any teaching you had previously?
3. Do you think that modern Christianity should adapt to modern society’s norms? (Up until 1980’s seen as mental illness but now society has adapted)
4. Do you know quotes that in your view present directly the bibles teaching on homosexuality? Or would you say it’s for a Christian themself to decide.
5. Homosexual conversion therapy is something which has been used more widely in the US than in the UK at the moment, but what is your view on this practice? Some have criticised it as a form of brainwashing.
6. What are your thoughts on church members blessing a civil partnership when there is so much divide on the matter. Is it responsible for a church member to perform a service that another church might totally disagree with?
7. Homosexuality is obviously something which has been around as long as heterosexual relationships. Homosexuals would have been punished for their acts at the time of Jesus. Why wouldn’t Jesus just condemn or condone it?
8. I read that you are in a relationship with another woman, what different reactions have you had to this from different Church members?
9. “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” - Romans 1:26-2 - What is your view on this quote?

Our Second Interview

On Tuesday after school the whole group went along to Bethnal Green in East London by tube to a place called Oxford House. Once there we were greeted by a woman called Sharon Ferguson, a lesbian reverand, who is in her own words "the face of Gay and Lesbian Christians". More importantly, she is a representative of the 'Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement', which has been established for over 30 years. We interviewed Sharon in her office because she was surrounded by artefacts proclaiming her strong religious beliefs.

• We asked her nine set questions that she answered in full with lots of examples and explanations which will make it easy for the viewers of our documentary to understand. 
• We made sure to keep to the rule of thirds by placing Sharon to the right of the frame as her eyes were directed towards the left (where Alex was sat asking the questions, but out of the actual shot). 
• Elliott was the acting camera man and he made sure to zoom in on Sharon's face when she came to an important point to make the shot more intense and personal.
• Unfortunately during the interview our camera ran out of battery and we had to stop to charge it for a while. Luckily Sharon was very nice about it and we had a break for about ten minutes while it charged. 
• While the camera was charging Sharon gave us some reading material on the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement that we could perhaps use in our documentary somehow, either quoting it or filming pages from a magazine we received. 
• We filmed her surrounding office once the interview was over to use for cut-aways and such.

Final Cut Express

During Monday's lesson everybody in the class got a chance to watch countless tutorials regarding the program final cut express. This was an invaluable lesson because we will be using this program to edit our documentary and none of us have ever used it before.

After completing a questionnaire based on what we learnt from the tutorials we ended up feeling a little more confident about this complicated program. When we do begin editing (hopefully on Wednesday) Final Cut Express seems to contain a lot of interesting features to help our documentary seem dynamic, for example a wide range of transitions, which would give our documentary a professional edge.

Our first interview and what we learnt from it

For our first interview Elliott met up with a woman called Julie who is a newly trained vicar. We have now got 17 minutes of straight footage with Julie airing her opinions on various Christian related questions based within a homosexual context.

The interview was conducted at Elliott's house in a room with pale wallpaper so that she stands out. She is seated so as to be comfortable and was asked to answer the question directed at her in her answer so that when it comes to editing we can cut from and to various questions throughout. This will also aid cut-away shots.

The interview was good and definitely usable, but there are some points we will be able to improve upon when doing our next few interviews:

• The framing of the shot could have been better, for example there is a radiator in the corner that is not very visually appealing and a glass of water is half visible which could have been cropped out.
• The lighting in the room was not ideal because of the lateness of the hour and next time we will make the area as bright as possible.

• Julie does not have a very loud voice and although she was asked to project her voice at the camera her answers are still quite quiet. In the future we may like to use a microphone that can be clipped on to the interviewee's shirt. 

For our second interview we have arranged to meet up with Sharon Ferguson, a homosexual reverend who works for the Lesbian and Gay Christians Movement, on Tuesday 3rd October. Sharon Ferguson will be an invaluable asset to our documentary because she has been on television previously, on the BBC's ethics programme 'The Moral Maze' and also 'The Big Questions', so she will be well rehearsed in airing her views.

Teacher Feedback

I know you have done more than this! You have some BASIC information and there is an attempt to include visual images and made this look presentable and easy to read. Your presentation was very good (proficient/excellent). If you had completed this blog, you would have earned high marks.


Lastly, please label your blog entries--and complete drafts. Two of your entries are drafts. I posted one of them, but it is incomplete.

Audience Research

We created a questionnaire to find out information regarding our audience. The questionnaire contained 6 questions about their television preferences and views on homosexuality in the church. 

We put these questionnaires into graphical form to make it easier to read and draw conclusions from.


Note: Please click to make larger! They stretch the page if embedded in their original size. 












Not all the results are posted, however from the graphs shown we can determine that there is an interest in our documentary type and the subject matter. 

Influences

Louis Theroux does controversial documentaries such as the enclosed picture taken from 'The most hated family in America' which we gained inspiration from. For a start, Louis has a very typical technique of creating an unbiased account of both the for and against parties. Secondly, he has a very courteous demeanour when talking to people he does not necessarily like or respect. 

'The most hated family in America' is a documentary about one family in America which is part of a particular type of Christian church that sets out to hate homosexuals. They are presented in a carefully negative light, with the grandmother of the family acting very hostile towards anyone who does not share her view. Unlike this documentary we will not be taking a specific side in the debate and will not present anybody either negatively or positively. 

Pitch and Response

We pitched our documentary idea about gay and lesbian christians to the class. We got lots of useful feedback such as how we should go about presenting our formal pitch. We also got the idea to create questionnaires for people to fill out, so that we can gather more information about our target audience. For example we need to make a powerpoint presentation and make sure that everybody in our group speaks and also include pictures to help maintain focus.

Gay and Lesbian Christians

Our idea for a documentary is to investigate the controversy surrounding gay Christians. This is a sensitive subject that has been in the news a lot and yet skirted around. We aim to provide an unbiased view of the debate that follows homosexuals practicing Christianity.  

Is it viable?

Our documentary has viability because we have access to organisations concerned with our investigation. For example the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement is a UK based charity that holds events every month in London that would be easy to gain admission to. We are in the process of contacting a few of the people involved and are planning on asking for interviews at a later date. This would be invaluable because they would be able to give an opinionated point of view on something they obviously feel strongly about.

One of our group members also knows a gay christian personally who would be happy to air his views for the documentary.

Where would it be filmed?

During our documentary we would like to have a number of cut-aways to footage of churches and have already found a list of churches nearby that are gay friendly. However we would also like to film a few churches that are not so open to homosexual Christians as well as interviewing vicars or priests who disagree also.

As well as churches being relevant to our documentary they will be nice locations to film in because many of them are very picturesque, for example catholic churches which place great emphasis on beauty in statues and stained glass windows.

Who would be the target audience?

Our documentary will not have a very specific target audience, but will be more generally aimed at young adults and above who would be interested in the subject matter.

How would a five minute extract fit into a larger documentary?

We have decided we would like to film a five minute extract starting at the beginning of the documentary because we would like to do a creative opening sequence.

Why would a television channel want to commission our documentary? 

Because the subject is controversial and yet very much relevant to today's society a television channel would want to commission our documentary for its originality and first hand accounts from either side of the debate. As we are not biased towards one opinion or another our documentary will be informative and different to the many others that are out there.