Liverpool Documentary - Analysis

The edit is finally finished and I feel we've produced a fairly strong piece that gets it's message across effectively. We spent a while deciding on the title of our piece but concluded on calling it 'Music of the Streets'.. indicating how the streets of music are full of life and vibrancy from the street performers they hold.

In the end, we reared away from the proposed council legislation action they were planning on putting forward onto the streets of Liverpool, and instead focused more on the buskers/performers themselves; where they came from, how did they get into what they do now, what motivates them, their reactions from the public, and how they generally feel they contribute to the community.

The reactions we got from the public were of great interest, most, if not all of the interviews we got were all in favour to the street performers, however unfortunately, we talked to one of the members of public, and she described how one of the 'brass bands' played continuously throughout the afternoon in the same spot, right outside her office of work. This proved annoying for her and said they were meant to move on after 40 minutes or so... however she didn't want to be on camera so we lost her opinion on the 'busking scene'. Perhaps we could have interpreted what she said on-screen via narration or titles, but then again I don't think this would have fit properly at all with the feel we were going for.

As you can see, we managed to collect more than a few of the public's opinions on the performers.

It is also worth mentioning now that we suffered from some severe grain throughout most of our shots.. we checked the camera and thought it was all fine, however we couldn't tell on viewfinder, and then until we were back in Sheffield, that in fact the gain was not adjusted properly. This was one of those things that we just had to deal with, and will be corrected for next time. Unfortunately I've never had the proper hands-on experience myself with the camera as I've usually starred in the films myself, so i was unsure to whether i had adjusted all the settings correctly. But we checked, thought it was okay, but unfortunately not. Despite the graininess, i don't think it deters you away from the shots and what's happening on-screen.

Johnny Walker, the busker we found and arranged an interview/meeting time with, provided to be a success, as we were able to gather every shot we wanted, from close-ups of the guitar case, to his performances and interview. Throughout our piece we decided to keep referring back to Johnny Walker and what he had to say, this is also apparent to the band of three we interviewed. By doing this, we were able to shuffle around the interviews we had, with the cutaways and performances, and then refer back to the interviewees instead of having a 2-minute straight interview on-screen.

Another aim of our piece, was to portray the buskers as more 'human', rather than people who are lifeless, playing day in day out without communicating with the people personally. I feel we achieved this successfully by the responses we got from the interviews, and perhaps most of all, some of the natural shots I managed to collect whilst filming.. this ranges from one of the buskers looking at his bag of sandwiches, to one of the guys fiddling around with his guitar strings. These proved to be personal, interesting but subtle shots that add a sense of 'charm' to the piece.

The cons of our final piece I believe could include the following -

- Our piece perhaps gets to a stage where it drags on for a while (around the 3:30-5:00) mark; after a good start, with the music in the background, and the relatively steady-fast paced editing, the piece slows down and lacks density. If we were to do it again, I would have taken Esther's advice and gathered more 'up close and personal' shots, rather than the amount of shots I got that were perhaps too far away from the subject. However, saying that, the director (or lack of) never decided what shots to have, and instead left it down to us to decide.

- The obvious grain on more than half of the shots.

The pros of our piece I feel include -

- The vast amount of footage we gathered from the days we were in Liverpool, we are also going to make a longer version of our documentary to send it to Johnny.

- The interviews themselves from the buskers and public, who provided us with more than enough content to create an interesting piece.

- The combination of long to more up-close shots, with the cut-aways and time-lapses we have on-screen.

Overall I feel we created a fairly strong piece that is interesting enough to keep the audiences entertained and informed.

Liverpool Documentary - Editing

Here are some shots of the editing process we went through to achieve our final piece.

In this shot, we had to alter the sound levels by finding the 'base' sound, lowering it and applying it to the whole of the sequence; this cut out any unwanted background noises and made the foreground noises easier to hear.

This is one of the shots i really like; the way he sat against a blank wall. I positioned the camera in a way that expresses and perhaps shows connotations of loneliness and solitude. - How the performer is against the blank slate, it provides signs of how perhaps some of these performers are lonely, it's a lonely lifestyle to life?.. combining these images with ones of a band who are willing to talk for ages, we can create different views/opinions on how street performers are portrayed.

Liverpool shot list

I created a brief shot list for Liverpool before we went, however deciding on the day to what other shots we needed proved much easier and effective.

Back from Liverpool!

We returned from our trip to Liverpool with heaps of footage, plenty of interviews, cutaways, time-lapse footage, performances and more! The trip proved to be a success as we spent the whole of tuesday scouting even more locations and filming.. however we suffered a rocky start/set back. The first few performers/buskers we asked were either rude to us or not interested at all, this provided us with a slight set-back and made us wonder if we were going to get hardly any footage on the day at all..

But luckily, we came across our first busker who has happy be interviewed. Me being the cinematographer, deciding we should collect long shots of buskers playing from a distant, to gather a 'perspective' on the performer with the public, as well as medium-close ups, 'natural' shots off the performers, cutaways and more. Unfortunately some of the members in our group did not fulfill their role whatsoever, so me (and a few others) had to jump in and cover their role.

Liverpool Documentary - The Planning Stage

When we learned about the trip to Liverpool to film a documentary, I was looking forward to the wide variety of opportunities to film whatever we wanted there. But then we discovered in the brief that our documentary had to be based upon/around a news article significant to Liverpool itself..

We looked around on the net as a group, found possibilities from football, to the docks and graffiti. However we stumbled upon a news article that seemed both interesting, and an article that could be constructed into making a documentary.. the article we came across was from the 'Liverpool Echo' local newspaper website.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2011/11/19/liverpool-city-council-planning-to-charge-buskers-100252-29801770/

The council are planning to charge buskers to play on the streets of Liverpool, and apparently other cities and towns across the country may be following suit. The buskers will be required to hold a permit to be able to play, and in some cases may be allocated times and days to where they're 'allowed' to play that week.

This proved to be a greatly interesting article that allowed us to create a documentary on. Our aims were to portray a positive image towards busking, combining interviews from both the public and the buskers themselves. To portray a more 'human' side to busking, rather than the public seeing them as a more robotic, 'lifeless' figure on the streets of Liverpool.

Using this idea as the ground base, we were then able to discover a more well-known busker named Johnny Walker, who'm in fact is in talks personally, with the council themselves about the legislation that may be going ahead sometime this year. He offered a brilliant viewpoint from the busker's perspective to the council's perspective. He even managed to gather a statement for us from the council about what they're planning to do.. however this is after attempting to contact the council personally about the legislation but getting no reply.

Our second idea for the documentary project, was to focus around the statue of a vandalised priest, one of which Banksy (the infamous and controversial graffiti artist) placed a mosaic slate in front of the priests' statue's head in the national museum of Liverpool. This article allowed us to again, use our ground base to build upon, perhaps exploring Banksy's art throughout the city, and expanding into other areas of art, for example street art, graffiti etc..

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/multimedia/arts-and-culture/video/2011/12/15/national-museums-liverpool-s-reyahn-king-on-banksy-s-cardinal-sin-at-the-walker-art-gallery-100252-29960047/

After pitching our two ideas in front of our class we finalised on the Busking idea, as it proved to be a more interesting, entertaining and flexible idea.