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.
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