OUAN501 - Practical, Planning

As a practical piece a lot of the work before I could start creating the actual piece was in the planning. During this stage I had to make key decisions for the final piece, such as a timeframe to contain the documentary within, topics to discuss and other parts of footage that I wanted to include from various news broadcasts over the past few decades and the different game footage to include. It's during this early stage that I wrote the script ready for recording and arguably recorded the narration before the production process began. This task quite quite daunting at first because I had all of these different elements that I wanted to include and needed to work on indivudually before bringing them together, so it was difficult to pin point a way to start or what to prioritise. Ultimately it came down to multitasking and undertaking a variety of tasks at once. I found myself planning certain elements as they came into my head and undertaking certain aspects simutaniously because they had to match up in some respects. For example, when I was writing the script, after I had written a section I looked for videos and sourced footage that could work well with that particular section of the script. This was also because, after the script was complete I didn't want to have to go back through each section and source videos. This in my opinion was a more efficient and effective way of collecting material as it was also relevant to my thoughts at the time and I may have misinterpreted what I wanted to convey visually if I had done it at a later date.

One of the most difficult things about the preparation of my practical piece was that I needed to take everything I had learnt and researched over the past few months and condense it down to around 3 minutes of narration time and 3 to 4 minutes of footage. During the process I was concerned that the documentary wouldn't be entertaining as well as informative, from this perspective I wanted to make sure that the audience remained engaged. The visuals would help this but I was hoping to be able to sequence everything together in such a way that it was interesting but the information was relayed in a specific way to the audience. When I'm watching a documentary or a piece an informative video the visuals are fast paced and a lot of examples are given. This makes the concept that's being communicated or taught, much easier to understand and engage with - this is what I will be attempting to do in my practical.