Professional Practice - Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation:

Research:

The research I produced for this unit was not my best, this was due to the fact that I struggled with fully understanding what we were meant to research for this unit. I managed to produce so key points in me fully understanding how this style of work experience works. So during my research, I decided to look into freelancing and how self-employment works, with that I found out a lot of useful information in some pros and cons when it comes to freelancing. With this new knowledge, I can now start to look for by myself and not having to go through the university to help me. Another aspect of my research that was key in me understanding how to construct and produce a promotional video was that I looked into how to create a promotional video. I managed to find some tips for when it comes to producing a promotional video. I have never attempted to create a promotional video, so when it came to the research I knew I needed to look into that and the tips that I found helped open my creative mind. There were a lot of aspects that I never considered until I looked at these tips, the main tips that really stumped me as to why I never thought about it was tip two and three (choosing a direction & setting a tone). Without looking at these tips I would've just gone into the shoot with the plan of just getting silky smooth shots and when it comes to the edit we'll just put the clips in time with a random song. However, if we were to do this it would've meant nothing to the audience and they would not have learned anything new about the club's hospitality areas.

If there was anything I could've done better during the research stages of the project is to look more in-depth in other promotional videos. I only really looked at the three I analyzed in another blog, and I did look into their styles and the way they constructed their promotional videos. Normally, when I look at other work I get influences from their work, but in this project, I never found an influence to look at their work. This had a massive effect on my motivation as nothing seemed to click with me.

Pre-production/Planning:

The planning and pre-production stages of the project went very smoothly, with us communicating well with our employer and getting all correct health and safety, and risk assessment forms signed off in quick succession, leaving our group to have plenty of time to think about what to do. We were sent over a shot list from Gillingham explaining what sort of shots they're looking for and they left us plenty of freedom to think of other shots, however, we never really added to the list Gillingham gave us. We never went off to create a storyboard or script for this promotional video, which penultimately resulted in us struggling with production and pre-production. Without these scripts and storyboards, the promotional video started to look like a series of clips with music over the top, which meant it would lack emotion which wouldn't attract anyone. So what our group needs to do in future projects like this is to have more team meetings where we can discuss the script and storyboards so that the projects would have a clear direction.

Another aspect of the planning that could've been improved was that we originally planned to have two filming days for this project and was told by Gillingham that we'd have full access to everywhere. However, on the second shoot, there were a few rooms we could not enter due to the stadium being a polling station for the UK General Election and in the rooms, and the rooms we were able to get in had immovable objects so we couldn't get a nice clean shot. The fault for the areas being untidy can be blamed for by both parties, our group should have made it clear to Gillingham's representative that all areas must be clean before shoots, however, as a professional club and they want this promotional video more than us, we just assumed that they would've made to rooms tidy as this video represents the club. We also didn't realize that Gillingham would be having Christmas decorations up around the stadium and in my opinion, it wouldn't be truthful to the fans if they were to see all these decorations up, they would assume that the club would be like that all year round when it's not.

Production:

We experienced a lot of problems when it came to the production side of this project and one main reason for filming to be so rushed was due to the fact every time we went to the stadium we would come across a huge obstacle that we'd have to overcome. Every time we went in to film the stadium was filthy and we had to spend some precious filming time to clean the rooms, this resulted in a lot of shots being rushed. Rushed shots meant that when it came to the edit we had a lot of clips that were useless. This led us to have one extra filming day rather than the two we planned. However, like I mentioned before Gillingham didn't tell us that they were hosting polling stations at the stadium, which meant we couldn't film in certain rooms. Another aspect about filming that went really well was the use of the tracking shots, even though we had a few problems with the dolly on wheels most of the shots we managed to pull off really gave the video the silky professional look.

On the other hand, there was a lot of good learning experience I've learned from the filming experience. As I've never filmed a promotional video before I never took a lot of time preparing shots. I think this is because most of the projects I've filmed have been my own and I've been lenient on my skills and allowing little errors to occur. Due to the fact I'm working for a professional football team, I felt like if I were to do a good job with this hopefully it would get other professionals' attention.

Post-production:

With Post-production, I didn't participate physically, but I did have some influence on where Ewan should place certain clips. I've never really been on the post-production side as my skills are more practical and production-based. I know from what Ewan has explained to me that Gillingham was after a roughly 5-minute long promotional video, which is far too long for a promotional video, but this is where we explain to them that having a 5-minute video wouldn't be great and would lose the audience's attention.

Overall this is roughly all I had to do with a contribution for the edit, I tried to give my opinion where I could, but due to the Christmas break and Ewan being the only one with the edit I couldn't help out over Christmas. In future projects, I'll make it my aim to get more involved with the edit and in my own time spend more time understanding more features in premiere pro so when it comes to editing I feel more comfortable with my skills.

Conclusion:

To conclude this entire project I must say that this has been one of the most challenging projects I've worked on. Not because it was massive in scale it was due to the lack of communication between Gillingham and our group. Many times we had to explain scenarios more than once to the Gillingham representative and he was just not understanding us. I believe that Gillingham didn't truly understand that this was not only was a work experience but a university project that we were also getting marked on. Although there were little problems that can easily be improved on like communication, aspects, like storyboarding and scripting together a draft, was silly on our behalf. I have no excuse as to why we never have done it when we've done them in previous projects it just simply slipped our minds. The main thing to take away from this project was the experience and the opportunity to be able to work with Gillingham. I have definitely learned a lot from this project that I will be including in future work.