My main role within the group was that of advertising and promotion towards our documentary. I began such a role by creating prototype logos, poster and flyers. On top of this I was in charge of managing the group’s facebook and twitter accounts posting constant updates of the group’s progress within the build-up to production. I also created the group a youtube channel as a means of broadcasting any material we made available to everyone on our social media websites. Due to this New Media Applications was a page on our Yola website which I was in complete control over as it reflects all promotion and marketing strategies created by the group towards our documentary idea.
The wider our development grew in regards to our final documentary idea, the more unique my strategies became in terms of marketing for our documentary. I was aided in such duties through the help of the assistant advertising promoter, Jess Massey. Such radical promotional strategies included creating a QR Code which links viewers directly to the groups mobile Yola, soon to be WIX website, which is available on any smart phone.
Such a modern strategy I feel has and will continue to work very effectively towards our promotion as it will appear on every piece of transitory advertising the group produce and acts as a very quick gateway to a matter of fact break down of what both the group and the idea for our film is all about.
The other piece of creative advertising material I constructed was that of producing an interactive webisode online which acts a teaser alongside the promotional video for our documentary. The webisode is one of many to be realized on the build-up to our film. In regards to the group’s documentary proposal which took place in week 12, the above was the sections within the presentation which I focused heavily up on.
I feel that my contribution towards the group was that of a very satisfactory level. I brought forward a lot of very strong and extremely plausible ideas for potential documentaries. An example of this is the rock documentary idea entitled ‘A Cut Throat Industry’. I developed the idea for the film as well as bringing forward the appropriate contacts such a documentary would require who at the time expressed interest in taking part. Due to this I allocated myself in charge of the page within our Yola website entitled further research on specific topics which gives an overlay of the group’s progression towards a final documentary idea broken down weekly. Upon this I would upload conversations I had had with various primaries so as to display a clear understanding of how our overall ideas were growing and forming.
Ideas which I deemed potentially strong but weren’t originally mine, I improved upon and progressed again finding appropriate and reliable contacts on the way. An example of when this happened was within the documentary idea of historical re-enactments. I had arranged two separate primary subjects who were very keen to take part but as the documentary did not have a different enough spin in terms of standing it out from all work of a similar nature before it, the idea was regrettably put aside indefinitely. Behaving in such an assertive way in terms of research towards a final idea, I feel I instilled confidence in my group as they knew that by acting in such a way we were sure to find a very effective and sturdy idea.
If every single member of the production group had acted in the same way, bar one person who had the same attitude as myself, we would have achieved a strong idea for our film a lot earlier than we did thus allowing us more time to develop ideas, concepts and themes as opposed to a week before the pitch. A lot of such a late time of making the final decision for our documentary came down to our primary subjects not being as available as we had first hoped or our ideas not being quite strong enough to work well as mentioned previously. However a lot of it was the majority of the group not bothering to research into documentary ideas or find promising contacts. As a result it was left to me and the other group member to do all the work in that respect.
Despite such issues, I felt that the group had an overall dynamic working style. A lot of this was due to the fact that all members are good friends with each other and as a result we bonded more comfortably than a lot of other groups within our year. I feel such a factor reflected in a positive aspect within our work.
In regards to the work I created in terms of analysing various documentaries, such an aspect of my overall research proved to be very useful. This is because it helped me greatly gain a strong idea of common aesthetic structures as well as overall themes associated with different documentary genres and styles. Studying the various modes and genres was also very helpful. As a result of this, when creating our own ideas for potential documentaries, I took large inspiration from some of the films I looked at and attempted to lightly apply certain aspects of them to my own.
A perfect example of such an occurrence can be found within my pitch for the rock documentary ‘A Cut Throat Business’. After looking carefully into the ‘rockumentary’ God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, when I came to developing my own film with the music industry consisting of a key component, I felt confident that it was achievable as I was aware of important factors necessary.
All the research I conducted on the Yola website in regards to work within critical reading reviews or photo journalism, I carefully chose to look closely into the other readings as they were all topics which I personally found to very fascinating and intriguing. An example of this can be found in my work on studying into animadocs. Since my research, I have found myself a lot more open minded to expressing a variety of concepts in different mediums to convey reflect documentary ideas, providing they are in context.
