Form and Style Development

For my project, I am making a video for a school, which is under the branch of Social Action and Community Media. My client, Eaton Primary School, first gave me a brief idea of what kind of video they were looking for, and pointed me in the direction of a video from The Wroxham School. After studying this video, I was able to pick out a few techniques that they had used in the video and implement them into my work as well.

First off, there were interviews with the teachers and the students, and clips of teaching in the classrooms. After seeing these techniques used, I decided to use these in my own piece. I also noticed that they made a conscious effort to match clips together to create a vague narrative structure, for example they’d show one of the children getting interviewed, and would then cut to a clip of that child working in class and interacting with the teacher. One of the main messages in this video, was that they were passionate about letting the children choose their own challenges, and letting them be independent in their work and take control of their own learning. I hope to be able to portray this message in my own video too, by following some of the techniques that the original video used.

Equipment List

Things needed for each shoot:

- 5D Camera
- Tripod
- Sound kit (radio mic/5D mic)
- Notes on ideas for video
- Space for filming - using library at school as well as classrooms

No costumes or props are needed since we are performing interviews with the students as well as a fly on the wall style filming in the classrooms and on the outside grounds.

Music Cue Sheet

Annotated Edit Timeline Screenshots

Assembled all clips together and edited them to the right length. Added some effects to the video such as brightness and contrast and sharpening.

Examples of effects I added to the clips. I added these so that all of the clips would look the same, and none were over exposed.

Camera Rushes Screenshots

Clips of the interviews I did with the children. These are the contents of the 'Eaton Primary' bin as shown in the below picture.

Clips of extra things I filmed, along with the music that I planned to use and titles that I made in Photoshop.

Production Schedule

Recce Checklist

Risk Assessment Form - Eaton Primary School

Filming Day 2 - 06/03/15

I filmed again on the 6th of March, and arrived again at the same time of 10.30 am. This time, I was able to set up my equipment and get started much sooner, as the filming space wasn't being used and there was nothing in the way of quiet filming. I stayed in the filming space and one of the teachers went and collected groups of students from some of the different year groups.

Once we'd finished, I took some various shots of the school and I got the opportunity to capture the choir singing in practice for a school performance. Overall, the second filming day went down without a hitch as I knew securely what I was doing and was confident in setting up my equipment and talking to the children. 

Filming Day 1 - 27/02/15

My first day of filming was on the 26th of February at Eaton Primary School, and we encountered a few hiccups. I arrived at 10.30 and met with the head teacher of the school. We discovered that the space that we were planning to film in was taken up by their book fair, consisting of 3 large trollies full of books. This would be a problem because a lot of the children were interested in looking at and buying the books and there would most likely be a lot of traffic through the area, therefore creating a lot of background noise.

Before we could get down to filming, we had to move the trollies out into a different place in the school which took us around 15 minutes. Afterwards, I had to set up my filming equipment and find a suitable background for the footage. We then walked around the school and asked some of the teachers and students whether they would be willing to join in with the filming. I ended up being escorted around with a different teacher as the head teacher had to leave due to a family emergency.

We successfully filmed 14-16 students, from a few different year groups. I made a technical error when I first started filming as I forgot to turn the microphone on, so we had to make some of the students redo their parts again.

Apart from a few mistakes, the filming went well and I am pleased with the quality of the footage that I was able to obtain.