Personal reflection in the editing stage (post-production period)

Our documentary video has roughly been finished. But i was disappointed of it. 

Though we were organised and made sure we filmed every week, we actually didn't know or were not clear what we aimed to do each time. If you go through all the raw footage you will find we sort of intended to do a simple interview based documentary and what we have finished now is actually one conventional interview-plus-cutaway documentary. 

i listed footage of these themes:

Ren singing in stammer park (acted up)

Ren doing busking in the Laines and royal pavilion park. (acted up)

Ren editing his music albums at his laptop.(doing hip-hop rap)

Ren cooking in his kitchen. (acted up)

Ren going to a shop.

Ren doing yoga. (acted up)

he acted in a lot of footage so there is not a sense of the actual illness. In the production process, what we did was to contact him and ask if he could do the above things and then he said yes and then we filmed. so from the beginning we didn't let things spontaneously happen as they would. what i thought we should have done was to ask him to call us whenever he felt he was doing something to do with his condition M.E. say for example when he would visit a practitioner. but unfortunately, he has recovered already so theoretically there was nothing special about him anymore as he is currently just a person leading a normal life, passionate about music (which remains the only element we have known that is special about him). we can no longer capture any shot showing he lives as a real patient. but i thought we could still try to dig down to find out there must be something in his current life that reflects the fact that he was once a patient.This process would have taken a long time and what was critical was that we needed to spend more time with him. But due to a lot of reasons, (plus my group members thought it was not a good idea to take up so much time of him. maybe they were right as it would be unfair and we didn't plan to have budget to pay for him to keep him with us more). we could only see him a few times (this is one of the restraints of student project). and the footage we got of him doing above things doesn't make a good story. because the relation between these footage of themes is unclear. it was quite plain and you cannot say one group of footage leads to another group. they didn't happen. there were not cause and effect relation. what we have done was fine but i thought what we could have done was to chill with him and find out what is his current life like now and in what situation he often feels again that he was once a patient. we need to find out what's in his life happening now that is to do with M.E. 

In the finished video you will see we relied heavily on interview (talking head )because the rest of the footage didn't make good story themselves alone and we didn't know what's good story about him that we can film. I know in the interview his story in the past really sounds good but it is such a shame we cannot visualise the story. documentary is after all a visual medium and now i feel in our video there is no highlight to be 'looked at' and his story could have just been edited in an audio podcast i guess it would still be a success. 

the filming didn't go the way i wanted it to go and i don't know if the communication with Ren was in a different direction things would change. 

there is something else i wanted to complain about the course. we were not taught clearly how a student, short film should be different from those feature documentary film. we were given the viewings of lengthy documentaries in industry usually up to 90 mins long. the production approaches between short and long films are obviously disparate. some approaches cannot be fully applied in short documentary. it is fine now as we produced only an 8 min documentary so without enough visual evidence of Ren's being a patient the video still looks fine but i really hope tutors can give us some guidance about what a good student project should look like. this reminds me that we were shown twice master year student's film of 6 mins that was helpful. 

maybe i am assessing my work comparing it with those masterpiece so the video seems to be weak. but i know now the efforts we should put in. and about the currently accomplished version i could only say we have tried our best and some budget approach might help and maybe it should have been a longer film.