Unit 31 (Task 4): Whoever controls the media controls the mind

Evaluation

Today we presented our social action and community media video 'Educating Granddad' to four people from the college who had come to judge it for the equality and diversity competition. At first I was worried about what their reaction to the video was, I didn't know If we had covered enough points however the judges loved the video. They were really impressed with the quality of the video and the points that it covered, they praised the way we had written about and addressed really sensitive topics. After seeing the video they expressed a great deal of interest in showing the video around college and using it for equality and diversity competitions, obviously this made myself and the team very proud as the college had recognised all the hard work we put into the video. As well as this we uploaded the video to YouTube and shared it on all of our social media platforms to try and reach as many people as we could with it. The feedback from the college, tutor, peers and people online has been overwhelmingly positive about this project and I think people believe the video can help insight a change in peoples mind sets about mutual respect and tolerance in and around the college and hopefully further students understandings of British values. As well as the college wanting to use our video to help educate other students we also won the 1st place prize in the equality and diversity competition winning £150 for the group.


I think that the project went well and while there were a few hiccups in the process the finished video was a great success. In the pre production process things got off to a slow start, at first we struggled to come up with a unique idea for a video that could explain all of the points we needed to cover but also be entertaining. As a full class before we were assigned our individual jobs we sat around and brainstormed many ideas for what our video could be, in the end we came up with a sit-com styled conversation around a table. The story we came up with is that there is a family enjoying a quiet day in with their Granddad when all of a sudden he airs some politically incorrect views, the family then educate granddad (hence the name) on why his views are wrong and how he should be more tolerant and understanding towards people of different; races, cultures, sexuality's and ethnicity's. I was project manager and during the pre production process this meant I had to assign jobs for everyone one to do, I put Kane and Chloe in charge of writing the script for our idea, as well as this Jess and Matty helped edit the final draft of the script. The first issue we had with writing this was that it came across too serious and we felt the viewers would not retain much interest in it, over time we eventually came up with a script that was more light hearted and that handled the subjects in a friendlier way. A bigger issue we had was getting cast, we knew we would need a racially diverse cast to improve the credibility of the video. Unfortunately for us the acting class that we usually use as our pool of talent there is not many people of different ethnicity's, this became an issue as it meant we did not have a lot of people to choose from. In the end we got around our casting issue and managed to find someone who would fit the part. Another issue we had was that we put Adam in charge of location, this wasn't a problem at first as he managed to get us his girlfriends house for us to film in however 1 day before the shoot Adam told us he had an exam at the time we were scheduled in. Obviously this annoyed everyone as at first as it meant we might not be able to use the house and we already had everything schedule in but luckily Adams girlfriend was okay with us coming round with out him.


During the pre production process I think that I did a good job project managing my team and making sure that everything got done. As a PM my duty was to over see the production process so I delegated jobs and managed my team making sure that everything was in place before filming, I did research and over saw the writing of the script before putting together a team to work on the production process, I assigned myself as director, Matty as DOP, Jess as AD and Ben as boom.


Shooting went well, we got all the footage that we needed and our only main issue was that we ran over a little. The team worked very well together on set and everyone pitched in with ideas. Myself and Matty worked closely and collaborated on what shots we wanted and how we wanted to shoot everything. Being critical I would say that we could have worked a little faster and we may have spent to much time coming up with shots which may have slowed us down. In the end after our many discussions about shots and which shots would be best we finally got finished.