500 word evaluation

 The film was, I think, a success. At the beginning we had no idea of the story behind the building, shop and those who worked there, and managed to translate their current image and their hopes for the future into our film. I think the film is successful in how it balances being a personal story of Bally, a story about the shop and the clothing industry, and a story about the building and it’s role in the community and it’s recent neglect.

As a team of 3, we were only half the recommended group size for the project. However, I think we worked well as a team, balancing the roles of camera operator, sound mixer and interviewer between us. The size of the group meant we only had one camera operator during unrepeatable shoots such as the tour around the building which was filmed in a narrow window on the only day he was available to film that with us. However, the footage was good, and we went to get static pickup shots of details mentioned in the tour for cutaways, which also broke up the repetitive continuous shot. Being in a small group was a perk for organising shoots, and the easily accessible middle-of-town location of the shop also made going to shoot easy and quick, so we could quickly arrange to go back for pickup shots. We kept in communication with the shop via social media, allowing us to quickly contact them and keep up to date on possible events worth filming at the shop.

I was inspired by Sean Dunne’s The Archive (2009) as it used fairly similar subject matter and was a similar length to ours. The film used interviews and cutaways to tell the story of a man and his collection, whilst we used a similar style in the first 2 minutes (and last 30 seconds), using an interview with Bally and others in the shop and cutaways to different details in the area that link to their speech. 

We knew the style would have to change to document the other abandoned areas of the building, so we donned a shoulder rig, wide angle lens (16-35mm f2.8) and a Sony HVL-LBP hot-shoe light to allow us to illuminate just the subject. I was inspired by Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000), which often harshly illuminated the foreground with the background being kept in complete darkness. 

I liked how in James Marsh’s Man on Wire (2008), most of the film was made up of interviews, and the events of 1974 could be told through interviews and photographs, requiring little footage. We included interview audio over almost the entirety of our film, as this made it personal and you could impose his vision for the building onto it’s current state.

I learnt a lot about making a documentary, as I never had done so before. I learnt a great deal about interviewing subjects, such as getting them to include the question. I learnt a lot about editing documentaries too, such as using the interview audio with cutaways to create meaning. If we were to make it again a slightly larger group would be preferable so as to get more coverage.