Documentary Project

For the documentary project we are required to work in groups of six. For this project, I will be working as Producer, with Noah Chebouli as Director, Alex Kentfield as Camera Operator, Alex Potter as Sound - Recordist, Oliver Guy as Sound- Editor and Saul Allerton as Editor.

Since being introduced to the new documentary module on Thursday, as a group we have all exchanged contact details and been communicating with one another to arrange meetings. We have held two successful group meetings since, where we have been starting to discuss early ideas, researching current news articles and developing our concept.

After doing some joint group research on the Liverpool Echo website on Thursday afternoon, as a group we managed to narrow down our findings to two newspaper articles that caught our attention in terms of thinking about the benefits of creating a documentary based on their individual subject matters. We also discussed another idea that we had previously thought about and looked into, and we discussed the pros. and cons. of using each story as a main focus for our documentary.

 

 After discussing this further and researching each story again individually, we agreed as a group that the idea we felt strongest about and that seemed the most current and original was the closure of the Vinyl Emporium record store concept. As a second idea to also pitch on Thursday, we chose the Street Art concept over the Public Transport idea, as we felt as a group that more could be achieved visually with it, and that our public transport idea was heading more in the direction of a short film narrative rather than a documentary.

Taking on the role of  Producer, over the weekend I have managed to successfully get in contact with The Music Consortium, an Event Management, Event promotion, Crew Management and Artist Management company based in Liverpool, who also used to own the Vinyl Record Shop in Liverpool city centre that has now been closed down. The news article that we found discusses the fact that the store is now selling all of it's stock on eBay, which grabbed our attention as we thought about how the contrast between the age of a record, as a valuable collector's item, and online auctioning sites such as eBay could create an opportunity for an interesting documentary film to be made. I have made arrangements to speak to the previous owner of the store and The Music Consortium, Spike Beecham, on the phone on Monday, and to meet up with the rest of the group on Sunday afternoon to discuss our concept further after this. We have had a look at the news article which we originally found as a group, and I have highlighted some key facts that we discussed and found to be of interest:

 

We agreed on some questions to ask, and a few key areas to research further into, including how the store stands now and what state it is in (we discussed that if it was a completely empty and bordered up this could actually enhance our creativity and communicate our idea more strongly) and where the large collection of records is currently stored. As Producer, I am also going to discuss this with Spike on the phone tomorrow, and try and gain access to some key locations and possibly try and arrange some contributors for interviews.

We have all agreed that communicating with one another and keeping in contact is vital during our production, and so we have agreed to meet up every day this week, in order to all contribute towards our final pitches and treatments ready for Thursday and also keep updated with the latest happenings and the progress of our production.