Critical Evaluation
I decided to respond to this brief by doing a moving image documentary on a topic that I am personally interested in. For the Pre Production stage I felt that the best way for me to get a full understanding of coffee culture was to research as much about coffee as I could. I found a few websites that were very useful for me, one of which was the National Geographic Coffee website, this is because it had everything from how coffee was first discovered to how much we spend on the popular drink today. The different articles and websites that I looked at were very helpful as they gave me a better understanding of coffee culture and informed me enough in order to write my own script to use as a voiceover. It also meant that I was able to get some archive footage, which plays a very important role in documentaries, especially for my topic as it meant I was able to show my audience where coffee is grown, how it was discovered and what the coffee plants actually look like.
When it came to the actual filming of my documentary, I chose to get in contact with the manager of Stokes High Street Café in Lincoln. I felt that this location suited my film best as it is a quieter café, I was able to go right in behind the scenes to capture the baristas in action making the different orders. Capturing a wide variety of different shots and angles meant that I could show the audience a new way of looking at a café, as we don’t normally look behind the counter when we order drinks.
As my documentary could only be a maximum of five minutes, I decided not to interview any of the staff at the café, as I would not have been able to fit it all in with the history and discovery of coffee as well. It would have been too much information for the audience to take in, in such a short space of time. I felt that including a voiceover would help the audience to have a better understanding of the history of coffee and how it originally came about. Having a voiceover also means that the footage would flow better overall and be used as a transition.
For the visual elements of my production I looked into the work of Spielberg, by analysing a short clip from the film Munich. Paying extra attention to the use of lighting and camera movements. This really inspired me as I felt that the positioning of the camera in this particular scene was very clever but simple. I then started to storyboard the different ideas that I had so that I could see them in front of me, this also helped me to prepare for filming on location, as it meant that I knew what shots I wanted to achieve. This also meant that I was able to get all of the footage in one shoot as I had carefully planned it out so that I would not waste any time. Overlaying keywords in certain parts of the documentary helps to bring out the main points further and also adds an interesting element for the viewer as they have more visual elements to look at instead of just listening to lots of information.
During post production, when looking for the right soundtrack, I started by looking at different royalty free websites. I knew that I just wanted something simple and instrumental to play in the background whilst the voiceover was playing. Changing the focus of the video with the use of sound, helps to accentuate the different sounds of the coffee machine and also makes it visually more interesting. When editing my documentary I watched a few Starbucks adverts on YouTube, which got me to think more about the length of shots included in my film as I found that having a variety of lengths and shot types, mainly at a fast pace helps to keep the audiences attention a lot more. I also watched another coffee documentary, I found that this particular film was not as interesting as the Starbucks adverts, this is because the shot lengths were a lot longer and the interviews did not really help to provide the audience with much detail.
If I had the chance to make a longer documentary on this particular topic, I would interview a few different people to get their personal opinion on coffee culture and why they think it has become so popular over the years. I would also add an audio clip of customers ordering their drinks. Another visual element that I could possibly add would be a time lapse video of the outside of a café, to help show how many people actually visit a coffee shop.