Evaluation of my role during the production of Pocket Money Essay Example

of 'Pocket Money' in the sense that it explained why we feel that students should be able to spend their EMA freely. We did not feel that it was fair on the student who did not receive EMA, so we agreed with the fact that students who are entitled to it should make the most of it.Something we were aware of whilst editing and producing 'Pocket Money' is that documentaries should be subjective to a certain extent seeing that characters in documentaries should be given a voice to achieve verisimilitude and to enable the audience to make their own conclusion based on what they see. We wanted the purpose of our documentary to be represented in a realistic manner so rather than using an animation footage which represents what students spend their EMA on, we decided to use a reconstruction footage.

This enabled our target audience to relate to 'Pocket Money' as the reconstruction represents real people in real life situations.Furthermore during the process of producing 'Pocket Money' another concept we were aware of was that 'documentary is the creative treatment of actuality', as a result, we attempted to apply this theory to our documentary by using a range of techniques from various forms of documentaries such as observational and performative documentaries. Similar to Spike Lee's 'When the Levees Broke' where his absence in the documentary allows the 'black voice' to speak through the victims, journalists, actors etc, we have also tried to simulate this effect by removing the central character form certain sequences. For instance, in the 'How do you spend your EMA?' montage the absence of the central character reassures the audience that

the information about EMA is not just coming from us, the producers, but from the real young people.

The genre of our documentary could also be performative as well observational in that the protagonist plays a committed role in the documentary. In 'Pocket Money' I did not only interview the students but I performed as a character (Post office scene) to create a close relationship between the audience and myself. When Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 911 goes to visit the dead soldier's families we realised that the audience felt attached to Michael Moore, and as a result, we created this effect by presenting the main character as the Hero of the documentary.One sequence which was highly effective in the way we got our message across to our target audience was the contrasting interviews between a male student who was not entitled to EMA and two female students were entitled to EMA.

When the male student was being interviewed we ensured that he was near the interviewer to capture that sense of sympathy between the male student and the audience as well as to put the interviewer in the unfortunate place of the interviewee.In contrast we made sure that there was a distance between the two girls and the interviewer to illustrate to the audience that the central character (interviewer) is not just the hero of the documentary, but that she is also victimised as she feels what the male student is going through. The short cut edits between the words of the male students emphasized this '..

.not receiving EMA has affected me...

' cut to '...EMA has helped me to.

..'From this sequence we wanted our audience

to see the positive side of EMA as well as the negative side. In other words our intention in editing this sequence was to make our audience realise that EMA can be enjoyable when you are entitled to it because you can spend it on whatever you wish clothes trainers etc, however when you are not entitled to EMA you can sometimes face financial struggles. Nevertheless we are not saying that young people who do not receive EMA are unhappy or that students who receive EMA have to spend it on these things, on the contrary, our aim is simply to show what students spend their EMA on and how those who are not entitled to overcome that matter.

In addition, when the male student was asked how he would spend his EMA if he was entitled to it, he stated that most of his EMA expenses would go on education. This shows that our documentary is objective in that we accept everyone's opinions as we are aware that some members of the audience will have different opinions about EMA and how it should be spent.Despite the fact that we had problems with forming the narrative of 'Pocket Money' at the beginning of our production we managed to create structured narrative whilst editing. The documentary begins with central character walking up to the post box, and ends with central character posting the EMA envelope. In this way I think that we have used Propps theory of a constructive narrative effectively to form the equilibrium of our five minute documentary.

On the other hand, if we were to re-shoot the documentary I feel that there were

certain parts of our documentary which we could improve such as different types of interviews, varied camera shots, angles movements etc. Overall, I feel that editing 'Pocket Money' not only enabled me to apply my theoretical knowledge of documentary to the practical side of the unit, but it has given me experience which I can use in the future.