BHARAT PILLAI 1138500 ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AND EDITOR

The following is a document which analyses the role played by me and activities undertaken by the production team named A Reel Slice who are second year Media Production students. Being the Assistant Director in the group my cardinal job was to strike a rapport with the primary of the documentary who is Chris Todd, the man who tried to cross the Irish Sea in a giant Hamster Wheel. My fellow group members had met Chris during a presentation in November and they had scheduled a meeting at his home for further discussions. I went to his place along with two other group members, one of them being the producer asked him the required questions while I filmed this interview using a Cannon 550D, excerpts of which has been used in our Media Storm trailer. Chris was cordial enough to give us a lot of his archive footages and photographs. All of us feel that maintaining a good relation with the primary is always helpful for the group. We all agreed to the fact that the Media Storm trailer has to be light hearted which would disclose information about how he conceived the whole idea of crossing the Irish Sea with a giant hamster wheel, his failure and his and his ambition to do it all over again, this was well received by our fellow students and tutor. We firstly created a Facebook group which would enable us to share and discuss information and also schedule our production meetings. Later on in the production process such social networking sites including twitter was used to promote our Production Team as well as the films that were making. The Photojournalism Project and the Technical Practice assignment helped everyone including me to get very familiar with the DSLR, which were being used first time by us. My photo essay included taking photographs inside a projection room in a cinema ain

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Southampton; the main aim was to make the look and the feel of the colour palette to be very contemporary. As far as the content in the website is concerned I was given the responsibility of the data base documentary tab which involved me posting about all the rules and regulation that are involved while producing a documentary, by researching for this I gained in depth knowledge about the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, the Channel 4 Compliance Procedures and also about the intellectual property rights. This particular page also gives informs the readers about what exactly is a copyright. Studying this module opened all together a new dimension to me who did not have great opinions about documentaries at all. This gave me the opportunity to watch and review world class documentaries such as (i) Baraka (1992) which is a ninety six minute wordless documentary comprising of a series of beautiful images from twenty three counties around the world (ii) Waltz with Bashir (2008) is a brilliant animadoc from Israel set against the back dro of the Lebanon War which reflects on evasion of responsibility and selfreflection (iii) Centaury of the Self (2002) which is a documentary series using the Expository mode and voice of god raises questions on how corporations controlled people for decades using Sigmund Freuds theories. All these documentaries dealt with wide range of topics ranging from spirituality to, sexuality of nuns to human consumerism to war. The New Media Application tab was also completely designed by me it gives the viewers, information of all the major film festivals happening around the world sorting it out by the country, location, and the kinds of film festivals they host and hyperlink to their website .It also has a widget which displays the University of Winchesters annual documentary film festival called U-Doc. I have also reviewed two educational articles in the Critical Reviews tab named Documentary in Digital Era which is a two piece essay written by Sharon Lin Tay and Dale Hudson and Aesthetics in Realism which is an article written by Ohad Landesman

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discusses the ways in which digital cinematography contributes to the challenging interplay between reality and fiction in the new hybrid documentary form. In the ten minute presentation my role was to speak about the legalities that were concerned while making this documentary of ours as I was also in charge of writing about the rules and regulations in our website, I made it a point to let everyone know that even though he has let us keep all our recordings of his journey as a copyright of our production company all the archive footage and photographs that we will be using in the documentary or its promotion is owned and also of the fact that our documentary does not involve anything dealing with crime, violence, religion or even minors. According to policy number eight of Ofcom rules we have decided to keep his personal information hidden. The whole production process went of smoothly with just issues of lack of punctuality from everybodys side .In this semester I have been able to imbibe great amount of knowledge as the subject area was quite vast. I was really fortunate to have everybody in the Reel Slice Team as my co-group member. Despite all our negligible issues we have been able to work wonderfully as a unit overshadowing each others weaknesses. I personally believe that I have performed all the duties assigned to me with dedication and diligence Im confident that the amount of hard work everybody has put will surely reflect on our work.