Media Studies - Documentary Production Process

This blog post, written by me (Maxi), details the process of filming our documentary. The details of the shoot were written by me, however all images were taken and compiled by Nayana.

The production and filming of our documentary took place across 5 different days, over the span of roughly 2 weeks. Here you will be able to see the details and process of each day of filming that we had. I was not present for days 2 until 4 of shooting since I was in a different country, but still gave my inputs and helped out with some troubles that they had with making decisions on how to film the shots I had detailed in the screenplay I wrote.

Day 1

On the first day, we decided to film our first scene, which was a scene of me and Timo arguing about the cast of our documentary and the unclarity of the people we were interviewing. We wanted to get this scene done first as I would be leaving to a different country shortly after and wanted to alleviate the process of filming the scenes we had to take once I got back. 

We shot this scene on Timo's iPhone camera as the idea was to have us being secretly recorded. Thus, we didn't want to have the high quality of an actual camera, and instead used a phone camera instead which would make more sense. We had several attempts of filming this scene as we were interrupted multiple times by other students wandering into our shoot. However after around 6 takes we got the shot we wanted and wrapped up. 

Day 2

We started shooting with the actors who played the Dave characters on this day. The first 2 Dave's we started with were Muscle Dave and Happy Dave. Here we can see the equipment that we used to shoot the interview and montage scenes, which were Timo's Sony A7III Camera, A tripod, and a RØDE VideoMic. While I was away, I had helped in providing insight as to how some lines in the screenplay should be read by the actors, as it was a bit unclear on what emotions the actors should be trying to portray. I then told them how I wanted the lines to be said, and everything else went smoothly.

Muscle Dave

Happy Dave

Day 3

On this day we shot the scenes of Creepy dave and Softboy Dave. We used the same equipment as the previous day and had no problems. All the actors were able to work well with us and we got all the shots we wanted efficiently and effectively. 

Creepy Dave

Softboy Dave

Day 4

On day 4 we filmed all the scenes with Player Dave. This included his interviews and his montage of getting rejected by all the girls that he claimed would "fall for him instantly" in his interview. To get the actors who would play the girls Player Dave tries to hit on, we asked friends of ours who were still at our school at the time of the shoot if they wanted to play a character in the documentary we were shooting. We then explained to them what they had to do and the lines they should say. This ended up being very successful with all these extra actors being able to understand what we wanted them to do and play their roles well.

Day 5

On our final day of shooting, since I was back in Bali, we decided that we could finally shoot the leftover shots that we needed from the first few scenes of our documentary, that required me and all other actors to be present. Along with that we also filmed the scenes for Not Dave, for which we also had asked friends of ours to play as extras who would be in Not Dave's shots. We also took the thumbnail pictures, as well as the selfie that Happy Dave mentions during his scene. Again, all went according to plan and we were able to get all the scenes we needed with our actors.

Self Reflection: 

All in all, I believe that the whole shooting process had little to no errors, other than the fact that schedules were constantly clashing and getting all the Daves together proved to be quite hard. However the filming process itself went very smoothly due to a variety of factors including the teams great chemistry, our good relationship with all the actors making it very easy to deliver directions and for them to understand what they need to do, and effective management skills that helped us in being able to get all the shots we would need and want. Theres little I would change and want to do differently in following projects for this area, however it would've been better if we could have coordinated with all our actors better and create a proper shooting schedule that we could share and use with all of them.