Evaluation- ‘The Joy of Reading’ Doc

For our Documentary assignment, our group consisting of Ben, Lewis, and I, chose to film our documentary about the topic of corruption and bad ownership in football, with the main story featuring around Reading FC and how in 10 years they have gone from Promotion to the Premier League to a club in crisis due to problems behind the scenes. The main message that we were trying to convey was that these organisations such as the EFL -Governing body of English Football- have to do better when allowing these corrupt owners to take over lower league clubs as well as bringing more awareness to behind-the-scene dilemmas because of the lack of media care to report on the situation when it isn’t one of the “big teams”, therefore a lack of traction and consequently a lack of sympathy and public knowledge.

Due to me being an avid Reading FC supporter, I already had quite a bit of in-depth knowledge on the situation(s). We decided to use this to our advantage as one of the first ideas that we came up with was to interview me and my perspective as a Reading fan growing up in the last 10 years. I was satisfied with this idea, and it allowed us to progress through the pre-production phase a lot quicker.

Additionally, I took heavy influence from Al Jazeera’s investigation documentary called ‘The Men Who Sell Football’, in which they investigate the corruption that football clubs repeatedly face and effects that it brings. Although Reading were not a key topic/club within the documentary, they do feature in 3-5 minutes of it, where they talk about what happened with the former owner Anton Zingarevich and where it left Reading in 2013/14. Within the documentary, I particularly liked how they transition into each club with the moving, illustrated graphics to introduce people and clubs. I also found the way they edited the documentary together interesting as they would effortlessly switch between the undercover interviews and the B-Roll footage of the stadiums and fans. The way they did it invoked a real sense of closeted anger and encouraged the viewer to feel sympathy for the fans of the clubs, especially on the Derby County section. I pitched ideas similar to these to my group and they too found them interesting and useful so decided to take influence and create our documentary in the same observationary style that Al Jazeera did.

A few days into the assignment, and our group were already starting to plan out our research and the timeline of the documentary. We chose that we share the research in equal portions. That meant that I researched about Anton Zingarevich and an analysis on the Al Jazeera documentary, Lewis researched on Ron Gourlay and his involvements and Ben researched on the aftermath of the two eras (2018-present). This allowed us to complete it at a faster rate and piece it together at a later date. After that, we organised a timeline of the documentary and how we were going to lay it out. Simultaneously, we created a brief storyboard of the documentary that showed how we wanted to shoot it and cut it together.

While we did this in college, I got in contact with one of the biggest Reading fan groups, Elm Park Royals, in an attempt to get an interview voicing their opinions on the matter through questions I had sent them. Although I wasn’t able to get a proper interview, I was able to get a voice-note from them. This turned out to be perfect as it would give us more variety to use in the documentary, rather than just using B-Roll footage and two in person interviews. Instead giving us the idea to have the B-Roll footage and my interview, along with an audio visualiser, reminiscent of audio visualisers that are seen often in police recordings and crime programmes. The voice-note was 10 minutes long and gave a deeper insight into the topic. This gave us a lot more information that we needed to and at times, it was difficult to know which parts to use and cut out. Overall, this contributed massively to the quality of our documentary due to the extra depth and analysis of another person.

In terms of filming, we organised to shoot at Reading’s Stadium, The Select Car Leasing Stadium -formerly the Madejski Stadium-. This ended up working perfectly as no-one cancelled plans and the weather forecast said it should be clear for the day. We filmed over 10 minutes of B-Roll footage of around and inside the stadium and got shots which we were particularly proud of, such as the Reading badge reflected in a puddle and shots of the flags outside. Before we shot some footage, we discussed how we would use them and how they would match the voiceover and the timing of events. We shot as much as we could but for a few, we had ideas in our heads that some shots would be used in more downbeat scenes, and some would be used in times that we were directly talking about. Moreover, we were able to film inside the stadium bowl, free from people. This is because my dad, without me knowing had emailed the club asking whether we were allowed inside the stadium at all to film. And although he didn’t get an exact “yes or no” answer, we were given that we should on the day go up to the reception and see if there was anyone available to allow us inside, which to my surprise there was. This made me realise that people are more willing to help out than what I first thought, something which I will definitely learn from when doing future assignments.

Moving on to the editing process, this was no-doubt the hardest out of the three stages of production. One thing I was most pleased with however was the overwhelming amount of material that we had. This is due to my last music video assignment not having enough material to use, so having learnt that lesson, I felt somewhat proud of the amount of material we had and knowing that I am slowly but surely improving my skills as a filmmaker.

Using ideas from what we had learnt during college lectures, we created 4 timelines on premiere pro, one for the main project, one for my interview, one for the voiceover and lastly one for the voice-note. Using this benefitted us greatly as it allowed us to carefully and quickly gather all of our material instead of searching through tons of material in the project section on premiere pro. We also learnt about using J and L cuts in documentaries, something else that we picked up and used in our final video.

Within two weeks, our documentary was finally complete, and I think all three of us were proud of the final product. Aside from the general project, I in particular was most proud as I feel I had improved a drastic amount from my last assignment where I admittedly was very unprepared and ended up with a finished project that did not originally fit my initial vision or quality that I wanted. So, this time, ending up with a product that is so much clearer of a higher quality, made me much more confident in my ability. In terms of the documentary, I feel that we progressed the narrative at a good pace while also giving the viewer a near-full (due to the time restrictions) description of the events and final message while also managing to look authentic and seeing that a lot of care was put into this project, from all three of us.

A few things that probably could have gone better in my opinion was the graphics and the length of the voice-note sections in the documentary. The graphics, I felt could have been improved a lot more. Obviously, I know we could not get to the level of the graphics in the Al Jazeera documentary, but I feel that we should have tried to make them fit a more of a crime and dirty theme, similar to the topic that we were talking about. The voice-note sections were too long and should have been shortened. However, the main problem with that was that the information needed was stretched over nearly a minute in some places, so cutting them shorter would mean that some key information would not make the cut, therefore not giving the viewer the full story. Upon next time, I think that we should have spent a bit more time on creating the graphics so they would look even better and fit the style of documentary we were going for more. And for the voice-note, I think when asking the questions, I should have been more specific, hence the answers would hopefully be a lot more precise and shorter.