07/11/22 - 13/11/22

This week, the main focus was for my group (Ben & Lewis) to think of a clear and do-able idea for our documentary. I had suggested that we could do the documentary on football, especially the behind-the-scenes of the clubs who have undergone corrupt owners and fraud. I said this idea as I support Reading FC, who over the last 10 years have had a corrupt owner and are still feeling the effects of his reign. We chose to have the story to be about Reading due to me having personal connections and already having a good enough knowledge to talk about the situation along with our research.

Soon after, I made a brief timeline on the past 10 years at Reading so my group would get the idea of the story and how the documentary should be laid out. We then spoke about the research elements and how we were going to split it. In the end, we split it so I research the Zingarevich era, so 2012-2014 as I would know the most about it and is more difficult to research. Whereas Lewis researched about the Gourlay era, 2015-2018, and Ben researched the aftermath of both, so 2018-present. I believe that it was a good thing that we decided to split up the research into equally sized portions as it sped up the whole research and pre-production process and allowed us to move onto other areas much quicker. In terms of the group, they reacted positively to the idea and went along and understood the process as I had first thought that they may have reacted slightly more negatively due to my personal connection to Reading and Football.

We then made a schedule for the project where we decided that we hope to complete the whole pre-production process by the Friday of next week. Film all of our scenes the week afterwards (21-11-22) so it gives us two weeks to edit the video and redo any filming if needs be.

(14/11/22 – 20/11/22)

This week was focused on our Pre-production with the idea that we will complete the whole process this week. We all finished our research fairly early, which meant we had time to create our script and our storyboard. We finished the storyboard during college and the script was partially complete.

For the script, we already had organised that we will film our interview on the Monday of next week, so we did the script for the interview such as the questions and aspects on the replies. We made sure to ask extra questions in case we have to fill up time and for the knowledge of having more than what we need. Also, we didn’t write a full answer for the interviews because we wanted to make it feel more organic instead of me reading off the script.

I also reached out via Twitter DM’s to Elm Park Royals, one of the biggest Reading fan groups, for an interview or a voice note answering some of our questions about the topics discussed within the documentary. They came back to me saying that they will and later on in the week I was sent a 10-minute-long voice note in which Alex Everson (a co-owner) explained in-depth about the questions, which worked out perfectly as it gave us plenty of material that we could use for the documentary.

I feel we should have tried to complete the full script much quicker as I feel that a lot of that week, we were distracted by the World Cup and didn’t work for as much as we could. However, as we finished our research quicker, we had more time to finish other aspects of our pre-production.

(21/11/22 – 27/11/22)

This week was solely reliant on filming and the production stage of our project. On Tuesday we booked out the studio in order to film our interview. We had to set everything up so it would reminisce of the ‘Drive to Survive’ style that we were going for. And though we weren’t able to get it “spot on”, we were able to capture the aspect of the interview well in my opinion.

On the Wednesday, we had planned to go to Reading to film around the stadium. On the weekend, without me knowing, my dad had emailed someone at Reading to see whether we can film inside the stadium such as down the tunnel, in the bowl and/or in executive boxes. Although we never got a certainty that we were going to be inside, when we got to Reading, we talked to the receptionist and someone was willing to let us inside the ground for about 15-20 minutes, but only inside the bowl. This has made me realise that people are more willing to help out than I had first thought.

Filming around the ground went very well for us due to the quality of the b-roll footage that we got. We were able to film everything we needed to film and more, which allows us to experiment more with the end product. Additionally, some of the shots we have, we are all proud of, notably a shot of the badge reflected onto a puddle of water.

(28/11/22 – 4/12/22)

On Tuesday, we had the time and equipment to finally record our documentary voiceover. We recorded it on an iPad and to my surprise especially, the audio picked up greatly. Ben and Lewis recorded the voiceover. We decided that both of them can do separate parts of the voiceover as it allows them both to feel more involved in the project because I have been the one who has encouraged the idea and what we do for it. The voiceover was particularly difficult for Ben, who is dyslexic, so reading off a script can be hard for him. However, we all were patient for him and helped him throughout his recordings, resulting in a final piece that we can easily use in our documentary.

Then, on the Thursday, we began to start our final edit and finished the introduction to the documentary. While Ben and I were working on the edit, Lewis was working on the graphics that we would use, such as for the audio visualiser and the pictures of the people, as well as the title screen. This worked out fairly well as we were getting two things done at once, so when we need the graphics, we can just put them straight in without having to worry about pausing the editing process to create the graphics.

(5/12/22 – 11/12/2022)

This week all we had to do left was finish the edit for the documentary. At this point, we already knew that we were going to have to go over the 10-minute mark due to the amount of information and material we still had to tell, but overall did our best to keep it as short and precise as we could; even if it meant we had to cut out some pieces of voiceover, voice note and interview questions.

We set out different sequences on premiere pro for each the interview, the voice-note, B-roll, and the overall documentary film in order to pick out material quicker so the editing process can go by at a faster rate.

By Thursday, the documentary was complete except for the conclusion where we used Google Earth to pinpoint different teams who have had some sort of corruption going on within their history. I did this on the Friday as we ran out of time on the Thursday.

During the weekend, we all shared our documents, exported the video and made sure that we all had what we needed to be able to put on our websites ready for submission.