More editing...

As we have basically finished our opening, we can begin to edit some of the footage we have for our main documentary.

I scanned in some newspaper cuttings showing positive and negative headlines about CCTV and the surveillance society. I edited these together to make a short sequence using Windows Movie Maker, so that we could then use this in our documentary.

First Draft of Opening

Now we have finished all the initial editing for our opening we put it together with the voice-over.

We had to add an extra clip of a CCTV poster as we couldn't fit all of the dialogue we wanted into our original footage. Now our intro is about 20 seconds, which still leaves us lots of time for our main documentary.

As this was just our first attempt at the opening, we still have some changes we want to make:

-The voice-0ver needs to be louder than the music

-The font at the end needs to be changed to a more interesting one

We are going to change the font at the end to this:

We had to make this on www.cooltext.com as the fonts on iMovie weren't working.

Recording the Opening Voice-Over

Today we finished off editing our opening sequence by recording a voice over. We scripted it using interesting facts we had found from our research.

We tried to make the script engaging for the audience by presenting them with some shocking statistics and fast paced music. The opening introduces the documentary topic, and is intended to grab the viewers attention and keep them interested so they will want to watch the whole documentary.

My group decided that I should record the voice-over and found a quiet room to record. We used a 'Yeti' Microphone to give the voice-over a clear, professional quality. It was our first time using this equipment so we did some test recordings to experiment, and I practised saying the lines so they would have the right impact on the audience.

We then put the voice over onto iMovie and edited it into our opening. We had to adjust the volume of the music and voice over so that the music didn't overpower the voice, and the voice wasn't too loud.

Editing

Now we have nearly finished filming, we have started to edit the opening sequence on iMovie. We weren't happy one of the shots as the quality wasn't as good as we'd hoped and it was very shakey, so we've decided to re-film a small section of it.

We went to Weybridge Station and filmed a short clip of a CCTV camera moving to look at us, which is less shaky and clearer than our previous attempt.

We decided to speed up most of the clips as we wanted to make the opening engaging and exciting for the audience. We sped up each clip to 70% and we also stabilised some clips to make them more steady and smooth.

We then made some music to go with the opening on Garage Band. We wanted it to sound upbeat and exciting so made sure the music we created was fast and engaging.

We then transfered this music to iMovie and added it to our documentary. We made sure it stopped as the Titles appear on screen and to make it sound more professional we faded the music out.

For the title of our documentary, we added a transition called 'Lens Flare', which we thought was effective as it looks like the light and text is coming from the CCTV camera. The screen then fades to black and the title text appears.

We also added a transition at the beginning of the opening which was just a simple fade in from black to make it look neater.

First Day of Filming

Yesterday we went to London to film some shots for our opening sequence. We planned to go to:

-Oxford/Regents Street (for some crowd shots)

-Abbey Road (to experiment with some shots

of the live webcam, and maybe try and capture us being filmed by the webcam)

In Oxford Street we wanted some shots of the crowds. We put the tripod

on a flat pillar on the pavement so that we could get a shot which was above the crowds heads, looking down the street.

As it is very close to Christmas, the busy crowds made it harder to set up etc, but helped us to

acheieve the right shot as there were so many people to create a busy street scene. We took shots from several different angles.

As we were walking down Oxford Street we saw a mobile CCTV van, and asked the police officers inside if we could film it. They agreed, and then they asked if we wanted to see inside the van. It was interesting to see all monitors etc, and asked the police officers some questions about it. Unfortuntely we weren't allowed to film inside and the policemen couldn't do an interview as they were busy, but we were glad to get the shots of the outside of the van.

Filming Schedule

Today we decided that we had planned a sufficient amount for us to start filming. We made a filming schedule which we will try to stick to, but we will have to be quite flexiable with the dates because of other commitments over the Christmas holidays.

Planning

Today we thought about what we wanted to include in the main section of the documentary. We made a storyboard of our ideas.

We want to include a section about 'talking' CCTV cameras and we did some research to find out if these types of cameras are currently in use in the UK. We discovered that Hounslow (a town near us) trialed the cameras in January 2010 but we weren't sure if they were still in use so we decided to contact Hounslow Council. We went onto the council website and used the online enquirey form to send them a message asking about the cameras (if the trial period was successful and if they were still in use).