Unit 10 - Working to an audience's needs

 

Brainstorming Ideas

• One idea for the Bentley Priory project could be a video that explores both the history of the museum alongside the artefacts inside of the museum, which the history of the specific artefact will be discussed in briefly detailed information.

Audience Research

In a recent study conducted by Statista in July 2024, between May 2023 to March 2024, the highest age group who visited either a gallery or a museum was aged between 40 to 44, making up 49% of the report, with the second highest reported figure was between ages 16 to 19. 

Relevant Research

Bentley Priory's history dates back to around 1170, where it is believed that the supposed founder Ranulf de Glanville founded the priory. Over the following centuries, the priory changed hands many times with different rulers, for example, King Henry VIII briefly owned the land.

After many ownership turnarounds from many different parties, the estate was sold to a man named Sir John Kelk, who proceeded to add a picture gallery, conservatories, a clock tower and a section called the Italian Gardens, which is still accessible to museum visitors after being restored to it's former glory.

The state was once again sold in 1882 to Frederick Gordon, the founder and chairman of Gordon Hotels. He converted Bentley Priory into a hotel, even spending roughly £48,000 to extend a railway line to attract customers, despite this however, the hotel was not successful, and in 1908, the hotel was sold and was converted into a girl's school, the school then closed in the early 1920's and the land was then abandoned for some time until 1926.

That same year, the priory was split up and approximately one lot and 40 acres of land was sold to the Air Ministry for around £25,000. The Inland Area also moved into the Priory that same year, though was dissolved and was reworked into Bomber, Coastal, Fighter and Training Commander. The RAF were the longest standing residents at Bentley Priory, having been stationed at the land for 82 years before they departed in 2008.

Pre-Production

Location Recce

Shot List

Booking Tripod

Production

Filming

We agreed to start filming on Friday 13h December, as the was when we were on our day off and when the museum was open, which to me was the perfect balance between finishing production smoothly while also using some of my time to partake in filming. I arrived at the place around 10am though I had to wait for a long time as I had the belief Anna would arrive at 10am, thought she did manage to arrive one hour later. Eshan sadly couldn't come but there was no issues regarding his absence.

I was tasked with booking a tripod for the production, as Anna was tasked with booking the camera. One issue that came up was when we tried attaching the camera to the tripod, the relationship between the plate and the camera was a bit loose. This could be because Anna booked a Nikon camera instead of a Cannon camera which the tripod I booked definitely fit Cannon models more. However, this wasn't really a huge issue and filming went on swell without the issues between the relationship between the plate and the camera.

As for filming itself, we first started at the Abercorn room, which included two separate rooms that showed us RAF memorabilia alongside paintings depicting both the Operations Room alongside pictures of important figures from the Raf days of Bentley Priory. From there, we then went to film the Italian Gardens, Queen Adeliade's Room, Rotunda, Filter and Operations Room, and the Bunker, which was a far away journey from the Museum. 

During filming, me and Anna took turns in filming, so she would film one section, and then it will be my turn to film a section, and so on and so forth. One shot that was my idea that I both came up with and filmed was the Rotunda shot, which featured the camera going around the room showing off the paintings and then moving upwards to show off the ceiling lamp and then rotating around the medals in the middle. Despite how convoluted the shot would've been, I managed to film it all in one take, which I consider impressive, especially since I had no dolly track with us. 

We started filming around 11:30am and finished around 2pm, as most of it was spent on agreeing what particular shot we should use for which room. Some rooms did have limitations to them, especially Queen Adeliade's room where we tried to move the camera. around to capture the whole scope of the room, but the door alongside the Christmas ornaments present on the mantlepiece made us go the generic quote of setting the camera and tripod up and taking a still shot of what was present there.

Interviews

On January 17th, a month after filming in Bentley Priory, we did additional filming in the form of interviews with Virenda, our client, alongside an old man and woman who are part of the Stanmore Society. The questions were mostly related to Bentley Priory and what it means to Stanmore as a whole, our questions were usually relegated to 3, but the old man had less questions asked because he was going off about the history of Bentley Priory, which provided us with a great amount of material for Anna, who was tasked with editing the interviews while Eshan and I were tasked with editing the main product.

We started around 12pm and ended around 3pm, this was mostly due to Eshan not being present just like when we went filming in Bentley Priory Museum, so Anna had to take up both the sound and camera job while I was mostly the interviewer on camera. The job was surprisingly easy considering I had to look directly into the eyes of the interviewees, and eye contact is not something I'm great at, as it makes me lose focus for quite awhile, but I was able not to break eye contact throughout it all, which was a surprise. Another thing I can mention was before filming the sections, I would sometimes come up with the questions right on the spot, often diverting from the questions we were going to ask because when the old man and woman provided us with a lot more than envisioned, we decided to lean into it more.

During filming, Virenda shot some behind-the-scenes pictures of the interviews, with one of them including me and Virenda with both of us holding our hands out, almost like we were engaging in a conversation. The weird part about it was Virenda was copying exactly what I was doing, which was odd to me at least, as I felt I should've been the one looking like I was asking a question, which Virenda looking like he was engaging with me, the whole photo felt awkward for me, but it was what it was.

Editing

When we were filming, we heavily relied on the script we wrote in order to help us achieve the vision we wanted more closer, anything the script mentioned, we would try to locate that place and shoot B-roll footage there. One important thing to remember about a project like this is editing is a vital asset on making a final product good or bad, so it was necessary to shoot what we thought would match our vision the best.

 

I provided the voice-over for our script. I booked out the podcast studio as I believed the space was particularly suitable for voice-over material, and took my phone with me which had the script on it so that I can make editing easier, I recorded the dialogue in less than 30 minutes and generally recorded each sentence individually, so whenever there was a full stop, that was when I stopped recording. Sometimes I did mess up takes, but the sessions went quicker and easier than I imagined it to be.

For the actual editing, me and Eshan started editing on Thursday 30th January and finished editing on Wednesday 5th February, which only took 4 working days to edit the whole thing. As of now, the video runs at 4 minutes 1 seconds, with a large gap in-between the segments as this is to edit the interviews easier into the video.

The video used a heavy amount of transitions alongside image moving where images either move up or down, diagonally right or left, or scrolls left and right and vice versa. The transitions part was Eshan's idea to help spice the video up, as I was just lazily cutting clips up like how I edited my previous work before-hand, while I was initially against it, I grew fond of adding the transitions, even growing fond of transitions like Page Turn, Slide, Whip and Barn Doors. As for the image moving parts, this was done by me, as I used keyframes in order to move the images around. It was a process that took a while to get used to, but when I got a hold of it, it was extremely easy, which may have contributed to why the editing process took only 4 days to complete.

The music process for the video was a bit challenging, especially considering I was used to the silent nature of the video. The music was mostly downloaded from Pixabay.com, which has been a royalty-free music website that I have used for my videos in the past. My intentions with the music were to mostly link it to the section as closely as possible, so the start has happy corporate music to make it like a tour video showing off it's features, then the middle bit talking about the history has documentary music, considering the subject has a lot to talk about, and the Battle of Britain has historical documentary-type music to match the style of the time to the best of my abilities.

When picking out music for the video, one track I really wanted to use for the beginning was Conquer the Skies by BalloonPlanet, which I thought matched perfectly with the tone I wanted, however, the website I found it on forced me to make an account just to download it, and considering it was a one-off download, I refused to make an account and used other methods to try get the song, one method was screen-recording the Mac so that it records the music and therefore can get somewhat a clean rip of it without making an account, but all my attempts ended in recording nothing to recording not the Mac, but from my headphones, which meant you could hear me and others typing and chatting, which was annoying, but considering I had no other options at this point, I had to find another one similar.

Audience Research

Client Contact

Client Feedback

Final Video

https://youtu.be/WEZY9SU2FKo

Evaluation

The project first started around the end of the first term where I was picked alongside Anna and Eshan to take part in Work Experience for a video that is all about the Bentley Priory Museum up in Stanmore. The reason I was chosen for the project was due to my interest in filming and editing, which I felt I had the bare amount of skills to accept the offer. Another reason I chose this project was because prior to this, I was desperately trying to find any work experience as this was mandatory to complete for Unit 10, and considering it came around the tail-end of the term, I had no choice but to accept.

The pre-production part of the project was definitely the worst aspect throughout all of this, as we clearly had no idea what to do or how to approach this project the right way. We did manage to write a script with all of us contributing to each of the 3 sections of the script, I was in charge of writing the second section, which shows as this is the most long and detailed of the three, which I ended up cutting a few sentences since some of it was unsayable in video form.

The part that made us really work together somewhat was when we had a meeting with Virenda Adhikari, our client. The meeting went horrible, as it was clear to him we didn't have anything to show outside of a script and what seemed like empty promises. Needless to say, when the meeting ended, that was when we started getting serious about the whole thing, which we did by assigning each other different roles, which I took on making the questions alongside filling in the shot list alongside Eshan, while Anna focused more on the client and arranging dates to film.

We all set a date to Friday December 13th to start filming at the Priory, which we were originally intending to film the Saturday after, but there was a Christmas themed event happening, so we had to film on Friday. Filming went decent for the most part, though Eshan couldn't make it down to the Priory, although he never gave a reason as to why, but filming wasn't affected by him not being there. We filmed from around11:30am and ending around 2pm, and we shot a bunch of footage around the Priory, pretty much anything we could find, we shot so that we hd additional B-roll footage for editing. 

The week after filming which was our last week at college before the holidays ended on a whimper for me and Anna. That week, we started trying to schedule interviews from employees at Bentley Priory, alongside scheduling re-shoots as some of the footage came out looking terrible. I was under the assumption the project had to be completed by the end of the term, which definitely stressed me out a bunch, though I assumed that Anna was editing the project as she agreed to when we were leaving the Priory after finishing filming, however, she had to explain to me that she was only compiling up the footage, which amounted to 2 minutes and 16 seconds, which was her reason for wanting to re-shoot it.

When we went back in January, we were still arranging to re-shoot scenes alongside scheduling interviews, which we shot interviews with 3 people, Virenda, and a old man and woman who were part of the Stanmore Society, the filming for it went smooth for the most part, although the part where we had to extract the footage was a long and arduous process that took up a long time. When we were trying to reach Bentley Priory for re-shoots, they wouldn't;t answer our emails back, which put a lot of stress on me because we were on Unit 12 at this point and had to juggle between starting and finishing work.

A revelation came next Thursday, when Annette told us to scrap re-shooting and just focus on editing the video as it was. During that time, I experimented with colour-grading some of the shots to make them appear more sunny, which I used for the final product. The editing process went by so quick, where I managed to edit the whole thing in just 4 working days, this was possibly due to how comfortable I got with the process in which I took to edit the project, which included transitions that were suggested by Eshan, alongside animating images to make them move around like how you see in documentaries by using keyframes to achieve this.

Looking back on all of this, our biggest issue with our project was that in terms of working as a team, we often felt isolated from one another. It made Anna feel like she was doing everything while I just goofed around and did nothing, which reflected on my Blogger as I would go days without updating it with new information, which was ultimately because I usually didn't have the motivation to add it to my Blogger instantly. The whole team-working thing didn't pan out very well, but it was a decent learning experience on why working together is key in making a good project.

In terms of how I feel about the final project, I definitely feel proud about it. Even thought I have mixed feelings on the pre-production and actual production, the editing part was easily the best part about it, as I tried my best to make it the best as it can be, and I believe I made the final product as perfect as it can be. The part of adding transitions and key framing images provided constant pleasure for me as the transitions made the video a lot more interesting than if I were to lazily add the footage in and call it a day. To sum it up, I'm proud of what I've edited and I believe me and Eshan made a great video.