Creating a documentary from scratch, working alone, and with a host of other pressures from other subjects (not to mention day to day life and earning a living), it is very hard to find the time to take a step back and really brainstorm the best way to approach a problem.
Thankfully, with an entire class of people going through exactly the same ordeal, there have been a lot of ideas floating around through twitter and the blogs that have pointed me in the right direction. Here are a few of the stand outs:
Sometimes less apps is more:
– I had been trolling through different programs and apps to try to find the best ways to record my audio and and gather digital images and had run into a few walls (especially seeing as I didn’t have any sort of budget to spend on software). But thanks to a push in the right direction after a small discussion with some classmates in tutorials, I tested some of the older or pre-installed apps and programs with great success. Sometimes the ‘lesser’ programs and methods are more than enough for the project at hand.
Interview options:
– Although I had several contacts within my community and good avenues to get in touch with interviewees I had a lot of offers in the form of links, phone numbers and suggestions from classmates for where I could gather some even more specific content. I certainly would have utilised all these contacts had I not changed my focus to be so specifically centred on Vandal Spruce and his documentary instead of the broader street art community.
Twitterverse:
– I have to say that I have never been too much of a tweeter. You may have noticed that I have tended to run my blog instead of tweeting for the majority of the semester as well. Although it is a little embarrassing for a media major of my generation, I have to say that researching and following trends through the simple method of searching #tags had never really occurred to me as a useful practice. After using twitter on a slightly more regular basis through tutorials my eyes were opened to this valuable resource of up to date news and social trends on very specific subjects.