The draft of the documentary and feedback

This is the first draft of our documentary. We got some feedbacks of the documentary and there are lots of things that we need to change.

Firstly, since our target audiences are both Chinese and other countries people, we need to add captions in order to make all our target audience understand what we are talking about. For the Chinese captions are fine as I know what I need to write, however, I made lots of mistakes on English captions, such as some grammar mistakes and some spelling mistakes. As a result, I need to change it.

Secondly, in the facts scenes and the question scenes, we just put both Chinese and English captions in it, which make the scene look really crowded, and also it may be hard to read as there are too many words. As a result, we may need to add voiceover.

Thirdly, in the documentary, we only put the music in one scene where the other scenes have no music. The reason of this is because we did not know where we could put the music and what music we could put. And this makes the documentary seems to be quite boring.

And Finally, most of the scenes in the documentary are the interviews of our main character, Cynthia, we may consider to remove the last part, which is about the misunderstanding, and replace it with some scenes of Chinese students stay together. This could make the documentary be more interesting.

The second draft of the poster

As in our first poster, we only put on the Chinese title, but our audience also contain the international audience which may not understand Chinese. As a result, I need to put on the English title as well. However, as I want to use the same font style in all our production, I need to use the photoshop again to remove the background colour, which looks like this:

This is the English title that I have already removed the background. And I put it just below the Chinese title:

Now the problem of title is sorted, however, I still not put the credit yet. Also, another problem is that the tagline in the poster may be too slight and therefore the audience may find it is hard to read. As a result, I also need to sort it out. Moreover, I think I might need to change the size of the poster as it looks a little bit narrow, if I put in the credit, it may looks too many words in it.

Website making - the Forum page

The Forum page used to be the discussion page, however, when I installed the Forum, I found that the page is formed, and therefore, I change the name of the page.

These are the pictures of the Forum page:

As our documentary is about studying abroad and also about the misunderstanding of studying abroad, I have created two topics which could make the audience to chat about: one is the study abroad forum which the audience could give their experience of studying abroad here; another one is misunderstanding which the audience could give their experience if they have been misunderstood by the others while they are studying abroad. I think I may not change so much as this is already what I wanted.

Website making - the information page

By today, I have finished my information page of my website, which looks like this:

I made three parts in this page, which I have used same background colour as I have used in the home page in the information part. As there is meaning in the colour, for instance, the red colour represents China while the blue colour represents the UK. Also, to make the background links to my topic, I used the picture of my main character and two pictures of the school in these two countries. The page seems to be really simple, but I think this makes the page look clearer and the colour and the pictures could represent different countries, which was what I want. As a result, I think I may not have many changes on this page.

The first scene recording

For the start of our documentary, we decided to be an online scene of people's commentaries. It is found on ZhiHu where people put on the questions and their opinions and other people could leave the comments and their opinions as well. As our documentary is about students study abroad, and there are still some misunderstanding of this groups of people in China, we think it will be a good start if we put the misunderstanding at the beginning.

As my computer is Dell, unlike Macbook, Dell does not have the ability to record the screen, it could only make screenshot. To get the online scene, I used an app which is called "ApowerREC". It is an app that is particularly used in recording the screen, and it could make me to get the online scene.

This is the app that I used

And this is the basic form that what it looks like (it is in Chinese)

At the start, I just randomly scrolled it down by my fingers:

As you could see that scrolling down the screen by fingers is quite unstable. Even though the speed seems to be fine and I could change it while editing, however, it is too unstable that some parts of the scrolling are too fast, some parts are too slow, this will increase the hardness of editing. 

Therefore, instead of using my fingers, I click the 'pagedown'  on my keyboard and make it down:

It might not have too many changes, but I think it actually look better than the first one. Although the speed may be faster than the first one, it is much stable. And the speed problem I could solve during editing.

Also, as this is a Chinese website, the comments are all Chinese. For our secondary target audience, which is the foreign people who are interested in, we will add subtitle down below. And we will make the subtitles to stay longer which could ensure the audience could see it properly. However, we might still speed it up for purpose (as we want to make the speed be faster and faster and suddenly turns into black).

Website making - a small change in information page

While I was making the information page, at the start, I was thinking about to use an interactive and the audience could just simply click the arrows on the side and change it to different topics. For the background, I used to think about using this:

It is a collabration of a Chinese school and a British school, and I made this by using Photoshop. The reason that I tried this is because we used to think about combining two schools from different countries together, when the audience click it, it could change. However, I could only make them combined together like the picture has shown. And when I put it into the page, I found that it is too bright and too complex that the audience may be hard to read the text on it, and this may make the audience feel uncomfortable as it may be too complex.

As a result, I changed my mind and I used strips instead. And I separated the school pictures as well.

The picture of the Chinese school

The picture of the British boarding school

Production diary 7 - the additional footage

We took some extra footage because when we started editing, we found that there are still some footages we need to take. Also, we think we need to refilm the interview scene of Cynthia since the quality of the original one was quite poor. As a result, we refilmed the interview and also filmed some extra footages that we need.

 These are the shots of the interview that we have refilmed. In the original interview scene, we only filmed in one angle. And this time, we use two cameras to get two different angles. But Melissa has made a mistake that she forgot to turn on the microphone and therefore we could only use the sound filmed by another camera that has not use the microphone.

Theses are the walking scenes. The reason that we filmed these scenes is because that we want to put the facts during these scenes, and we could also link the title scene and the start scene (the website scene) since it shows that the character is walking to the location of the title scene.

These are all for the title scene, and our main character has shown during this scene. One of the reason that we show the upper body and then the whole image of our main character here is because we want to make the audience realise the connection between our three productions: the poster, the website and the documentary. In the other two productions, we show our main character in this location, and so we also decided to show our main character with the same location in our title scene.