This is a short documentary I filmed last week inplace of another project I didnt get to do as couple of people let me down. This film interviews a man who rents an allotment and he tells of how he looks after it.

I did the doc for Current TV now sure if anyones heard of that.

http://current.com/items/90532048_the-allotment.htm

Any feedback welcome, I hope I can learn from it.


Cheers.

There is definatly potential for an interesting documentary here, i think you need to work on the basics first. The boom mic came into shot quite a lot, and this distracts the eye from the main subject. It looked as if you were holding the camera and the boom at the same time.

There were a few instances where the allotment owner stumbled on his words and repeated himself, if you had re-took the shot it would have been fine.

The content was a bit all over the place in all honesty, in parts he gave an interesting interview, especially when he was talking about digging for victory, in others it was a bit odd, for example when you tell him parsnips are no longer a popular vegetable. It sounded more like a news reader trying to trip up a politician than someone interviewing a guy about his allotment. And the question "do you have good sinuses?" where did that come from. And "HERB! - is that legal"

Also i felt the music was a bit strong and moody for the subject matter... feirce violin playing whilst your looking at vegetables doesnt exactly match.

I think the guy you chose to interview is a great character and i think if you take a bit more time considering whats being said/done in each shot you have a chance of getting some good results.

hope you found my comments useful,
Smith

Thankyou Smith for that,

The boom mic was done by somone who had not done this before, I kind of just threw it on them. I actually after found it easier to do the boom and shoot at the same time, problem I had with my home made boom was that when people use it they tended to made too much noise, so I had to edit out a lot of rattleing with tone.

There was a lot of random dry comedy to it I thought but yes I should of thought how I was going to construct it all together more. I should of made the things he was saying fit together more.