Constraints experienced and overcome
- 1. Constraints Experienced and Overcome Financial: During our pre-production, it was important to firstly plan out how the group would spend any finance we had gained for ourselves for our setup, props, etc. Therefore, before we started our production or pre-production we created a budget, where we calculated a total amount of money we would need to spend throughout the production. Our total budget came to a staggering figure of £4,783.41p. The budget was used to calculate funds which would be put into equipment, the cast and the crew, props/scenery and travel expenses. Seeing as the whole of kings key production is in full time education, this meant that we could not create a production to the best of quality if we did not have any money to spend on it. The good thing is that even though editing and camera equipment took up some of the budget, we were able to overcome those costs. The way we did this was by borrowing camera equipment from our media teacher which covered and decreased our costs for the production. We were given an HD camera, a boom mic, tripod, clip mic and even a dolly even though we did not need to use it. We also found that we had little money to spend on transport, such as bus and car hire and take us to our location. Our group overcame this by using public transport such as buses and trains to help us get to the places we needed to go. Therefore, we found we did not need any financial support with travelling saving cost and allowing spending to put elsewhere. This wasn't an issue as we were travelling local anyways and so the locations consist a maximum of 20 to 45 minutes. Our team were also used to taking the public transport as we have been visiting all locations in our daily lives before. Furthermore, we had saved money on actors and extras as they had happily volunteered to be a part of our production without the need of being paid and that we had team members take part in the production. This allowed us to create a documentary which included all of the appropriate cast members. However, for more major roles, such as the presenter, we decided upon using one of the group members to perform as presenter, which meant we did not need to spend any money at all allowing us to maximise the work effort and performance. The same thing happened with the fictional character as well as my colleague who agreed to analyse the different junk foods. Therefore, we overcame all of our financial constraints, by looking for free alternatives which allowed us to create a professional documentary to the best quality on a very low cost.
- 2. Legal: It was important that we did not break any laws during filming our social action project, such as performing on premises without permission r filming people without permission. Which meant that we had several constraints. In terms of overcoming any legal constraints, it was important that during pre-production planning, we created all legal forms that needed signing and made sure that every contact had been informed and agreed to the terms we were putting forward. These included talent release forms and location release forms. Making sure that these forms were signed meant that we were following any legal guidelines, therefore allowing us to overcome any illegal constraints, and so we couldn't get in trouble having legal documents allowing us to complete our actions. What was also done is that, during production is that we had displayed a huge ‘Notice of Filming’ sign so that people walking by understood we were filming and had a choice whether to walk through or get out of the shot, making it their choice if they were seen or not. Also, beforehand when it came to interviewing people and stopping them, we asked if they wanted to be interviewed on camera, getting permission to borrow them for our social action project. If we could not get individuals to sign a talent release form, we made sure not to give away their identity by hiding their faces or making their identity incomprehensible. For example, during our documentary, we included an interview with a professional coach whose face we had to blur out as their not allowed to show it due to other personal reasons. Regulatory The Copyright, Designs and Patent Act keeps the regulations for and artist’s property their own. It makes sure that each artist can put a ‘stamp on their own work’ meaning they can claim that their work is theirs and no one is allowed to copy or steal ideas trying to claimits their ‘original’ piece. The Act makes it their work; making sure that they can not be copied by another artist; who may want to use the same ideas or even plagiarise the original artist's work. This Copyright Act applies to not only music videos, and music; but to any media platform that it is put under. For example, we used music to make our documentary more exciting however, that music is not our own creation but matter of fact is someone else’s. To copyright a product, the product must have a Copyright license issued, and anyone wanting to use this product or creation publically or for the benefit of their own, we must ask the record label who owns the artist/music production permission to use their music. Therefore, it was important to send emails to their music label requesting use of the songs. Of course we must also mention it was for educational purposes as well. This was needed for a few songs, as to refrain from breaking any copyright laws, we used music that was not bound by any copyright laws.