Today we gave our pitches. By this time we had completed our research about the topic and made the necessary arrangements. I would shoot the following Saturday, so I booked the equipment that I would pick on Friday.

Today is the day before the production. Unfortunately, I was sick for the past two days and couldn't pick up my equipment from school. Thankfully, I had a camera and tripod at home that was available. But I didn't have any equipment to record the sound of the shoot.

We were initially supposed to shoot on the 21st of September, saturday. But my subject called last minute cancelling the shoot because of a packing issue. Instead she asked if we could the next day, sunday. Since she was leaving Hong Kong on Monday, I had no choice but to agree.

We did our shoot today. We started at about 9 in the morning, and finished by 1. Since I had no sound recorder, I used my iphone to record sound. I shot one angle with a professional camera and the other angle with a phone. During the shoot, my camera battery died and I did not have a spare. So I shot the rest of the interview with the phone. Also, the iphone sound recorder suddenly stopped in between the interview. Thankfully, we noticed it and put it on before it was too late. She let me stay the day so that I could get B-roll. After the shoot, we both sat and went through archive footage that could be used. She gave me the footage in a hard drive, which I transferred to my laptop immediately. 

On the 25th of September, I began reviewing the footage. I realised that during the interview, Liz shifts her position, making the composition of the video look awkward. Since I was shooting the other angle, I did not notice it. My crew member did not inform me of the composition, as she was focusing on answering the questions.

On 28th September, my crew mate finally sent me the footage I took from the phone. But the problem was, she sent it through Whatsapp and the videos got compressed.

I also began transcribing the interview, so that I could know what to keep and what to cut.

I kept on transcribing the interview, but it was taking a lot of valuable time. It took days for me to transcribe just the first 10 minutes. I asked Mr Alcock about this and he suggested that I piece the videos together. This way I could attach the video to the audio, while figuring out what I should cut out.

It took me a while to get all the audio onto my laptop, but I finally did. I began placing it all together. When I heard the audio from my phone, I heard a low wind sound. Then I realised that it must have come from the air conditioning. I turned of the fan so that this wouldn't happen, I didn't realise the air conditioning was that loud at the time. But it wasn't much of a problem, because it wasn't overbearing. Liz's voice was very clear and crisp.

I kept on assembling the video until I reached the point where the audio was missing. I decided to ask my crew mate to transcribe the video, so that I could send it to Liz. I would ask Liz to speak into her phone sound recorder and send it. My crew mate said that she would send it back in a few hours.

Today, I showed my interviews to Mr Alcock. He told me to watch a few MTV documentaries and Punk'd episodes as it has the same editing that I want to use. So, that's what I did the rest of the lesson.

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I got all my b-roll, archive footage and interview footage. I organized the interview and began cutting in the b-roll and archive footage.

I kept on working on the interview. I tried to find some appropriate background music to set the tone of the interview. I added cheerful, upbeat music to the beginning of the interview, and when she talks about her struggles I added a more slow, sad audio.

On the 29th, I asked Mr Alcock to review my work. He gave a lot of useful feedback that I needed to work on. For example, he told me to add a title card to make it look more interesting, and what parts of the interview were irrelevant to the story.

On the 10th of November, I had finished about 4 rough cuts of the documentary. I made sure to get opinions on how to make it look better. I sent the fourth rough  cut to Mr Alcock to get input on how to improve it. He gave me a lot of useful pointers which I added in my final documentary.

On the 15th, I asked a group of three participants to review my work. They gave me a lot of suggestions how to improve it. For example, one of the participants told me to complete showing time as Liz explains her day. Another participant told me which parts of the documentary were too soft to hear.

By 17th of November, I was almost done with my documentary. I decided to create two versions of the film. I would cut off the part where Liz explains her day to make it reach 5 minutes so I could submit it for Eye Hong Kong and submit the original 8 minute documentary to BTEC. I was struggling with how to end the documentary but I finally decided to end it with credits.

On 18th November, I submitted my final cut on Google Classroom. However, I couldn't find a way to make the video come down to 5 minutes without removing important parts. I am going to get feedback on how to make it smaller.

Today we reviewed documentaries in class. I got a lot of feedback from Mr Alcock and my classmates. I was told to remove the daily routine from the documentary because it doesn't really work well with the whole film. This shortened my documentary significantly. It went from 8 minutes 14 seconds to 6 minutes 27 seconds.

On the 22nd of November, I incorporated the input I got into the documentary. The reason I had to remove the daily routine is because the portion of the film is pretty factual. There is no emotion or feeling when Liz talks about her day. This contrasts with the rest of the documentary. So, after removing it, I took some of the b-roll, used for that part, and placed it throughout the film.

On the 2nd of December, I submitted my finalised cut for grading.