REFLECTION
When I started planning the documentary and how I wanted it to look like was at the start I wanted to give some background information on the Church, essentially lout out some groundwork on why this is an important issue. I start the doc with some OOV’s of church art, however if you pay attention, you’ll notice I’m talking about kings and dukes, but the images shown are of Jesus and other characters. This is because initially I wanted to have some B-roll footage of a royal funerals, royal weddings or of the queen however I thought originally that we weren’t allowed to use third-party content so I assumed I wouldn’t be able to use any of that, so I decided to fill that with videos of stained-glass images and some statues that I was able to film in church.
However, in retrospect, the way I’d be allowed to use any of that video would be to have to get into contact with the owners of that probably would involve a lot of leg work to get permission to use it. The video somewhat fits the audio and it’s not too noticeable but perhaps if I had to change something about the start would be to research on the possibility of using third part video for that section and investigate how hard it would be to get hold of it.
The first piece to camera, I’m using statistics that could be seen as outdated. I was interested in knowing how many people from UKME/BAME backgrounds consisted in the UK population and the only available data was from 2011. But I thought that overall, it presented a reality that society is changing and that despite of the gap in percentage between the 2011 numbers and the 2021 numbers, the message being communicated is that society is changing and therefore the church should reflect that change in society.
The ethical issues that I faced in this project is obviously the topic discussed, racism. In discussing with my supervisor, we agreed that because no person individually is being called out that it stands clean of any sort of legal issue related to defamation. One of the pieces that I recorded initially had a problematic phrase that was brought to my attention by my supervisor which was that my line was ‘the church has confessed a terrible sin, racism’ and while racism is a terrible and shameful and should be eliminated from society, one of the things that Brad said was that the church has been involved in other terrible things such as child abuse and sometimes in trying to expose an issue we make others an injustice in trying to compare it to other issues. So, I had to change my first line to a less ‘in your face’ resort which ended up with me simply stating that the church still looks very white and middle class.
With my interview with Rosemarie, there were lots of things said that I didn’t include in the final cut, primarily because I didn’t have enough time to include in it. I found it challenging to be able to do this without taking words out of context and it took me listening to the answers and again to make sure things weren’t taken out of content. The truth is that I I could never do the subject justice in a small seven-minute documentary and that there would be a lot of things that would have to be left out. I also filmed an interview with Ben Nicholls who is part of the anti-racism taskforce, I had the pleasure to speak to him about the idea behind this taskforce and what kind of impact he thought the report would have. When coming around to edit I realised that in order for there to be a good structure to the documentary, it would have to circle around Rosemarie and Charles and what they said about the idea of change and reform in the church and how that would come about, with Rosemarie discussing the different areas of the church and Charles taking a position of wanting to work around the faults that the church has. It sadly meant that Ben was cut out of the final cut, but I’m determined to include him on some extra content on the website.
Charles Idu is a man of thought; he likes thinks a lot before saying anything that was exemplified in the interview. Even though he knew the questions I would ask him he took his time in answering and that meant there would be a lot of cuts between the scenes, therefore in the same day as filming the interview I got to film some GV’s with him reading a book and video that I could use to cover up for the fact that there were some many cuts in his answers. Sometimes you notice the cuts, other times it’s smooth enough that you don’t see them, I tried as much as possible to make the video as smooth as possible and not to include a lot of overlay video that could risk serving as a distraction to what was being said. In reflexion, what I should’ve done is bring a secondary camera to capture a different angle so that the cuts wouldn’t be so noticeable, when you have a second shot of the person, it makes cut a lot easier to cover up and allows for a better flow when it comes to cutting things.
Some of the videos where we wear Rosemarie talk about having a real impact in the people, I used some videos of leaves in a park when I filmed my pieces to camera, I filmed some leaves falling from a tree as well as leaves on the floor. This was to link o the idea of change of seasons, and when seasons change, that inevitably causes change in the appearance. In hindsight I should’ve been more intentional with it and I didn’t really think about whether it’d be an obvious metaphor that the audience would realise.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project because it allowed me to explore an area that I really enjoy and hope to work in the future, video journalism. It gave me the opportunity to explore different formulas and I think enriched by understanding of storytelling.