Filming the Documentary:

Within terms of filming for our documentary, we have filmed 2 interviews, a voxpop, cutaways and the opening titles.

For the interview with the tattoo artist, we visited the our interviewee in his actual workplace - Global Tattoo Studios - and filmed in his surrounding work area. We did this to make our interview more authentic, as the mise-en-scene was already set-up all around us. The area we actually chose to to film the interview, was chosen as it perfectly outlines the effect we desired the create, mainly based on tattooing as an art (e.g. the massive explicit tattoo images seen in the background). We had trouble whilst filming with the door alarm constantly going off (as people entered/exited the shop), however we feel we have obtained enough film to be able to avoid this disturbing the footage we use in our actual documentary. My participation in this interview was filming with the camera, whilst Rachael asked the interview questions. We both helped sort the framing for our footage.

Our voxpop was filmed in Liscard village, within the shopping area. We chose to film in front of McDonald's and the street, as it plainly shows the viewers that we were interviewing the general public, and not a targeted audience biased towards the topic (such as only filming people with tattoos). Also, it more-so follows codes and conventions for this style of filming. My role within filming this was once again filming, and holding the microphone above the interviewees for them to talk into. Radu held up the images to our participants of the voxpop and asked questions such as 'What do you think of these tattoos?', 'Would you consider getting this done yourself?' and 'Why?'. We both helped to gather up volunteers with opinions to film.

We attempted to film the voxpop twice. The first time, we experienced troubles trying to find willing volunteers to film and also experienced abuse from passers-by (mostly due to the way we were dressed, as we were dressed up for Halloween in school). We also had troubles with the tripod being to small to film with, and even after trying to balance it on a bench we still had trouble. When we came back the week after to film however, we were delightfully surprised with the good feedback we hadn't been offered before more people were intrigued and interested to take part. We learnt from our mistakes, and made sure we had the correct equipment to film with, and chose our framing with confidence.

Setting up:

The Images used for Voxpop:

The interviewees reactions:

The cutaways for our documentary came from a variety of places. Some are images that were obtained from the Internet, other images are ones which Rachael took of friends/close-relations, and we even filmed some footage whilst in the Global Tattoo Studios - e.g. equipment, Ed Hardy posters/tattoo images, drawing ideas, old-school tattoo tools and even the chair in which it all happens. We all helped to film the pans over the military images for the starting voiceover, and the tattoo images of the lizard man and the Tiger-man for the voxpop:

To do this, we needed to stick our printed images on a black background, and find the right lighting to film in so the image can be clearly seen on the screen. We stuck them to a wall as our filming would be straighter and look more professional.

Here i am filming one of the military tattoos, making sure to pan both up and down, and zooming in to get the whole picture in the frame.

Finally, the filming of our Opening titles. To create this we got some paints from the art department, and painted each letter of our title 'The Human Canvas' on a different part of Radu's body. We then used a camera to take the pictures individually for the opening titles. We took these images both with flash and without flash to see which sort came out looking best - we ended up using the ones without flash. I painted the letters, Radu was our canvas, and Rachael took the pictures. We then uploaded the images onto the computer, Rachael re-arranged them into a full-screen title, printed it off and then we filmed that too for a few seconds. This time however we stuck the image to a white background - another useful blank colour to use as a backdrop for our filming.