Pitching and Feedback
I presented my FMP idea to five other people to see if I’m on the right track with my project concept. The feedback I received was mainly positive. However, I did receive some constructive criticism. This criticism was necessary to ensure that I produce work to the best of my ability and it was helpful to see some outside points of view. I also reviewed some of my peers blogs and gave them feedback too.
What Went Well
I was told that my general idea had potential and it garnered some interest amongst my peers and my tutor, which is a great sign. My peers knew exactly what I was creating when I had explained it. They also liked my idea to research into the different documentary modes.
What I Can Improve on
I was told to rearrange some posts on my blog for it to flow better and told to add more detail in certain areas to reach the criteria given. Another part of my blog I was told to expand on was my project concept. My original concept was too complicated to understand what exactly I wanted to produce, so I decided to change it to give anyone reading a better understanding. I was also told to have a group meeting with my team members about the editing style, this is due to each individual having a their own personal style and when we join our individual sections together, the edit will likely be jumpy and lack any flow. To avoid a puzzling edit, we will be discussing what editing style we will all follow.
Primary Research
We wanted to split our Primary Research into two different sections. The first being information we gathered from children and the second being information we gathered from adults.
Our first idea was to create a questionnaire to hand out in a primary school or to children aged 12 and below in a comprehensive school. We decided we would write up an email to send to Dwr-y-Felin comprehensive as it’s located opposite the college.
Below you can see the email we constructed to send to the school.
Once the email was complete, we began writing up a questionnaire to hand out to the children on the day. Below I have attached a PDF of this questionnaire that we sent in.
We then decided that creating visuals for the children would be more engaging. We began to create a powerpoint which included visuals of the questions on the questionnaire.
I have linked below a PDF of this presentation.
All seemed to be going according to plan until we were told by the school that it was too short notice to go in and hand out questionnaires. This definitely gave us a negative start to the project. Instead of looking at the questionnaire as a waste of time, we decided to write it up using the website ‘Survey Monkey’. We then shared the questionnaire on to Facebook and I sent the link to my younger siblings. We didn’t receive as many results as we wanted with this survey due to not being able to contact a large group of children. Next time, I will take into consideration how much time a school needs in order to arrange a day where we can go in and hand out questionnaires. The results we received from the online questionnaire were essential and became a big part of ur project.
We then decided to create another questionnaire on Survey Monkey, only this time the questions were catered towards older people. We came up with the questions and shared the survey on our Facebook pages. Unsurprisingly, we received more answers on this questionnaire as we have more adult friends on Facebook. The most popular age group that answered the questionnaire was 18-24, we would have liked more results from people that are older, but the results we received worked well in our documentary. Next time, we should use alternative methods in order to get the questionnaire to older people. We could hand out physical copies to the lecturers in NPTC and our parents/grandparents at home. This would give the primary research a wider range of answers that could have given us a slightly better insight into how the older generations feel about YouTube.
In conclusion, I think the primary research we managed to gather played a significant role in the documentary. Because of this research we were able to find out what YouTubers we should be researching into further. These YouTubers were Logan Paul and Jake Paul who were both a large topic in the documentary. I think next time to gather this research I would have liked to interview children in person and play that in one of the sections in the documentary.
Secondary Research
Once we had decided on creating a documentary about YouTube I began with my research. We decided our documentary would fall under the category ‘screen life’. Since this was our project starter, I decided to look into how reliant humanity is on technology and came across an article about children using mobile phones and aimlessly using YouTube.
This article was helpful as it mentioned YouTube and children, which is one of our topics. Although this article proved that YouTube and technology have a large influence over children, I think I could have looked into more statistics and facts in order to back this research up more.
I then decided to look into different documentary modes, this was extremely helpful and gave me a better understanding of how types of documentaries work. After learning about what the documentary modes were, I then decided to look into a documentary that uses the expository mode, which is the mode I believed we would be using. Looking at this documentary gave me some helpful tips and tricks on what to include when I use any pictures or videos in my own.
As discussed in my primary research section, learning that children enjoy Logan Paul and Jake Paul and adults have a negative opinion about them, it motivated us to research further into the Paul brothers. Since my section of the documentary is ‘The Influence on Kids’ I decided to look into Jake Paul. Taking a closer look at Jakes videos, channel statistics, controversies and personal life gave me a better insight as to why two generations have completely opposite opinions on him. After looking more into Jakes YouTube statistics using the website social blade, it offered an in depth analysis of Jakes channel through the years. When going through this, I saw the dip in viewership and subscriber growth for Jake when he was involved in controversies. The research I conducted on Jake Paul took me longer than expected and I fell slightly behind on my project plan. To get myself back on track with my project plan I put more hours during the night to complete this section, which got me back on track.
As well as conducting research on Jake Paul, we all thought it would be a good idea to look into less controversial YouTubers who maintain a family friendly image. I looked into Bird Keeper Toby for two reasons, the first one being because his content is family friendly and the second one being because Toby is the YouTuber who agreed to be interviewed for the documentary. Toby runs successful YouTube channel with over 200,000 subscribers. After looking into Toby’s past videos and his social blade statistics, I was able to determine that maintaining a family friendly image is helpful to your career as it’s more likely that brands will want to work with you and you’re able to obtain different types revenue this way.
Not only did I need to look into different YouTubers, I needed to get n understanding of documentaries. I began by looking at the documentary modes distinguished by Bill Nichols. Looking into the different documentary modes and researching closer into a documentary gave me a better understanding of how the production side of documentaries work.
If I was to do this again, I would use a range of different sources for my research. Although I did obtain research from books, movies, YouTube videos and articles, I feel like the number of research I did for these sources wasn’t as equal as they could have been. For example, I only looked into one book written by two YouTubers. I think at the beginning I thought looking into books wouldn’t be helpful because YouTube is based online, but my prejudgement was definitely wrong and the one book I looked into was very insightful and helped with the documentary.
Research in Practice
Since I was given the task of creating the title sequence, I began looking into different animations created in Adobe After Effects. As I wasn’t that familiar with animating, this section helped me tremendously with learning the different elements within After Effects.
Practice 1
I had an idea of including polaroid images within the title sequence, so I looked up how I would do this
I used YouTube tutorials to guide me in creating a rough edit and it helped tremendously. Using these tutorials educated me further on using the software After Effects.
Practice 2
As well as the title sequence, I wanted there to be animations used throughout the documentary. I then looked into creating a drone-like map effect using After Effects. I used one tutorial to follow and my result wasn’t the best, but doing it gave me a better understanding on what I need to do in the future.
Practice 3
I also researched into how to create a glitch text. I wanted the glitch text to be a staple piece throughout the documentary and I needed to text creating it before hand.
All of these animations I practiced required a lot of attention to detail and without practicing them in my research stage I know I would have fallen behind and got frustrated during post production.
Idea Generation
When trying to decide on what we would do for our project, we came up with the idea of creating a documentary about YouTube. We came to this decision because we are all avid users of the platform. We then began to pitch names for the documentary and in the end we came up with ‘YouTube: Beyond The Screen’. Before we could begin generating more ideas, we needed to decide who our target audience is going to be. We each agreed that our target audience would not be children as we wanted the documentary to be educational and informative. When working in a group, it’s not always smooth sailing and people tend to disagree with each other, but we were lucky at this point as we were all in agreement. In order to brainstorm ideas I created a mind map, on this mind map I put in everything we could potentially talk about in the documentary.
After we all created our mind maps, we decided that we would split the documentary into different sections in order to separate our work. We came up with different section titles and assigned them to each other. My main section title was ‘The Influence on Kids’. I then began to create a mind map specifically for this section and within this mind map, I discussed the positive and negative effects that YouTube and YouTubers have on children.
Upon creating these mind maps, I learned what YouTubers I need to research in depth and what YouTube videos I should be looking at. Knowing this, I then created a mood board which shows what I will be using and what I intend on creating throughout the process. After hearing that creating a documentary was popular amongst our peers and a lot of people were planning on creating one too, we knew we had to have a unique selling point. We then realised that there is a YouTube Space in London, so we jumped on the opportunity immediately and booked a creator day for April 17th. After completing the idea generation process, we were confident in our project idea. We thought we could sustain a sufficient amount of research and produce an interesting documentary that stood out from the rest.
These mind maps were helpful for me to refer back to when I was completing my research. They gave me a reminder of what I needed to be looking into in my secondary research section. As you can see, in the larger mind map, I’ve included viral videos that I did research on and the controversies I looked into in the final edit. The smaller mind map which was constructed around my section was very helpful in reminding me about why these particular YouTubers are perceived as bad. Laying out my ideas in the form of a mind map was important to me because at any given time I could look back and recall what I needed to do and how I could elaborate on it.
Pre-Production
In my group I was assigned the task of writing up the pre-production paper work. So with this task in mind, I began creating the pre production paperwork ahead of schedule. I did this to ensure the paperwork was complete before we went to the YouTube Space. This was because our first production day was fairly quick into the FMP, which meant I needed to be fast with the paperwork.
As a group, collectively we booked out the YouTube Space in London. We bought Megabus tickets and found a time and date that was suitable for each of us to go to London. This needed to be done first as all of the pre production paper work is centred around our location on production day. We all wrote out an itinerary for the day after we had our tickets. This itinerary was helpful for us to understand what we would needed to do at each hour.
Equipment List
The first thing I did on my own was write up the equipment list, I thought this was essential as we needed to plan exactly what we needed to take to London. If we had forgotten anything that was crucial, it could have ruined a production day that we wouldn’t have been able to repeat. I also did this first because we needed to book equipment out from the college. The day we were going was during half term, so we needed to acquire this equipment before half term began.
Location Recce and Risk Assessment
I then wrote out the location recce for London which included a photograph of the area, a satellite image, and a written statement saying what scenes would be filmed here. I then moved on to the risk assessment of this area in order to determine what hazards we may encounter while travelling to London and while we were there. Doing this made me and my group aware of things that could go wrong and made us more alert to these potential hazards, which would help us avoid them.
Call Sheet
I created a call sheet which explained everything my team needed to know about production day. The call sheet included the time and date, the time and location we would be meeting, the location, the expected weather on the day and the equipment we would be using. This sheet was helpful to have before hand because if anyone needed to know any information, they could just refer back to the call sheet.
Budget and Cost
Most students production days were free since this is a college project and the equipment is provided without a cost. We were travelling to London, so our production day was not free. I created a list of expenses during the trip and the total for all three of us came to £198.75. Although we could have done something else that would require no money for the documentary, we wanted to get out of our comfort zones and create something that was unique from the rest. We all agreed that the money we used for the project would be worth it in the final result.
Script and Storyboard
The last two things that were created in the pre-production stage was the script and the storyboard. Unlike the other paperwork, this paperwork takes longer to complete.
At this stage, we all knew what sections we were editing, so we decided to script our sections individually. After our sections were scripted, we met up at Dans house in order to script the remaining parts of the documentary. We then scripted what each of us were going to be saying, but this part of the scripting process was more in a unified team. I preferred when we scripted together as we could all bounce ideas off each other and help each other out when necessary.
I then created a storyboard using Adobe Photoshop. The storyboard I created included the type of visuals we wanted to produce, the time scale of the sections, and the audio that was going to be used.
Overall, the pre-production stage went smoothly and because of this I don’t believe there is anything we could improve on. The paperwork was completed ahead of schedule, it had all the necessary information and it became a help to all three of us when moving on to the production stage.
Production
Our main production day was when we went to the YouTube Space in London. We did have a few other days that we recorded visuals and audio during the production process.
- Our thoughts on YouTube before the documentary.
- Interviewing Bird Keeper Toby.
- Going to YouTube Space London
- Recording Narration.
- Our thoughts on YouTube after the documentary.
Our Thoughts on YouTube Before the Documentary
This production day was one of the simple ones. We took my personal camera into the studio and recorded our unscripted opinions about YouTube.
This section was the only part of the documentary that was opinion based. We always wanted our documentary to remain as objective as possible, but we also wanted to show the viewers what our pre-judgements on YouTube were. If we were to do something similar to this in the future, I would have made sure our answers were longer and at one point towards the end included all three of us in the frame discussing YouTube as a whole.
Interviewing Bird Keeper Toby
We had scheduled a time and date to interview YouTuber Bird Keeper Toby over webcam.
We went into the interview with a list of questions to ask Toby and the interview turned out really well. Toby’s answers fit really well into the documentaries narrative and he was entertaining and informative as well. I think as a group we were professional and friendly when asking Toby questions and we got everything we wanted out of the interview and more. If I had to change anything, I think if we had more time we could have met up with Toby and interviewed him in person since he lives in England. I did however like the quality of the screen recording and thought the interview was a nice pace.
Going to YouTube Space London
On the 17th April 2019 we went to the YouTube Space in London. We arrived at London Victoria Coach station at 5am.
After arriving in London, we began filming every possible thing we could. We wanted more footage than we needed in case we needed it later on. The YouTube Space doors opened at 10am and we sat down in the cafe at the front of the building.
Surrounding us was various different YouTubers, either in business meetings, working on projects, or editing their videos. At this point we had been in the YouTube Space for awhile and hadn’t been able to acquire anyone to interview. We were originally hoping to interview staff there, but there was only one woman who was in this area of the building and she was working as the receptionist. We then decided that because there were so many YouTubers around us, we would ask them if we could interview them. After doing so, we were able to interview five different YouTubers. The only problem we ran into here was how loud the music was, given that this was a public area, we weren’t able to ask anyone to turn off the music. As well as that, there were a lot of people coming and going which meant we had a lot of background noise. Unfortunately, one of the YouTubers we interviewed didn’t make the final cut because the music was too loud over him talking and there was nothing we could do to resolve it.
We took a Rode Shotgun mic with us to London, but if we had taken a boom mic then we would have been able to get close enough to the subject which would have ultimately eliminated the background noise.
As you can see in the pre-production London itinerary, in London we wanted to interview the public and ask for their opinions on YouTube. We were supposed to do this at 1:30pm, unfortunately our time in the YouTube Space lasted longer than we originally thought which resulted in us not interviewing any of the public.
Although interviewing the public would have been a nice touch to the documentary, not including these types of interviews wasn’t detrimental to our finished product. Interviewing five YouTubers was unbelievable and we were happy to sacrifice interviewing the public in order to spend the extra time in the YouTube Space to interview the extra YouTubers. In my opinion, we made the right decision for our documentary.
Recording Narration
When it came to recording our narration we wanted to use the college studio. We took the time to book the studio during one of our audio lessons. Since every media and music student were eager to use the studio due to deadlines approaching, we only had this two hour slot to get our narration perfect.
Unfortunately for us, on the day of recording, we ran into several different issues in the studio. The first 10 minutes usually involves setting up the computers, speakers and equipment, but we ran into problems with connecting the microphone to the mixing desk. Attempting to resolve this issue ate into a lot more time than we wanted and we were left with just over an hour left to record. Once this issue had subsided, we opened up Audacity in the studio and attempted to record test pieces, however the programme was not picking up any sound waves, again after trying to resolve this and eventually opening up Logic Pro X instead, we were left with very little time to record a lot of narration. As the end of our session neared, we decided there wasn’t any point in recording anything as all of the issues resulted in us not having enough time to even test the audio levels. This left our group in quite a bad situation as there were no other time slots to book the studio and we needed to get the narration recorded in order to begin our edits. To over come this issue, we put our problem-solving skills to use and decided we would record our narration the next day at Dans house. Dan has a professional microphone and we had as much time as we needed to record the narration on that day.
We were worried that we would be behind on schedule giving the issues we had at the college studio, but quickly coming up with a solution and getting the narration recorded the next day put us right on track.
Our Thoughts on YouTube After Documentary
Again, just like the recording our thoughts before the documentary section, this section was one of the more simple ones. The process was exactly the same, using the studio, lighting and my camera to record ourselves.
Much like the other section, this one was also opinion based and was unscripted. If given the chance to do this again, I would have changed the location and had us all in frame at one point discussing what our current thoughts are. I liked the white background at first, but if we recorded in a bedroom it would give the audience more of a YouTuber setting and would relate to the documentary story.
Post Production
Post production was definitely the longest part for me. I used Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop to complete my edit. The first thing I had to do was arrange all of the footage we had taken during production into their own personal folders, which included the good takes and the bad takes. Doing this helped me a lot when I began my edit as everything was easy to locate and didn’t take up valuable time. Something I can improve on next time would be to set up a folder for the third party content I downloaded. As majority of the documentary included various different YouTube videos and screenshots, after downloading these I didn’t arrange them in any way and they sat in different sections on my laptop which made them hard to locate when editing.
Title Sequence
The next thing I did was start my title sequence. This title sequence went through a few different stages, but the end product was worth it. I began with just the polaroid images against the background. I also had the “Beyond The Screen” title in one of the polaroids during the first draft.
I then decided that I didn’t like this as I felt the documentary name deserved it’s own section of the title sequence. I came up with the idea of putting the name into an old TV screen and have it turn off before the polaroid images come into it. I liked the old screen as it fit in with my glitching text idea.
Now that I had my title sequence, I wanted to take it a step further and text my abilities in After Effects. I thought that doing this could be a risk and make me fall behind on schedule, but it was something I really wanted to do. I began watching various different tutorials in order to learn how to animate something entirely different, again this was a time risk because I wasn’t able to practice this during the research stage and began creating the real thing with no prior knowledge or practice. After spending a few hours on this edit, I knew it was coming together well and didn’t stop until I had finished it. The animation only took me a night to complete and didn’t make me fall behind on my schedule.
In the last animation I did, which was the YouTube play button, It reveals the TV glitching animation. I had to import the finished TV glitch edit in After Effects and attach it to the second edit. This was something I was happy to do as it would show me if the two animations fit together properly. After seeing that they worked well, I exported it and in Premiere Pro I added in the polaroid edit to the end of the title sequence. This whole edit was quite time consuming and if I was more organised next time and decided on everything I needed to do for the title sequence before hand, I wouldn’t have made so many changes that could have effected my schedule.
The Glitch Text
I then created the different section titles that were used to introduce the next topic of discussion. I used the glitch text for each of these title sections in order to keep the same theme throughout the documentary. Since we were all editing different sections separately, it could have looked like the different edits didn’t belong together, but this theme of glitching text tied everything together.
I think this worked really well throughout and is one of my favourite parts of the documentary. As this was my first time creating glitching text, now that I am more familiar with the techniques, next time I can challenge myself more and make the text look less basic.
The History of YouTube Edit
As this was the second edit I was assigned, but the one that starts the documentary, I wanted to include various different animations to make the viewers immediately interested. In my research in practice section, I was able to practice creating a done-like map effect, so I knew that this was something I wanted to include straight away as it’s snappy and good to look at. I was able to achieve a much better look on the actual edit than I did on my practice and this really pleased me. This then cemented what I already knew, that without the practice, the animations would not have been that great and would have resulted in frustrations during the most crucial stage.
This is the practice. 
This is the official edit.
Looking at the two edits, you can see a significant difference in them both. My practice edit is lacking in quality, and you can see where the lines are on the different parts of the map. The official edit is bright in colour, is good quality for what it is and you can’t see any joining lines. The text and the map pin are placed better in the official one as well. This further proves that practice is essential when you want to create something out of your comfort zone.
If I was to critique something in this section, it would definitely be the stock images used. The images worked well with what was being said, but I personally didn’t like how they would just play without a transition between. I felt this part could have been executed better and if I was given the chance again, I would have done things differently. I know next time that I will want to use various transitions that fit the scene in order to make going from one stock image to the next less boring.
I used an image I created in Photoshop and then animated in After Effects during this section as well. This edit was something I had no practice on and was a spur of the moment decision when listening to the narration.
I liked the idea of creating the YouTube page and being able to do whatever I want to it. I wanted to include on the side the other types of viral videos and I was able to create a zoom into the view count that was high quality and appealing to watch.
The Influence on Kids Edit
This was my main edit. Much like the other sections I was responsible for editing, I included some animations. A lot of the animations I created in this stage I haven’t discussed or gone into too much detail about because of their simplicity.
The first two of the screenshots above were created in After Effects. I wanted to show a visual of Jake Paul and Logan Paul moving from Vine to YouTube. This animation only lasts a few seconds, so I do wish this animation was in my mind before we recorded the narration, as I would have said my narration slightly slower in order for the audience to see the full effect of the animation.
The second screenshot you see was created in both Photoshop and After Effects. I liked how this one turned out because it introduces the person and the country he lives in through the visuals and the audio. Using the British flag was something I wanted to do because it will relate to the British audience that will be watching the documentary.
The last one was created in Premiere Pro using the position keyframes. Again, this one was just introducing the people to the screen in a slightly different way.
Although these animations are simple, I think they were effective in the sections I put them in as it was a change from the stock footage and stock images that were usually in the edit. Next time I want to plan out the animations I want to create before I begin editing. I came up with a lot of them on the spot and when creating them I did fear that I would be behind on my schedule.
Audio
The audio edit was assigned to Dan and he had to edit our narration for the documentary. I believe Dan did a great job in editing the audio, and we were all very pleased with the outcome of it.
When the whole documentary was edited and we pieced our final edits onto one timeline, we all decided on background music and sound effects. We scoured through YouTubes royalty free music and found music that matched the mood of the sections. Finding music that matched and was royalty free did prove to be difficult, but we managed to find what we were looking for after a lot of time. In order to keep consistency, we made the title sequence music fade onto the History of YouTube section, and we repeated some of the songs when appropriate. I believe we did a very good job in selecting music, and choosing it at the end together when the edit was done rather than individually throughout was a smart move as it made the documentary seem more professional with each sections music linking together.
Screening
I screened the final draft of the documentary to three of my lecturers. I began by going through my context page in order to explain what the documentary was about and why I decided to work in a group. After screening the documentary they then gave us feedback. The following is the positive and negative points they gave us.
Positive
Once the lecturers had watched the documentary, they mainly had positive things to say. They claimed that they enjoyed the pace of the documentary and that they could see that a lot of effort had been put into creating it. They thought the documentary seemed high quality and the overall edit was slick. Regarding our interviews, we were initially worried that they would pick up on the background noise at the YouTube Space, but they said that having the background noise gave it a natural public interview feel. They also liked the colouring of the documentary, especially the use of bright colours during my section ‘The Influence on Kids’, this is because the bright imagery matches the YouTube kids genre. Another thing they liked about the documentary was the consistency throughout, using the glitch text all the way through. Although one lecturer did question why it was a glitch effect when YouTube is modern, after explaining to him it was because it’s a popular effect vloggers use today he really liked the concept. They enjoyed that we spoke about the darker side of YouTube in regards to youtube controversies (Logan Paul suicide forest) but the main thing we were complimented on was that we were able to keep an upbeat tone and didn’t upset the mood as we were strategic with what we were showing on screen. One of the lecturers liked that I used Morgz as an example of a controversial YouTuber because he is British and it can relate to the audience and give them a close to home feeling. We were praised on how well the audio was, especially given the issues we had during production with audio. They liked how the audio remained the same volume throughout and that it was clear to hear what we were saying. As well as that, one of them picked up on the background music and thought it was great. They said that the subtleness of the music tied the documentary together and it wasn’t distracting. To finish off, they liked the end credits we used with the bloopers and thought it was a unique touch.
Negative
Even though the majority of things they discussed were positive, they did have some constructive criticism for us. One of the lecturers spoke about how the polaroid part of the title sequence was too slow for their liking. As well as this, they thought because we scripted our individual sections separately, that we needed more communication during this process. This is because during my section, ‘The Influence on Kids’ I talk about Logan Paul and his suicide forest controversy. Then in Cheye’s section, he also talks about this topic but they felt as if it was being introduced for the second time as though it was new information, instead of being continued on from the previous section. They thought when we talk about our unique selling point in the documentary, it made it seem as if our target audience was the lecturers marking the work. This is something I personally didn’t pick up on when we were scripting or recording, but it has made me think that I need to pay closer attention to detail next time I do this. Another thing they disliked was some of the screens becoming black during parts of the documentary. I know during some of my edit I included a black screen with a quote underneath and audio playing over, I thought this was unique and a clever way to move on to the next part of the edit, but next time I will think whether or not the imagery is important and should be there too.
We did receive some constructive criticism, but the lecturers thought this criticism was something to take on board the next time we work on a project, rather than having us go back and make changes to the final edit.
Final Evaluation
Overall, me and my group managed to achieve what we set out to do. We created a 32 minute short documentary that we were all very proud of. We managed to answer the main question of the documentary which was can YouTube be a career. We saw the effects that YouTube has on children and how controversies surrounding larger YouTubers often get swept under the rug and the actions of these YouTubers overshadow the positive actions of other smaller YouTubers. From the beginning, we wanted to be as objective as possible, but after the completing the documentary and hearing feedback, I do believe we weren’t as object as we initially thought. When discussing Jake Paul and Logan Paul, I only spoke about the negative controversies they had been involved in. I think if I was to do this again, I would research more into the positive things they have done on YouTube. In my mind map, I do have a section where I wrote about the positive impacts YouTubers have on children, but in my section ‘The Influence on Kids’, I don’t discuss any of these positive things, suggesting I’m not being as fair and objective as I wanted to be. I also agree with the lecturers when they said they felt as if the Logan Paul suicide forest discussion was repeated, rather than reintroduced. I know the problem was insufficient communication, so if I was to work with people again and do individual edits, I will ensure we communicate as much as possible and script the sections together to avoid any repetitiveness. Even though during our primary research we managed to get a sufficient amount of results from the survey, which led to us heavily discussing Logan Paul and Jake Paul in the documentary, my regret is that we didn’t do these interviews in person. It was difficult to get responses from children online, but since we each have younger family members we could have recorded them answering the survey in person. Since we had issues with our primary research because Dwr-y-Felin said no to the classroom interview, we did fall behind on our schedule but putting our heads together and coming up with a relevant solution allowed us to get back on track. I do wish we didn’t immediately assume that Dwr-y-Felin would say yes to us interviewing their students as creating the questionnaire and PowerPoint was time consuming and we could have put that time into other research. Thankfully, we did recycle some of the questions we were planning on asking these students and put them into our online questionnaire which didn’t make the first process entirely useless. Regarding secondary research, I believe I researched into everything I needed to in order to complete my sections of the documentary. Researching into the different documentary modes and looking into a documentary gave me a new insight into the production side of a documentary. Looking into different types of YouTubers and different styles of videos helped me understand YouTube on a different level. Because of this research, I was able to construct my section ‘The Influence on Kids’ with a lot of knowledge on YouTubers who’s main demographic is children. Looking into different YouTubers views and statistics helped me understand the money aspect of YouTube.
Overall, this project has taught me a variety of different skills that I did not possess before hand. As stated in my rationale, the first seven units allowed me to learn the basics of the Adobe software and become more comfortable. After completing this project, I’ve learned several new skills and acquired a better understanding on how editing and animation works. After Effects was a software that I wanted to master after previously using it to create a basic title sequence in another unit, watching tutorials and requesting advice from lecturers has helped me advance my skills in After Effects during the FMP. This project tested my time management skills as I had created a schedule I intended on following from the beginning. Sticking to this schedule was difficult on times as the project took different turns and I came up with new ideas, but overall I managed to complete my work during the time period I wanted to. Not only that, working on such a large project with two other people tested my team work skills. When working in a team, it’s not always easy to agree on everything and understand where the other people are coming from, but we chose each other because we knew we worked well together and always listened to each others ideas. The only issues we had as a team was not communicating enough when we were scripting our individual parts, but we all agree that not doing it together was a mistake and next time we will be sure to pay closer attention to each section of the script, together. During this project, I did encounter several different problems and at the time they were very challenging and frustrating, especially the college studio issue, but we were able to overcome them in a fast and professional manner in order to not fall behind. The final piece we produced is something we all worked tirelessly on and seeing the results and the feedback is something we’re all very proud of.
Final Product:
Below you can view the final product that was shown to our lecturers.
Han Williams 
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