Life as a Police Officer - ID# 502
Batavia
Documentary
Entry Description
In high school you have to decide on what your career will be. You know the basics but never the deeper stuff. What more is there about being a police officer other then arresting people?
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/18 3:55 pm - KEEPERS: Good story idea in terms of attempting to bring to light all of the various jobs police officers are assigned to other than patrols. Your interview audio was consistent throughout the piece. The broll you had was well chosen/photographed. Due to confidentiality it would obviously be difficult to film more dynamic broll and I thought you did well here in spite of the likely restrictions. IMPROVEMENTS: From a story stand point, there is way too much going on in this documentary for me to follow. With the amount of interview subjects you have, this would need to be a much longer piece, and perhaps it is since rules state this can be an portion of a documentary. Regardless, this is such a broad topic and though did your best to tackle it in the time constraints, it would have been better to have focused in on 2-3 of your subjects and gone deeper into their individual stories. How have their positions evolved over time? How has policing evolved over time? How are they different on the job now than they were when they started? What have they learned and why? These are compelling questions that you can get into a bit more when you have less interview subjects. Your cutting of broll seemed paced the same throughout the piece. I wanted you to linger on some of the photos longer. Remember, we need to engage with the broll as viewers so we need to see things longer if you're going to use certain shots. For example, the police report images: highlight a section of text and have those on screen for a least as long as it takes you to read the selected text out loud. Broll always has the potential to be much more visually compelling than interviews so use that to your advantage. Learn how to animate you photographs with some slow scaling effects (the Ken Burns) effect to bring them to life a bit more. Add music (at least 2-3 songs) to give the piece more emotional life as the story unfolds. All in all, this was a good general topic but it needed more specific focus for it to work as a short form documentary.
- 2/25 1:16 pm - STORY: Life as a Police Officer is a very broad title, covering a very broad category. This seems to show the perspectives of a few officers in DuPage county as they tell their stories and explain what they do. But this is a massive subject to try and tackle in 4:41. Your documentary could have been more focused, perhaps instead of trying to tell this huge story, you could have focused on just 1 officer and his job, his life, his experiences. PRODUCTION: The camera work is the biggest problem here. The entire interview with the first guy is the same shot. It would be nice to have had at least another angle. The third officer standing in the same spot as the first officer was also a weak point. Better camera work and better lighting, or any additional lighting, would have improved the image quality here. As for the b-roll, some of the b-roll you used didn’t really match up with what people were saying. The b-roll needs to be relevant to the content.
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