1. Review for our documentary that’s about the origins of the Lewis chessmen.
In this project I produced a short documentary about the Lewis Chessmen with the British Museum
and Chocolate Films. My documentary is targeted at the people who visit the museum and to those
who might want to learn more things about the Lewis chessmen. The Lewis chessman is a group of
78 12th-century chess pieces that mostly carved in walrus ivory.
For our research we did secondary and primary research on the codes and conventions of short
documentaries. So I and my group can understand how to make a successful documentary. we
watched several different kinds of documentaries that had gave us an idea on what makes a good
documentary. We watched very popular documentaries that were very well known and very well
produced, for example super-size me (fast food documentary) and Tupac Shakur's that was created
after he’s death. We also watched documentaries that were on the British museum website that was
based on the Lewis chessman itself. We also watched documentaries that were very extraordinary
for example Pong and apology line. This helped us understand what sort of things a good
documentary will need when making.
I learnt that some conventions of documentaries are visual styles these are interviews (talking
heads) and exposition. The interviews (talking head) were of the curators and the public these
interviews help us with our primary research and secondary, as you have the curators who have
already learnt about the Lewis chessman and the public who some know what they are and some
who don’t. The effects of interviews (talking heads) are that it helps our audience understand more
easily about the origins of the chess pieces. An exposition is at the beginning of the documentary
this gives the audience there thought of the documentary. The effect of an exposition is that its
starts and shows the theme of our documentary to what type documentary it is to our audience.
The reason for choosing these conventions was because I found them for more professional and
more suitable for our documentary. Talking heads and exposition have a wide effect to our
documentary as they both bring interest to audience and make it more clearly for our audience. I
find that they both are the most important part of a documentary as talking heads helps show other
opinions and different opinions, exposition brings the begin more live and sets our theme for
documentary.
The visual style for our documentary was what you see the mise-en-scene, for example the locations
to background etc. This shows fits well with our documentary and what best for the documentary.
Our visual style was very formal and was very clear as we had ours in the actually area where the
Lewis chessmen are placed in the museum. This shows the audience were the key information is in
the British museum about the Lewis chessmen.
We all had to plan out our documentary before we even started it by pitching each other’s ideas on
a storyboard. The storyboard consists of the type of shot types and drawing of how our
documentary will turn out to be. The storyboard starts from what will happen in the beginning and
what happen at the end, each step we explained what will happen and what shot types will be using.

2. Than we all created a plans for example we made up 10 suitable questions that we will give to the
interviewers when we’re interviewing them, we choose the best ones as a group and use them in
our documentary.
The pre-production tasks I undertook to help with making the documentary was that I helped create
the end of the storyboard, these was useful as it gave our group a visual image of how we wanted
our documentary to look and it help us figure out what shot type is better for what. The storyboard
is one of the important parts of our planning as it was the rough idea on how we were going create
the storyboard. Without a storyboard we would have find it more difficult for us to create our
documentary.
The things that went well for our researching and planning was very much our secondary research as
it helped us find out more information about the Lewis chessmen. The secondary research was used
in documentary when the curators gave in the input into the question we asked them, the curators
know nearly everything about the chess pieces as they have already studied them. The curators
were the information to our documentary.
Our decision making was good, however to storyboard we didn’t manage to make up our mind on
which storyboard was most suitable for us to follow and use to help us create the documentary. We
manage to choose one at the end, however our decision making took a bit of time and
disagreements throughout it.
As a group we all choose what we liked the best and what we will use for our documentary.
Everyone in the group had responsibilities and roles to do, we all swapped roles every lesson we
worked on it, so everyone participates with our documentaries fairly. For example we worked on
things like editing, creating bins, creating music, exporting documentary etc. This help everyone gain
new skills and better editing skill, this will help everyone individually in the future. Our time
management was very good as the more we have everyone doing something at the same time the
more quickly we finish our documentary. We will always have one person that check over to see if
there are any errors or any jumpy parts that needs to be fixed. This helps us stay organised as a
group and also helps with our time managements. There were some errors that needed to be fixed
as our music became very jumpy and we had missing footage at the end of our documentary that
needed some fixing. At the end of our documentary we thought it would have been a better idea to
add extra footage of an interview, in the interviews we used our teacher and a student to act like
they were the public. This made our documentary look better as we didn’t have enough public
interviews.
Our documentary had very good shot angle and good shots used in it, the lighting was very good and
the changes of footage worked out really well as it was very visual and clear. This bad things about
our footage is that we could of have a bit for interviews from a different curator as we had the same
curator talking through it majority of the time and if we had more public interviews of the people
being film next to the chess pieces.
Our editing was very successful as all of our footage fitted in very well and manage to make our
documentary look very well place together. As a group everyone manage to learn something new
that haven’t learnt when it comes to editing, this will help us letter when our editing skills are
needed.

3. Our documentary suited our target audience as it was for people who wanted to learn about the
chess pieces, and our documentary would teach others about the origins of the chess pieces as we
had the entire question that they would generally want to find out about the Lewis chessmen. It also
provides more information that was on the side if people wanted to know more.
At the end as a group we each gained feedback from other people that weren’t a part of our group.
We got told that we could have improved minor parts of our documentary, for example our music
repeating over and over again throughout the whole documentary. However they said majority was
well created and edited together.