Starting to edit (again!).

Last Tuesday (6th May) began the editing process again. I imported the clips onto Premiere Pro which took longer than expected, then I sorted the interview into bins, so when I was going back to each clip, it would be a lot easier to find it. So Tuesday was more of a logging and organizing day for me.

Wednesday afternoon (7th May) after another class was when Caoimhe joined me and we started clipping and cutting pieces together. We're both really happy with the footage and the way it's visually told on screen that it sometimes kills me having to cut something up, even though I know I have to do it due to time constraints.

We have a lot of information from Richard's interview that we can't all possibly fit in to five minutes which is a shame but as we were editing, we decided to try and keep in the information about parmesan cheese in because we are assuming that most of our audience don't know that this particular cheese isn't actually vegetarian, despite restaurants serving it as vegetarian. We want our audience to walk out of the audience finding out something new, and we think this will do the trick.

We also have some really nice shots of Richard talking about the Vegetarian Society and labels on food and as I was shooting this on the day, I moved in to see the labels and it auto-focused for me. We're using these shots because the audience will be aware of the different types of labelling in stores and we think it's something that some people may not be aware of.

On the Thursday (8th May), we showed Sharron our rough edit and I would say she was quite pleased with it. Caoimhe and I came up with some other titles because we personally didn't feel like "Green Beans and Everything In Between" fitted the documentary anymore. These titles were "Suitable for Vegetarians", "Vegetarian Options Available" and "A Vegeducation". However, talking with our tutor, she thought the title added quirkiness to the film and if we made the start quite quirky too, it would fit in quite well. We also had a lot of footage of Richard talking about the cheese which I didn't really mind but after our tutor telling us that the audience may start to think the film is about cheese, we thought it was best to cut it down but still have an appropriate amount of information still in there so the audience can understand why it's not vegetarian. 

Because of other on going projects during the week, we know from Thursday, we will not get any time to do another edit or go out filming apart from possibly next Wednesday afternoon so we do intend on editing more next Thursday (15th May) during class while the tutor is going over other people's work. 

Extended Research.

Over the month of April, I went vegetarian myself, to see what the life of a vegetarian would be like, the food challenges they face and the questions they were asked. Because I was only doing it over a month, I probably got more questions than your average vegetarian who had been doing it for quite a while, would get within one month.

My family questioned it and asked me why and when I explained my reasoning behind it, they were considered that I would have even less to eat because of the amount of foods I already have to take out of my diet because I have to live a gluten-free lifestyle (which I have talked about briefly before).

I got a lot of questions from my friends in class, and some weren't so much questions, more questioning why I was doing it. A lot of it was joking and usual class antics which I didn't mind; if I said something was wrong with me like I was tired or something along those lines, someone would say "well that's what happens when you're a vegetarian". Of course I know these were all jokes and I'm totally fine with that, I didn't get offended, this was part of the process that I wanted to explore while going vegetarian. I got told a few times that "we all need meat, it's essential" and because I wasn't 100% on the nutritional benefits on eating meat and not eating it, I couldn't exactly agree my point to its full potential. However, I did have my producer on my side the entire time, chiming in and defending vegetarianism whenever she could. Even though she wasn't doing the vegetarian month with me, she also feels quite passionate about defending vegetarianism because we feel that it is criticized too much and for no good reason.

With coursework and filming giving us hardly any time to do anything else, I didn't feel I had the time to fully prepare for my vegetarian month, which is a shame, because if I had've prepared, I think I could have made some really nice recipes throughout the month. I had beans on toast at least every other night, which could really boring, really quickly. I still ate my salads with either pasta and quinoa, I just didn't have meat in them. I never ate a heavy meat lead diet so nothing changed dramatically, but when I was missing meat from my plate, I just added more vegetables or side salad. Most of the food I ate regularly like fruit, vegetables, porridge, milk, beans, bread, muesli and smoothies were already vegetarian, so as I said before, I didn't have to change anything too dramatically.

It was quite an eye opening experience; with the comments from family and friends, combined with looking at the back of foods (more than I already have to) I was surprised to see what foods were and weren't vegetarian. I did slip up a few times during the month but with the same food; I had a milkshake a few times during the month with mini marshmallows and all three times, I ordered it, drank it and only after I had drunk it that I realized that I shouldn't have had the marshmallows. Normally I would have given up at that point but I wanted to stick with it because it wasn't a huge slip up, and it was a learning curve for me too.

I'm really happy that I went vegetarian for the month. I learnt a lot more doing it in actuality then just reading about it online, I was able to experience first hand some of the questions Richard had been asked before too, and I was able to discover foods that I thought were vegetarian but weren't, and vice versa. It really helped me understand my subject more and I wouldn't rule out being vegetarian in the future either.

Starting the editing process.

The next week I stayed in college after class to look over footage and to do a quick little edit on the smoothie and LUSH pot cutaways. But before doing that, I split up the interview to make it easier to edit later on. The lighting was a huge problem unfortunately and looking back on the day, I don't understand why I thought it would be a good idea to place her in front of the window. Maybe I just got over excited that I was finally starting the filming process for the documentary, but I tried to change it in Premiere Pro but it wasn't really working. The framing was just slightly off, I thought I had picked a tighter shot so when I seen the back door in shot, I was annoyed because on the camera on the day, I hadn't been able to see it at all.

I was really happy with the sequences I had filmed though, but whether or not I use them in the final film had yet to be decided.

Day Two: Smoothie and LUSH cutaways.

The next day I thought I would film myself making a smoothie to show that vegetarian food doesn't have to be boring. I know that a smoothie is very rarely unsuitable for vegetarians, but I thought it would be quite nice to film the process then speed it up to use possibly at the start or towards the end of the documentary.

Normally a smoothie takes me about ten minutes altogether to make but filming it, it took just under a hour because I had to make sure everything was in shot and I was cutting appropriately because most of the shots I had to do in one take, or else I would've been cutting up unnecessary fruit and wasting it.

After the smoothie, I thought I would take the good chunk of my LUSH pots and do a similar shoot. I would also speed this up in post-production and it would come out like a stop motion piece, which I'm very interested in. I had originally thought of doing a stop motion animation in the documentary but due to the large quantity of other work going on, I didn't feel like I would have enough time to do it, and do it properly. So doing this, it made me feel like I was still adding something different to the documentary, even if it doesn't get used in the final film. 

One of the main reasons I wanted to do the LUSH pots was because we had asked Lindsey a few questions about LUSH and she had talked it about it so we were thinking of putting this (sped up) in over her talking about it.

Pitching Time!

Thursday (27th March) was pitching time! We had briefly gone over what we were going to talk about in the pitch on the day, just to keep it fresh in our memory. Below is a photograph of Caoimhe and I after our pitch and you can see our t-shirts.

On Caoimhe's t-shirt, I wrote "Vegetarians Do Eat..." because a lot of people think vegetables just eat vegetables so I listed a number of different foods (including vegetables) below this and on the back of the t-shirt, I drew and coloured in a few foods.

On my t-shirt, I wrote in big letters "What is a Vegetarian?". This was my first idea for the documentary; I wanted to dispel the myths and find out from vegetarians themselves what others think when they hear they are vegetarians. So on the front and back, I wrote questions and phases that vegetarians are likely to hear when people ask them about being vegetarian. 

For our pitch we talked about a number of different topics:

The title: "Green Beans and Everything Inbetween", I actually give credit to Pearse for this quirky name because he came up with it and we thought it wasn't a generic name for a vegetarian documentary but it was enough for people to be interested, just by the name.

Subjects: Lindsey Mitchell and Richard Andrews. We spoke very briefly about how we were glad to have a man and a woman involved so we could get two different perspectives. Richard has been a vegetarian since he was born, so he didn't choose the choice to be vegetarian, whereas Lindsey did make the choice so it will be nice getting those two different sides too.

Audience: We want these to go out to a wide range of audiences. We want people to watch this who are skeptical of the vegetarian lifestyle or don't know much about it. We want people who are interested in getting involved in becoming a vegetarian. We want vegetarians to watch and feel like they're not dislocated from society like a select few make them feel.

Research: I feel our research has been strong; we watched a film called "Vegan Love" about a guy who wanted to make a documentary about his best friend who was vegan, and trying to find a vegan girlfriend. I also ordered a lot of resources from the Vegetarian Society including leaflets, pamphlets and posters which I had posted about before. 

Themes: Both our themes and locations are heavily dependent on our questions and our subjects answers. Our themes include whether it is their choice to be vegetarian or not, their lifestyle, the reaction of friends and family, common myths and their experiences eating out and shopping.

Locations: As I previously mentioned, this will be dependent on our subjects answers. For example if Lindsey said to us, she did it for the animals, we would go somewhere like Streamvale Farm and get a few shots of the baby animals. However, if she said she did it for the health benefits, we would get shots of health food shops. A few examples of locations are; Holland and Barrett, St. George's Market, Streamvale Farm, supermarkets.

Interview locations at this point are depending on shooting dates; we have Caoimhe's house and my house down as possibilities but when we know when both subjects can film, a decision on interview locations can be confirmed.

Shooting Dates: We were thinking the 4th or 5th April for Lindsey's interview and 8th April or 12th April for Richard's interview and then going on the 13th April for cutaway shots once we watch the interviews back. We feel this will be much more productive due to time restraints, instead of going to get a lot of cutaways at all different places, at least if we know their answers, we can base locations off them.

I was really happy with how our pitch went; we had an innovative idea with the t-shirts and no-one had the same idea. It stood out, it was memorable and we were able to explain how our original idea started in a more colourful way.

Pitching Ideas for our Pitch.

Tying in with our morning meeting; after lunch Caoimhe and I sat and discussed possible ideas for our pitch next Thursday (Thursday 27th March). We're working around the vegetarian ideas and because real food is fruit and vegetables, this displays lots of bright colours and we wanted our pitch to be creative as possible. We found it difficult at first trying to think of ideas, but we came up with some good suggestions as to what we could plan.

With the pitch being next Thursday, we don't want to spoil what we will be in our pitch because then the judging panel (two of our tutors) wouldn't be surprised because they may have read our blog. We plan to post photographs of what will be involved in the pitching process and how we intend to grab their audience, once we have actually completed it.

Our Fourth Meeting.

Myself and Caoimhe had another very successful meeting yesterday morning (Thursday 20th March). We first had a meeting with our tutor to discuss how we have progressed throughout the week; we spoke about meeting up with Lindsey and how she was excited to talk about all the various aspects of being a vegetarian, not just the food side of things. We also said how we were planning on meeting up with Richard (another person who said they would like to be involved) on Monday morning.

Our tutor gave us the idea of just concentrating on Lindsey and learning more about her life and her hobbies. While I think this is a great idea, this would change the whole dynamic of the documentary and possibly become unlinked to our 'dislocation' theme. My original plan was to interview people and get their views on why do they think they are being judged for choosing this lifestyle, what problems with people have they encountered, do they think being vegetarian gets easier, why did they start and how did they start. These would just be a few of the questions but I was stream lining it on the fact that we were learning about the vegetarian lifestyle and that anyone who had had reservations about vegetarians or didn't actually know about the lifestyle, would watch the documentary and find out that it's not just about eating vegetables. However, if we just concentrate on one person and their life outside vegetarianism, I start to question what our documentary would even be about. I'm really passionate about learning more about the lifestyle because it's something I have wanted to learn about for a few years and if I can help even a little on reducing the stigma on it, then I will be happy and feel like I have created a successful documentary.

Production Folder Links.

This post will be used for me to post links to research and articles that I find online to print out at a later date for our production folder:

1. [19/03] (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)

Our Third Meeting.

Our third meeting happened the very next day (Thursday 13th March) with our tutor. We updated up on the interest we had had so far, and that we had already planned to meet up with one of the subjects the following week.

We also discussed our idea of the opening of the documentary having us look online and typing in "vegetarian" onto various search engines, and all that comes up is vegetables. This is to lead in to what I wanted to know, is vegetarianism just about vegetables? Our tutor gave us an idea though; she said to use photographs or video that we take ourselves with markets and shops and to create a montage using my original "is it all about vegetables" idea.

Overall, I'm really pleased with our progress so far. We were a little worried we would come to class with no one interested but that quickly changed on Wednesday and I couldn't be happier.

Second Meeting.

In our second meeting (Wednesday 12th March) we looked over the research resources I had received the week before as well as reply to two responses we had received that morning. We also wrote up a short letter to politician Jim Wells because we found out that he is vegetarian himself. We haven't currently sent the letter yet because we have had quite a few responses so we were using that as a back up plan but we thought it was a good idea to write it up anyway.

Research Heaven!

The Vegetarian Society are a registered educational charity and have resources from little recipe cards right up to big posters for individuals, schools or parents to order for free. On the order form you have a huge number of options to choose from and there's no minimum or maximum limit to choose from, so you have as little or as much information as you wish. Everything I ordered arrived this Thursday (6th March) and I was shocked (The good shocked!) at how much resources there was, I don't remember everything I ordered, but I was blown away.

Below is a picture of everything I received then I do smaller group photographs of the leaflets/posters and books.

(Everything laid out together)

• Book One: Vegetarianism, a Project Book for Schools that contains nine recipes, a revision sheet, what a vegetarian is and why and information about nutrition.

• Book Two: Serving Vegetarians, this is geared towards restaurant, cafe and caters but if you have friends, family or even your children's friends coming over and they are vegetarian, this is a helpful tool. It contains six recipes, ingredients and meal suggestions and information about working with the society.
  
• Book Three: Veggie Kids' Kitchen, a book for children and young adults that they can read with their parents. It includes ten recipes, safety and hygiene tips for the kitchen and breakfast and lunch ideas for the lunchboxes. 

• Booklet One: Going Veggie... for the taste, that says "these recipes have been developed by chefs at the Cordon Vert Cookery School to inspire you to get cooking. Mouth-watering and satisfying, they each offer a balanced main meal with plenty of protein, iron and other essential nutrients". It contains seven recipes altogether.
  
• Booklet Two: Going Veggie..., is the essential guide for people starting to look into becoming a vegetarian. It includes what a vegetarian is, the first steps, what to buy on a big shop, misconceptions about some products, nutritional advice and information about their approved trademark.

• Three food comparison postcards comparing the nutritional values of certain foods that contain iron, protein and Vitamin B12. 

• Mini Book One: Veggie Guides for Teens (half of the book is for teenagers and when you flip it over and turn it around, the other half is for parents) is for both teenagers and parents. On the teenager side includes what a vegetarian is, tip for success in your new lifestyle, questions that people may ask you to challenge you about vegetarianism and a mini poster about nutrition. On the parent side it contains talking to your child, what you can cook and a helpful starting point for parents.
  
• Mini Book Two: Young Veggie Guide, is aimed at young children and children coming into their teenage ages. It includes a step by step guide into easing into vegetarianism, advice on how to eat when you're not at home, why people are vegetarians and three recipes.

• A pamphlet on the welfare of animals during the Christmas season.
  
• Four large bookmarks with a vegetarian nutritional food plate on the front and on the back of these, is a different recipe.

• A large sheet of pull out cards to give to restaurants and cafe with information on how to make their dessert menus more accessible to vegetarians (with many places not stating whether their desserts are vegetarian friendly or not).

(The front of one of the pull out cards)

(The back of one of the pull out cards.)

• Mini Book One: Meat-Free Made Easy, containing six recipes, a meal planner, ideas for sandwiches and more about the society.
  
• Mini Book Two: Why it's green to go vegetarian, includes information on how becoming vegetarian lowers your own environmental impact.

• A letter from the Vegetarian Society thanking me for contacting them and telling me more about their company.
  
• Mini Book: Healthy Eating for Vegetarians, gives you information on the benefits on a vegetarian diet as well as particular nutrients, a food plate guide, the special needs teenagers, children and pregnant women need and how to become a member of the society and the benefits.
  
• A Folded Poster: V-Healthy, a healthy eating plan with a meal plan and tips and advice on how to do shopping on a budget.
  
• A pamphlet: V-Healthy, this contain six recipes to go along with the eating plan in the bigger poster of the same name.

• An A1 poster of food comparisons with the nutritional values of food vitamins (Very like the food comparisons on the postcards).

• An A1 poster of food comparisons with the nutritional values of food (Very like the food comparisons on the postcards).

(A1 Poster: Enjoy Life, Enjoy Great Food)

• Three A2 posters (held down with other booklets because they were curled) with three different photographs used with the slogan "Your Future Matters")

In terms of research, I know this is just the starting point but I'm so happy with how much information I have that a charity was able to provide! If you want to find out any information about the Vegetarian Society, visit them at http://www.vegsoc.org