Evaluation,

I had to create a three to five minute documentary about a topic or issue of our choice. I chose to my Documentary about the blood condition called Polycythemia Vera. I chose to do my project on this condition because I was diagnosed with it nearly 3 years ago in August 2017 and because it is a rare condition, I thought it would be a good idea to try and raise awareness of the condition and to show to people that you can still live a normal life with a long term condition, I believed that if I shared my own personal experiences and facts, I could do this successfully.

I decided that before I could make my documentary, I needed to do my research to understand what makes a good documentary. I watched Touching the Void and Being Elmo in order to find this out. Although these films are very different, they do share the some similarities in their conventions and both films gave a variety of shot types and interviews which along with what I learned class, gave me a good understanding of what I needed to include in my documentary. Since my diagnosis with Polycythemia back in 2017, I have familiarised myself with the facts and figures of Polycythema so when researching for this documentary, I found that I did not really need to research that side of it, instead I wanted to research other people's stories about living with Polycythema. This is something I have never wanted to do or have been interested in doing since my diagnosis back in 2017. I have never felt the need to do it and I felt hearing about people's bad experiences with PV would have caused problems in terms of worrying and anxiety for me. 

However, because I knew I wanted to do this documentary on Polycythemia, I felt it was necessary for me to understand how other people live with it and if their experiences are different from mine. And I found this research really interesting and helpful, I watched a few short films and documentaries on YouTube about people with PV and not only did it allow me to understand my other people suffer from PV in a different way than I do but I also learnt some additional information that I could also use in my documentary.  Even though I decided that I wanted my documentary to be about my own experience, It was eye opening for me to see that other people have had different experiences to me so this research was very helpful. 

This was not my first idea, I knew that I did not want this to have anything to do with puppetry, I wanted to try something different and explore another area of my life on this project. My first idea was going to be about the semi-final second leg of the Champions League 2019, where Tottenham came back from 3-0 down to beat Ajax in the dying seconds.

 I was going to interview Tottenham fans and use footage from the game. However I realised that this idea would not have been very interesting, especially to people who are not football fans, also only being able to use 10 percent archival footage was a big factor in me passing of this idea because the majority of my film would have been archival footage from that game. So I decided to pass on it. 

I've always wanted to be able to share my story with people and make them aware of what Polycythemia does and how it affects people and I thought this would be a perfect way to do that. WE previously held a charity fun day last August which raised nearly £14,000 pound for two charities, Clic Sargent and MPN voice which did make people aware but it never really told people my story which was I was interested in doing. 

I knew I wanted to interview four people in my documentary, my Mum, Dad, my sister Kacey and myself. I wanted to do this as we have all been through this together and I thought it would be really compelling for the audience to hear 4 separate accounts of the same story to see how it affected each one differently. Unfortunately out of the 4 interviews I planned on recording, I only filmed two. One with my mum and the one with myself. I regarded these as the two most important interviews as my Mum is a nurse and I wanted to get an interview with someone who has a medical perspective and a personal perspective and of course my perspective in my own interview as I have the condition. I only captured these two as I was nearly finished my documentary when I went to film them and I felt that there was not enough space to include two more segments of interviews so I decided it was not necessary. However in future if I make a documentary, I will make it longer in order to include more interview footage from more people

I filmed the majority of my footage on my days off from college, I just wanted to record my normal daily life so I would just set up the camera when I was doing something like watching TV and just let it film my reaction. I felt this would make it so much more authentic for the documentary than me trying to act happy or engaged in my normal day to day activates. I was very happy with my clips that I recorded however I spaced out my days that I would record which was a good idea but it also meant that I was still filming quite late into the process of the project so this is something in future projects that I will try to avoid. 

Overall I am very happy with how my documentary came out and I am delighted that I was able to share my story and make people aware of Polycythemia. This project also allowed me to discover and learn new skills such as interview techniques and helped me develop my editing and camera skills further.