One liner: A look at the day-to-day life of a freelancer and what happens when he decides to live for himself.
Abstract /hypothesis
I want to show how the effects of an unbalanced work/life balance negatively affect people, especially those who work from home. I'm also aiming to show how making changes to improve this balance is crucial to fight off burnout.
Expository information
My documentary focuses on the day-to-day routine of a freelance software engineer in Pakistan. There is a notion among certain groups that online workers do not work as diligently at home compared to going to an actual office, I want to explore this by looking at the number of projects a freelancer is working on at any given time as well the human aspect that comes into play whilst dealing with clients. Most importantly, however, I'm looking to show how at times these freelancers take on such a hefty workload, they barely have time for themselves, which causes severe burn-out that could lead to anxiety and depression.
Significance of the topic
The significance is to shine a light on the struggles of the newest generation of workers and show how vital it is to balance work with a person's own personal life.
Main Characters
The documentary's only character is Zobad. A freelance software engineer located in Lahore, Pakistan who works with both local and international clients. Zobad has been a freelancer for the past 4 years and slowly but surely Zobad sees himself facing heavy burnout due to his work. Because of this, he is losing interest in his hobbies such as reading and gaming and is no longer actively playing games with friends or writing for his own enjoyment due to either exhaustion or simply not having enough time.
Conflict/issue
Zobad is an adult and a member of society, and with that, there are obligations he must fulfil. He understands the necessity of working and earning a living to fend for himself but must that come at the price of daily exhaustion and losing interest in the things you love? Is it wrong for him to want change and not have work consume his life? When is time to put his foot down and change the way that he lives?
On camera interviews
No proper interview will be conducted. This documentary acts as more of a fly-on-the-wall type documentary.
Locations
Indoor; Zobad's office
Form and style
I want the monotony of working as well as how fickle motivation can be while working to be shown through editing and sound design.
Resolution
The journey of life and how problems are tackled are different for everyone, as a result, I doubt my ability to provide a satisfying ending that wraps up everything nicely, however, I do want to convey to the audience that the best way to get over a problem is to go back to your roots and dip your hands into things you once enjoyed but stopped due to other priorities in life.
Target audience
The target audience is people who are currently in the same position as Zobad, whether that be fresh graduates, freelancers, people going through burnout or all of the above.
show him tired af after work blue light hitting his face
have shots of him reading (sitting, standing, eating, walking)
Him lying in bed (ticking noise in background getting louder and louder and then on one tick eyes open and he gets out of bed)
comes into room again this time with notepad
starts writing stuff about book (plot, characters, etc.)
then show him writing on word
maybe do a time-lapse?
eventually he finishes
last shot him turning off computer (shot reverse shot of mouse and cursor)
end when he presses shut down
Equipment Images:
Camera: Canon Eos 550D w/ 18-55 mm kit lens
Phone: Samsung Galaxy A50 for additional photography + audio
Microphone: RODE Lavalier GO
Location Scout Images:
Post-Production:
There are three versions of the documentary. The first assembly; compiles and organises all the footage according to the initial outline I made. Being able to see a physical version of my outline was very useful, allowing me to have an understanding of the pace of my documentary as well as allowing me to essentially play around with what footage I had. This is the roughest version of the documentary with no real edits being made to it, essentially it acts almost like a storyboard for me to experiment with and try out different combinations of the footage. Feedback was received from tutors throughout each step of the editing process, in my case it would be after each iteration of the documentary. The first batch of feedback was focused more on the footage I had shot. It allowed me to change up my shot variety as well as understand how an outside party perceives the footage, though I would not start implementing this feedback properly until later on.
The second iteration of the documentary comes in the form of the rough cut. This condenses and optimises the footage placed during the first assembly. At this point in the editing process, the structure of the documentary is set in place, and I am able to focus on the other aspects of the edit. That being said I'm not very satisfied with how little I did during this iteration. I feel I was not critical enough of myself, and as a result not much changed between the first assembly and the rough cut. Instead, I was rushing to finish the edit and left myself feeling unsatisfied with the rough cut. Like the previous iteration, I was provided feedback on the rough cut, with this bath of feedback I'm thankful for the strict nature of my tutor that allowed me to really understand that there were glaring issues within my edit that needed to be addressed with proper care.
With that, we come to the third iteration of the edit, the final cut. This iteration has the most amount of changes in all aspects of the documentary. Firstly, is the major cutdown of all longshots within the documentary. While some of the shots would still be considered long they are not needlessly dragged out to fit the maximum 10-minute runtime, instead prioritising the purpose of the scene as I should have done from the beginning. Based on my inspiration and references I wanted to include lingering shots that allow the audience to sit with and truly absorb what was going on in the subject's life. With some additional shooting, the documentary now includes some insight from the main character. While my aim was to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary it became evident from outside feedback that insight was still required, both to connect with the main character on a deeper level and to provide a form of exposition. A lot was done with the documentary's audio within this iteration as well. Where previously the documentary only relied on the ambient sounds within the scenes, I had now decided to incorporate background music fitting with the emotions I was trying to convey within the scene. I also added new sound effects to enhance portions of the documentary that still used ambient noise. The most difficult part of this process was balancing the use of sound effects and background music so as to not overwhelm the audience with sounds, it was still important to have moments of stillness in which the audience was allowed to sit and feel the moment. After iteration 2 I felt strongly that the documentary ended too abruptly, with iteration 3 this concern was dismissed due to the changes I had made, I am much more satisfied with the end product as a whole thanks to these changes.
Reflection:
With the end product now completed I feel it's important to reflect on the process and discuss what I'm still not quite satisfied with as well as what I would have done differently if I had to do this again. To clarify I'm much more satisfied with the end product compared to what I had with iteration 2, however, I still feel like a lack of experience and planning led me to make a number of technical mistakes during the shooting process. These include some scenes being out of focus and certain scenes having too much camera shake. I also feel I was overusing the same angles and not adding enough diversity to the shot list, a large reason for this was due to a lack of a proper shot list before filming. The other technical issues I faced during shooting I was able to counteract to an extent in post, however in the future, I would prefer to catch and sort out these issues during production itself and not use post-production as a crutch to fix all my mistakes.
On the other end of the spectrum, I wish to also discuss some achievements I'm proud of. At this moment in time, this is the longest piece I've ever produced and I'm happy that I was able to keep it diverse but connected throughout the whole run time. In the audio aspect of the documentary, I experimented a lot with various equalisation settings and layering various sounds on top of each other. These were things I had seen done in commercial work and I'm happy to say I was able to implement it in my own work as well while piecing together the method myself with limited help.
Final Film: Pre-Production Synopsis: In the distant future, humans are gone. In their place, advanced androids, nearly inseparable from humans, live on and continue to maintain the Earth under the command and supervision of The System. That is until one android starts to exhibit strange behaviour. Story: Ergo is about a nameless android who follows the commands it's been issued by The System, it receives commands at the start of the day, to act like a human. It does this for a while, however, we learn that this is not the life the android wants for itself, it is capable of more but gets tied down by the System and its commands. However, through its own efforts, it works to go against the System and prove its free will. To take a closer look at its themes, with this film, I'm looking at depression and dissociation. There are a number of people who are living their lives the same exact way every day without change, not actually being present in what's happening in their live
Selected Image: All Unused Images For reasons, I'm not quite sure myself, I've always been interested in prison mugshots. Perhaps, it has to do with the history of the camera and how different groups of people viewed photography. Lecturer Liam French has stated, that the camera was "a tool for documenting reality" (Davidson, 2017). Law enforcement at the time took this opportunity to take photos of convicted criminals of all kinds and use them as a form of warning to the common people. A warning that these are what criminals look like and these types of people should be avoided. Naturally, this would lead to various forms of segregation, false claims and other such negative consequences that come from class divides (French, 2015). With all that being said, the main focus of my research was to look at the history of the camera and photography and explore the practical side of photography that most people wouldn't really think of, just to show that there are more si
