Making The Documentary

Coming to a Concept
Out of whatever we saw there in Sandur that day something which really interested us was how there music and dance is intertwined with their work. How their recreation is self generated and sets a tone for their work all along the day. So we decided that we would document this entire system of how they come up with songs and how all the women join in to create a beautiful and healthy atmosphere to work in.

Planning
I think our first day experience really helped us to actually chalk out the entire plan for the documentary. We thought of bringing in different elements of their music together so as to give the full picture. So we went back to what we saw during our first visit.

• they were singing songs related to different things- weather, what they were making, then some festival, then a song of a lover etc.
• all of them seemed to know all the songs
  
• most of the songs had similar tunes and rhythms
  
• they instantly came up with this song of this girl trying on a belt, when one of us was actually trying on a belt
• all of them readily agreed to dance for us

so all these observations became a source of our questions as well as elements that our documentary needed to cover.

Location
We chose to work in the centre itself because our entire documentary centred around how their music and work was intertwined and centre was the most appropriate place so many women working on their traditional craft.

Documenting




One of the biggest advantages we had was that most of the women in the centre could understand as well as speak Hindi. So explaining to them , what we were doing wasn't that difficult. Though we did plan how and what we wanted to shoot , still a lot of our documentary was being built on the spot. Our questions to them were of course what we thought of but things like them making up a song on our bangles and them dancing to a song which was about we being there were just spontaneous and probably that marks the beauty of their culture.
It was our first experience in shooting so we did commit certain mistakes but I guess by the end of it we pretty much figured out what we had to keep in while shooting.

Editing
We used the Adobe software "Premier Pro" to edit our documentary. Until we started editing none of us had ever opened this software. So it was like a trial and error method which went on for an entire night before we could actually figure out how to edit a movie the way you want. It was quite a complicated process as we didn't realise that we were shooting from different cameras which had different settings. So it was only while we were editing we came to know that half our footage were to be converted into the same format and the same frame rate. After fiddling with these softwares for such a long time we finally finished our documentary just to start another day of shooting and editing with this time having no idea as to what needs to be done.

Feedback
There were specifically two things that were told to us for our documentary:

• There should have been subtitles especially when they were explaining the meaning of the songs. Since out entire documentary centres around music it was important for us that their meaning reach the viewers.
• another thing that we were told was that we were tyring to show too much in a very short time. like either we should have been in the frame for a longer time or shouldn't have been in it at all. we should have been more focused in terms of what we are capturing .