"A Northern Karate School Documentary

From the people who brought you snitch, this movie kicks it up a whole heck of a notch. We are proud to announce that this film documentary, being a Scope-Films first came out better than planned.

For our final evaluation for Communications Technology this year, instead of an exam we had to make a documentary on something community related. After a while of debating which topic to tackle, we decided on Northern Karate School and it's attributes to the community.

This was made over a span of about three months with numerous visits down to NKS for interviews and cut-in footage. It was finished last week and we are very proud of the result." - Scope-Films.com

Anyway, tell me what you think.

http://www.scope-entertainment.com/cinema/film.php?48
http://www.scope-films.com/?film=mind_body_spirit

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"Me? I'm dishonest. And you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones, you want to be afraid of."

the narration makes it comes off as a really long commercial instead of a documentary. the commercial aspect is accentuated by the still pictures and moving graphics.

there's no element of a story at the beginning there. documentaries usually have an even stronger narrative structure than plot-driven movies because they need to rely on the journey to keep the audiences attention.

10 minutes is an awful lot when you're not focusing on something particular, try for shorter documentaries. you could have cut off the whole beginning and focused just on the guy that runs it. he could have told us about karate history. if you're going to narrate karate history, you should have some old pictures and stock footage of japan to back it up. showing pictures of kids make it seem like you're trying to entice kids up for lessons by talking about the history.

the audio drops out really bad as well, but that might just be the online transfer to my browser.

i don't know what you had to use for the pictures, so if you could clear that up, maybe i can give you some pointers on how to not have it get so pixellated.

but good job trying to put something like this together. not a lot of people like documentaries, but it takes tremendous balls to try and make one. and when you do one right, they'll remember them more that the dramatic films.

Great job! Very informative. The footage of the students working out was very cool. And the mock mugging was hilarious! (I know it wasn't intended as such, but I enjoyed it) The graphics were also very good. I liked the way the information was presented, starting with the history and meaning of Karate, then the training of karate, then finally the benefits not just to the person, but to the entire community. I really enjoyed the synchronized movements they did when practicing–nice touch!

The biggest criticism I have is that the B-roll often didn't directly relate to the VO. I was listening to one thing and watching something else. It was a little distracting. For example, you twice showed the weapons corner, but never talked about the weapons (doesn't 'kara te' mean empty hand?).

Now, if you want to hear my technical nit pickings, why did you have the first third of the VO narration panned all the way to the left? Strange choice if you did that intentionally. Further, the recording of the VO left something to be desired (did you sweeten it at all?). The pan and scan pictures didn't work for me as much because there was too much movement and too much black space. I wanted to see fullscreen pics (that may be the small size over the internet), and often they had little to do with what the VO narration was describing. Finally, the popular music also didn't work for me. It just didn't seem appropriate for the piece (it broke up the natural rhythm of the documentary.

I know I wrote more negative than positive, but I really did enjoy it. (there's only so many ways you can say that) Thanks for sharing and thanks for asking for feedback.
joren

www.JorenClark.com || The Wallet @ ReWind