Production

Here I will be documenting all my production work.

Interview

I first began Filming my interview for the Documentary video with my friend Luke Hancock, who volunteered to participate for my documentary interview, as well as the reason being he also had read JoJo Steel Ball Run and suggested it to me in the first place.

We filmed the interview at his house, and set-up the interview spot within the kitchen.

I decided to go with two medium shots, taken from two different angles with each shot also focusing at different distances.

I used two Canon cameras as well as a H1N Zoom audio recorder for the interview, whilst using my Razer Nari headset to check and adjust audio levels before recording the interview.

I asked my friend some simple questions regarding the topic of JoJo, although I did have some technical difficulties as the batteries on one of the camera's had nearly ran out of charge and was not compatible with the charger I had on hand, as well as the camera's stopped recording mid interview even when the SD card had a lot of free space for the footage, Luckily I was able to rectify this later by re-recording the interview over discord using OBS. (I only recorded my own microphone and discord audio whilst using OBS).

With OBS, I was able to isolate the audio from the recording into different audio layers through the output settings, I then went into the advanced audio properties to make sure that each audio source would go to a different audio track. I currently have it set to three audio tracks as it makes it easier for my gaming videos that I do.

For future projects I hope to better understand how my equipment works and make sure to double check them before I do an interview in the future.

Narration

I began writing a prototype of a script, which I used as a base for what I was roughly going to narrate within the documentary video, the Script can be found in the Pre-Production page.

Once I had made the base script, I then went into a recording studio located within the college and begun doing several different narrations for my documentary.

After several attempts with the audio recording, I finally got the audio I needed for my Project and exported it into a .WAV file an uploaded it onto my activate learning account to be able to access it remotely from home to splice it for the documentary.

Ending

Originally I was going to do an opening sequence, but I decided to scrap it in the end and replaced it with an ending sequence.

The ending sequence was made to be similar to an actual JoJo ending theme, with the song of choice being I'll be lucky someday by Glen Campbell.

The reason I chose this song specifically is that it is a very fitting song for Steel Ball Run's main character Johnny Joestar, and for this I decided to make the ending theme be a sort of summary of Johnny's life and journey.

From when he becomes crippled, to his past and regrets, to the death of his friend, to finally him carrying his friends coffin to take him home via a boat.

I began editing the video together using royalty free footage from pexels of the American wild west with locations such like the grand canyon and other locations that appear in Steel Ball Run like San Diego Beach and the Mississippi as further examples.

I also have been editing together pieces of the original manga within the ending as well for some sequences and used some opacity and crop edits along with panel panning and the use of Premiere Pros video transitions.

I also decided to step it up by using Adobe Photoshop as well, using it to edit panels of the manga or outright cropping characters from the panels, I also used a content aware filter to edit out either text bubbles and auto fill in cropped spaces to make the edit not look so sloppy.

I also used some footage from the Holy Steel opening as well as some animations done by an animator by the name of RawazFHK for some sections of the ending.

For the ending I used an animation of Johnny on a boat facing towards the sky and have it transition to a landscape image of the ending panel of the Steel ball Run manga with a image of Johnny with his eyes closed with the opacity of him set to 77% to give him a faded appearance with his friend behind him like a spirit, with the screen changing to a hue of yellow with a simple position animation of the TO BE CONTINUED arrow from the JoJo anime appearing from the bottom right off screen and quickly panning to the left side of the screen, before fading to black with the music.

There are many parts of the ending where I also used Gaussian Blur and as well as some of the Immersive video transitions within the ending as well for more smoother sequencing of some scenes and panels.

This ending sequence was enjoyable to create for the documentary and I found it to be the most enjoyable part of the project.

Documentary Video

I began editing my documentary after collecting the previous documented footage/ audio using Adobe Premiere Pro.

I first began collecting the various audio recordings I did for the documentary video, this being the narration audio as well as the audio from my interviews. And began splicing them together for better fluidity of both the narration and interview to the best of my abilities.

I also used footage from one of those interviews as well before the actual interview as a means of introduction to the interview.

As well as including interview footage, I had the start of the video act as an introduction to the topic of the documentary, detailing what I will be talking about whilst including information relevant to said topic, with a few examples being who the author is, it's placement on most sold manga series, popularity on websites that catalogues peoples interest's and reviews on said topic. The topic being the manga series known as JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run.

I did some more audio edits to my documentary. With these being overall reducing background music whilst also increasing the narrative audio along with the interview audio. For the background music I used an instrumental version of the fan made JoJo OP named 'Holy Steel' for the introductory part of the documentary, with the music later fading away, replaced with the beginning melody of Friedrich Habetler's version of 'Johnny's theme', and I was able to loop the opening melody with a simple audio transition technique using the transition called 'Constant Power'.

I then started to add the Holy Steel animated opening of the background of the documentary, using gaussian blur when addressing something related to Steel Ball Run, so that it may be distracting. Within the video I use lots of imagery from the manga as well as previous works or Araki when I talk about his evolution in art style.

I began editing in the interview as well as having images and text on the screen, the images showing my channel logo and screenshot of my friends face with a question above showcasing what question I am about to ask him.

When my friend begins to answer the questions, I use related imagery and animated videos to visualise what he is talking, like what character he may be talking about or particular fight or scene.

The Documentary is rather short and due to certain events, the video finishes at the four minute mark, but I did want to show off the ending sequence I made, so I added in the ending sequence that I made specifically for this project and had the entire thing rendered and uploaded to youtube.

It Was difficult but I was finally able to upload this, though personally I think the documentary last year is still better than this one.