July - Bea and I came up with the idea for our short film, two sisters who had run away from home living on the streets. Our short film would simply be an event in their lives, we kept it simple. We wanted the eldest of the sisters (Sophie) to go to the local shop and buy something with the coppers they had got from begging. In the shop she would come across a mother and her son buying loads of food and paying with large notes, the audience would see her reaction to this and hopefully they would sympathise with her. Over the top of these shots the youngest of the two sisters (Lilly) would act as a narrator, describing how much she loves her sister and all she has done for her, but with-holding their true circumstances until they join up at the end, with (Sophie) bringing her some food.
We wanted the audience to feel shocked and saddened by what the sisters had gone through but to feel enlightened by the love they had for each other.
We planned to film in the summer holidays...
But due to lack of organisation we failed to do so.
September - After the summer holiday our thoughts had wondered and we were no longer so set on our original plot.
Instead we came up with the idea of 'Don't Get Me Started' a documentary in which we would approach strangers in Camden, London and ask them to follow on form this. Before we filmed our intuition led us to create a back up plan - just in case our original idea did not work out.
This was the question 'If you could be anything in the world what would you be and why?'
We thought that this would be a strong back up plan because its a positive question, people may not be as willing to rant about their negative opinions for fear that someone will oppose them or that they may offend someone. By having a more open question that allows people to answer either in a calculated way or a silly way more people should be willing to take part.
We filmed in October.
We began by setting up our tripod and camera facing a brick wall that we wanted people to stand in front of and give their answers. However after realising that people were reluctant to take part we opted for plan B. Our planning and experience came in handy as if we had not planned for something like this to happen, we would have been completely lost.
Instead we perseveered and found that our plan B was actually much more feesable to carry out than our plan A. Instead of making our filming subject to one place, we became mobile, and did not use the tripod as much which allowed us to approach people quickly and without hassle, as Camden is a very busy place on a Saturday.
11:00am: Meet in Camden and begin filming establishing shots.
12:00pm: Finish filming establishing shots, begin to look for a place to set up our camera and tripod.
12:15pm: Found a place to set up, begin looking for people to ask our question to.
3pm: Finish interviewing people. Begin filming more establishing shots.
3:30pm: Finish filming final establishing shots. Begin putting equipment away.
3:40pm: End of filming.
The footage we brought back was very rich in content, at first.
Cutting the material together was very difficult as we came to the conclusion that we did not have enough establishing shots for what we wanted to achieve, to fix this situation we went out to Camden again to catch more establishing shots on:
This session was a lot shorter than the last one as we knew exactly what we wanted to film and were much more familiar with the area, we had captured all the material we needed within an hour.
Back in the editing room, we found it very hard to piece together the shots because we had never done anything in the genre of a documentary before. However by referring to our research we managed to use other short documentaries and look at their structure, hoping to create a similar end result for our doc.
It has taken us several months to sucessfully finish editing our episode of the documentary series because there was so much to improve on.
I have learnt from this journey that documentaries are incredibly hard to piece together because we had no storyboard to use for structure and no script. Instead we learnt the shots inside out so that we could place them in the perfect order.
Our audience research helped us massively with this process as well, asking them what we should improve on (developed in the posts on the draft versions of 'The Big Question').
We filmed in October.
We began by setting up our tripod and camera facing a brick wall that we wanted people to stand in front of and give their answers. However after realising that people were reluctant to take part we opted for plan B. Our planning and experience came in handy as if we had not planned for something like this to happen, we would have been completely lost.
Instead we perseveered and found that our plan B was actually much more feesable to carry out than our plan A. Instead of making our filming subject to one place, we became mobile, and did not use the tripod as much which allowed us to approach people quickly and without hassle, as Camden is a very busy place on a Saturday.
11:00am: Meet in Camden and begin filming establishing shots.
12:00pm: Finish filming establishing shots, begin to look for a place to set up our camera and tripod.
12:15pm: Found a place to set up, begin looking for people to ask our question to.
3pm: Finish interviewing people. Begin filming more establishing shots.
3:30pm: Finish filming final establishing shots. Begin putting equipment away.
3:40pm: End of filming.
Cutting the material together was very difficult as we came to the conclusion that we did not have enough establishing shots for what we wanted to achieve, to fix this situation we went out to Camden again to catch more establishing shots on:
This session was a lot shorter than the last one as we knew exactly what we wanted to film and were much more familiar with the area, we had captured all the material we needed within an hour.
Back in the editing room, we found it very hard to piece together the shots because we had never done anything in the genre of a documentary before. However by referring to our research we managed to use other short documentaries and look at their structure, hoping to create a similar end result for our doc.
It has taken us several months to sucessfully finish editing our episode of the documentary series because there was so much to improve on.
I have learnt from this journey that documentaries are incredibly hard to piece together because we had no storyboard to use for structure and no script. Instead we learnt the shots inside out so that we could place them in the perfect order.
Our audience research helped us massively with this process as well, asking them what we should improve on (developed in the posts on the draft versions of 'The Big Question').
A good production diary that details the various issues you have faced over the project and how you overcame them. It might have been nicer to post these entries as they happened to show the journey across the blog more.
ReplyDeleteMr L