Production Week Blues

Early on in the production week, the plan was to film a documentary about a fighter named Carl Kinslow. Ideas and interview questions weren’t complete and I eventually set the filming day for Friday. It was originally me and Alys that were to complete the filming, but there were so problems so I had to film on my own. As well as this, Friday morning, Carl notified me that he was very ill and not able to open the gym today. This was a huge setback as I had no car and had to stick to a tight schedule in order to get home on Saturday. I wracked my brain and thought about filming my fiances step dad who is a farmer. As well as having an extraordinary occupation that many wouldn’t have experience, he also was a significant person. His produce feeds many and successfully runs his own farm and manages 3 others.

I had to quickly get to work and myself, and the group managed to brainstorm quite a lot so I had a good set of ideas and questions to ask. We took ideas from things like countryfile and even Yorkshire vet. Quick and visually appealing shots with a dialogue overlay. I considered some narration too. I headed over to the farm Friday night and finished up my ideas by looking around and seeing what jobs were being done the next day. In the morning, my fiancé (tripod carrier) and I filmed from 10am till 3pm, getting a good variety of dynamic shots during the usual daily routine. The contributor was very nervous so I felt comfortable having sam read the questions while I managed the camera and audio to the best of my abilities. As well as this, I filmed some shots by using a GoPro as I wouldn’t be able to get the same kind of shots with a conventional camera. I also managed to film some things once the family was all together. It was a difficult process on my own but due to having some camera experience, I could set up the camera quickly and know what looked good. There were some lighting issues due to the structure of the barn and a focus issue where I had the camera propped up high and couldn’t clearly see the screen. I made good use of a GoPro by fixing it to the front of a tractor and quad bike and placing it on the floor while the dogs ran towards it. I also felt it was important to keep the camera running during the interview phase.  This managed to catch some nice bloopers but also a real reaction from the subject that looked natural. Some of the other shots involving him were also filmed when he didn’t realise, capturing some really beautiful moments.

Overall, it was a good but difficult experience and I’m sure I gathered enough material to use and piece together. It included some simple and quick shots but I figured the more I had, the more we had to choose from an get more inspiration.

K.T

Blog Post 3 - Friday 27th January

Unfortunately, during the filming week the plans we had put in place for Karina and Alys to film with Carl were halted because unluckily he came down ill which meant that Karina was not able to film the idea we had. This meant we needed to come up with an alternative documentary idea. Fortunately, Karina’s Fiancé Sam has a step-dad who is a farmer and we decided to go with this idea.

Delia has the footage that Karina filmed and has said that she would like to be in charge of the editing process which we all agreed on because we feel like she has the most experience with editing video and using Adobe Premier. In the lesson today we came up with the narrative that we would like to use and the order that we could put the clips in to best represent the story we are trying to convey.

- TO

Blog Post 2 - Friday 13th January

Today we were able to continue to discuss some more ideas of what sort of shots we want to include in this documentary. Things like having some shots of his training to be able to show his determination to keep being his best. Also we thought about basing most of the filming in his gym to show what his day-to-day life involves when he is not fighting himself. For the interview, we want to know things like what strives him to do what he does and what it means to him, what his past was like and whether that had any effect on why he decided to go down this path, in another life would he have wanted to become fighter if things had been different.

Some more ideas that the group had come up with for filming so far:

·       Having carl in front of a black background to emphasise his persona

·       Making the film motivational

·       Having old footage available to fill in parts of the documentary

·       Film him punching (profile) at such an angle that I could use that footage to do some frame transitions (literally like he you punch the frames out of the screen)

·       we can get some footage of him training others if they're okay with it

-TO

Blog post 1 - Friday 8th January

Today we found out what the brief was going to be for our next assignment. Karina, Alys and I started to discuss the different people that we know who could be a possibility for the documentary. We came up with the idea of using Karina’s sisters’ other half, Carl, who is an MMA fighter. We thought that there could be a lot of possible opportunities for filming him because he has an interesting back story and it would be interesting to see different sides to someone who you would think was quite aggressive because of his job, however this is not the case so we would like to show the other side to people whose jobs portray them as something else.

We also created a group chat so that we could easily keep in touch with each other to discuss ideas and any questions that we may have.

-TO