Production Folder

For this section of the blog I will be showcasing the documents created and used throughout the production of both task 1&2 to illustrate how we worked together finish both the poetic documentary and the 5-10 minute documentary.
As many of our ideas fell through half way through production I'm going to include a number of screenshots and documents of some semi-produced ideas as I believe this still illustrates how we organised ourselves and continued to do so throughout the change of ideas.

Task 1

3-10 Minute Poetic documentary 

"Service. A look at one mans devotion to the fire service."

Before we finalised our film looking at the stories of a fire officer we went through a number of different ideas for this Documentary, mainly the Traveler eviction. 

The entrance to the traveler village.

Joel suggested the idea of documenting the eviction of a local traveler village opposite the burnt remains of the Ski-Village in Sheffield. At the time of planning the eviction notice was in its final sages and the residents were preparing to be forced out.

Our original plan was to interview one subject for our poetic doc. to learn about growing up in the traveler community, and have our 10 minute documentary focus more on the village as a whole, what was happening and how people living there felt about it.

Joel and I visited the site one afternoon and met with one of the residents we discussed our ideas and where we wanted to take them and everyone seemed on the same page and enthusiastic about the whole idea

. 

Unfortunately when we arrived the following week with Molly we were met with a group of new residents more than unhappy with the idea of being recorded. This led to a tension within the group which with us being there was only made worse. Therefore, we decided to leave the village agreeing to not film to release any footage.

This did leave us slightly behind as we'd placed a lot of time on developing these ideas simultaneously. Thankfully Molly's dad is a fire fighter and after listening to second hand stories being told of his adventures we decided Colin Winterbottom would be a perfect contributor to look at as his career had a number of both amazing highs and devastating

lows.  

Unfortunately we only had one day with Colin as the fire station was being shut down for maintenance and the setbacks meant we wouldn't have time for re shoots before the deadline. Therefore we knew that every second in there was going to be important and needed to be filmed. Joel and I were cinematographers and worked hard on getting as many cutaways as possible while our contributor was being set up. We knew from a previous task set up by Saskia in the workstation that no matter how many shots we got we'd never have enough cutaways. With this in mind we made sure to get everything from different angles, in and out of focus as well as a number of different shots that weren't used.  Overall I think we just about managed to get a big enough variety of shots to stop the film from looking boring or repetitive. 

Molly and Jack did an amazing job of recording the sound perfectly which could have been as issue as recording the sirens and doors opening often caused difficulties due to the how loud they actually were.

When it came to the edit we worked out fairly quickly that we had a lot of cutting an re-arranging to bring out the really heartwarming and important points of Collins interview.

After a number of meetings with Saskia we managed to work out a strong story line for this film. This was made easier by transcribing the whole interview and moving around different sections to see what would make sense where.

Doing this meant that when Molly and I sat down to edit the whole film we could focus on the dialogue we needed and not have to force our way through 40 minutes of unusable footage. 

Below are a few more production stills taken throughout task 1:

Waiting for the fire doors to open.

This shot was used for the opening titles as well as a close up, our of focus shot of the engine lights flashing.

This not only created a visually satisfying opening scene but also set the tone and pace for the rest of the film.

Notes from a meeting with Saskia.

Here you can see how the outline of the documentary began to take shape, with the major lines of dialogue being numbered and moved around.

A picture taken during one of the workshops taking place in the workstation. Here we were tasked with making our own short documentary.

This not only allowed us to experiment with equipment but also see for ourselves how much footage it actually needed for such a short film.

Task 2

5-10 Minute documentary

"If only. A dramatisation of a testimony written by an alcoholic."


Like with our poetic documentary, task two was hit with a lot of problems from the word go. We had accepted that our original idea of filming travelers was not going to happen I decided to look else where.
A few months prior we had hosted a medium night at my work where 3 fairly famous self proclaimed Mediums cam
e together to host a group performance connecting to the 'spirit world' to give group readings. Luckily the main woman, Claire, was my managers mother so I had already established a connection. I knew we would be hosting another night early December so I spoke with Claire about the possibility of taking centre stage in a documentary that looked at exploring what she does and the experiences she has.
Thankfully, although anxious, Claire agreed to a one to one interview, a filmed one to one reading with a contributor from work and would allow us to film the event taking place at work.

As you can see by the section of the treatment I produced I had already planned the shots we would need as well as where they would go. Unfortunately, just before filming would've began Claire had to back out leaving us in a desperate position to find new contributors.

After some back and forth with a number of potential contributors, including some other mediums, we decided as a team that given the time we had left our only viable option was a dramatisation. This was because it would allow us time to an actor rather than having to interview truthful contributors.

A testimony was found online written by a former alcoholic. We decided to get an actress in to read this aloud while intercutting scenes of her acting out the issues faced by this woman.

Unfortunately due to some personal issues I wasn't able to attend a lot of the filming throughout the final week, however I was available for our night filming in the bar and Sheffield city centre.

Below are a selection of relevant production documents as well as pictures taken from filming as well as during the planning stages:

A list put together by Joel showing the process we went through as a team looking for new contributors.

Confirmation from our Actress Laura Pearce who was always more than happy to help during filming.

The final day of shooting we all got together to record a number of bar scenes to help improve the look of the overall film.

A page of the treatment annotated by Molly, this helped us get an understanding of how the film would fit together and what shots needed to go where.

A screenshot of the near complete film edited on final Cut by Molly. You can see where the interview as been cut up and placed back together to make a smooth continuous dialogue along with a look at amount of cutaways we had to film.

When it came to filming both tasks one and two our equipment stayed fairly similar.

We used both the Rifle and Shotgun microphones to get a mixture a good quality interview sound and atmos to use in the edit.

I wanted to book out the XF305 as it has 3 colour sensors meaning when it came to colour correcting in post we had a lot more data to work it keeping the footage at a high quality.

The 70D was perfect for close up shooting as we were able to book out a number of different lenses allowing us to get beautiful close ups of hands and other features.

Overall I'm extremely happy with the equipment that we used throughout this module as I believe it really helped us work effectively and professionally on the tasks.