The Birmingham County Football Association

The West Midlands Police

Coventry University Accidental Seduction Film Group

‘Blind Faith’ Television Pilot

Source Radio

Corby Radio

These were a fairly wide variety of projects and placements. Many of them were chosen by me simply because of easy access and introduction from the university, only Corby Radio was not linked in some way to the uni, however having said that I did not choose any of these projects as an easy option, far from it in fact. I felt that the FA and Accidental.. Projects especially provided a wide range of challenges  from the get go. Particularly while we were trying to secure funding for Prague. I went with some of these choices based on work I had seen on previous trips in the case of accidental seduction.  I went with the Radio volunteering because I wished to improve my skills in radio broadcasting and sound editing as well as seeing how a small business worked in the case of Corby radio.

The journey that has been taken during professional Experience has been at times difficult but in general thoroughly enjoyable, My prior contacts were slim to none beyond my course and I’m glad to see I have met many helpful contacts throughout my time working on this module, My prior knowledge and interests certainly helped me decided the projects I worked on, I wished to test my skills abroad as well as getting a big name on my CV (extra bonus that it was the FA) and also wished to improve my radio knowledge. Skills that have been enhanced by this module include:

. Leadership

. Teamwork

. Practical Camera skills

. Editing skills.

.Organizational skills.

However over the course of this experience it has certainly been a case of “the more I know, the more I realise how little I know” I recognise that my confidence and leadership abilities have improved, but I still recognize that there is still a long way to go, I have also made many mistakes during this module (including not planning well enough in advance, leaving things late) which will help enhance my thinking of similar projects. In terms of my career goals and lifetime plans this has helped me to understand a bit better how the world of freelance media could work, at the start of this module I had no idea where I wanted to go after university and while I still can’t say I’m certain where I will go I now start to see myself more and more as a camera operator , I’m starting to realise that at least for the moment I don’t have the skills to take on full leadership of a project so I feel I’m much more likely to work for someone else rather than start my own company. However I’m also starting to realise the value of having a wide range of contacts and skills in your inventory so will be looking to act on as many opportunities’ as possible in my final year.

My next steps as mentioned previously include improving the skills I already have as well as the personal skills I feel I may be lacking, I’ve already got some further professional experience arranged in the shape of the West Midlands Police and The BBC Big Screens Project as well as continuing with Source Radio and finishing off the final touches to the FA DVD. I’ve also set myself a target of learning Adobe after effects as research has shown me how useful it is to have those skills or at the very least an understanding of how they work under my belt. I also aim to improve my editing skills further. I aim to improve my skills in these areas by simply by practicing any free chance I get whilst I still have access to the universities equipment. I also aim to further build my contacts and see about further paid opportunities’ for after my course has finished.

The good, the bad and the ugly. During this module several things have gone very, very well for me. I have gained a number of contacts which will help me in the future, I have also built up relations with the contacts I already had, I have learnt not only the skills I have but some of the skills I lack, which allows me to improve upon them in the future. However throughout the course of the module a lot of things have gone wrong. As mentioned previously organisation of the FA project was a bit of a nightmare at times, trying to get people to meet their times as well as have a consistency in style and equipment was a lot harder than I could have anticipated, making it very difficult to get as much footage worth using from some of the shoots as we would have liked. Other things that have gone badly wrong include the work I have done with source radio as timings and errors in originisation have prevented me doing some of the work I had orginised. Also whilst in Prague I learnt what can happen when timing is left to run as we ended up shooting the majority of the film on the final day of shooting for nearly 12 hours into the early hours of the next morning, this was much later than we originally planned. All of these have made me realise how much can go wrong in the world of media but also how important it is to keep a steady mind and strong will and get what’s needed done at the end of the day and that is possibly the most important lesson I could have learnt from experience during this module.

Sunny Sahota -  Marketing at the BCFA

Sunny is the perosn who has been in charge of the FA Project, She would be a useful contact in the future who is well-connected and could possibly lead me onto others that could progress my media career.

Des Barber – Station Manager Corby Radio

Des’ could prove useful as a contact in radio but also in getting my foot in the door with local events (should i stay in Corby/Northamptionshire)

Stewart Mcneil – News Editor/Presenter Corby Radio

As with Des Stewart would be a good contact in Local Radio and events.

Greg – Funeral For a Friend tour manager and Steph Van Spronsen  of Hart Media.

These were the two people that orginised the interview with FFAF, I could possibly use Hart media again in the future to orginise further interviews for Source Radio.

Sean Keaney – Current 3rd year M-Pro Student and Accidental Seduction director.

Sean is just finishing off his degree, but maybe a useful contact to keep hold of (aswell as the rest of the 3rd year film group) in case of any further projects in the future.

Charley Jordan – Radio presenter.

I contacted Charley through a relative when I was starting with Source Radio, although I didn’t work with her she gave me some advice on working in the radio and getting a good show going, She could be a useful contact in the future due to her background with the BBC.

The FA Project.

For this role I’d say that I worked quite well as a member of a team during filming shoots. I was good a helping people to try and get a good shot but would also criticise any that I felt could be improved. I also accepted that criticism of people several times. However I feel that my leadership skills could certainly have been improved upon. As I have mentioned on this blog before I learnt quite quickly it’s better to go with a small committed group rather than try and get a large group to do a little bit each. I will be the first to admit that I could not get people to commit to the project in the way that i’d have liked. Also I failed to take into account things like what to do if our first choice camera wasn’t available, who would edit the final piece (initially) and just what the chain of command was within the group, In defence to myself I never claimed to take a leadership role, but I was looked upon as the leader by many within the group, If I was to take on a role similar again I would need to be certain to make all issues and soloutions clear at the start of any project, aswell as establish peoples roles at the earliest opportunity.

Creatively this project has been great for me, whenever possible I aimed to make a shooting (although that wasn’t as often as I would have liked) I would love to go into shooting live events after univeristy so the football game filming was a great opportunity for me, We had several issues based on cameras throughout the project, because of the lack of cameras we often had to switch makes and models for each shoot, meaning that in the edit there’s an obviously quality difference, in the future i’d be preferable to make sure we have a camera we could always use, but of course in this case it was impossible to guarantee use of a single camera.

From this project so far (we are still at editing) I have learnt a lot about my own (lack of) leadership abilities which I now consider one of my top skills I need to improve, I have learnt alot about how media projects for outside orginisations work and how the chain of communication works for projects at the FA.

Source Radio:

Although I had my own radio show I had to attend regular meetings with source radio to discuss issues and oppurtunites with the group, this was a great way to make sure we were all on the same page as far as making the radio reach alot more people across the university. My creative and presentation skills were certianly improved by appearing on the radio regularly as it allowed me to experiment with ideas aswell as consider what did and didn’t work with me and my audience, aswell as improve my technical audio skills. I still feel that I could improve certain aspects of my technical side of presenting aswell as getting involved further behind the scenes.

Prague Accidental Seduction:

Teamwork was an essential part of this piece, Not only for our group but for the ‘once upon a time’ group that also went along to Prague, before we went out to film we all needed to get money to fund the experience, this was done by several events including several film nights and junk sales. from the start when we were handed Sean’s script we could see where the project was and see how he was planning for it to look, I wish we could have had more pratice sessions before heading out to prague and also know the full team a bit better, but whilst we were out there we all seemed to work quite well and everyone seemed to stick to their roles meaning there wasn’t a case of too many cooks, which was great during the more stressful nighttime scenes.

I honestly think some of the shots I got from this trip are the best I have ever shot, unfortunately I don’t have a copy of any of them at the moment as the film is in the editing stage and I did not recieve a backup of the majority of shots from this trip. what I have learnt from this trip was to have more confidence in my abilities as well as work in a foreign environment.

Corby Radio:

This was another place where teamwork was of course vital, I didn’t help out as much as I would have liked over the christmas holidays for a variety of reasons, but with that experience as well as helping out a lot of last summer I leanrt alot of how a radio station is actually run. I worked well in a team with stewart and the others I worked with during the time and throughout the experience I learnt to adapt to what was needed of me, be it busy or slow work days. Creatively i learnt the important skill of making pieces for a real-world radio station, something which i can’t really say about source radio as their rules are a lot more lenient than those of FM and DAB broadcasters.

A couple of weeks ago I conducted an interview with lead singer of Alt-Rock band Funeral For A Friend – Matthew Davies – Kreye. This was an interesting experience. I was only aware I would be conducting the interview a day before he would appear in Coventry. I decided to work with Alex Hacking in preparing questions for the interview and also getting him to conduct a few questions. I was happy to be doing this interview for a number of reasons. 1. A few expected interviews had fallen apart before.  2. I had been a fan of FFAF since I was about 12 so I was genuinely inter ested in the band I was interviewing and 3. I felt like I needed some interview experience.

On the Wednesday I met up with Alex and put together a very rough draft of the questions we would ask. once we got that sorted I phoned up the Tour manager of FFAF outside of the Coventry Kasbah and then met up with Matthew inside his tour bus. I’m happy to say that for a first interview this was a pleasant experience and everyone involved was genuinely nice.

Once the interview was finished me and alex were able to see the gig as part of the guestlist and seen the band do what they do best. Once the evening ended I went straight to editing the piece which you can here below. I used Audacity to edit the interview and uploaded the piece on Soundcloud.

Here is the interview

I spoke to a friend of mine involved in the creation of new student magazine EV. He was looking for content so offered him this interview to use in his magazine aswell. He has since transcribed the piece and told me he will use it so expect to see that in there also.

Funeral For A Friend's latest album. OUT NOW!

EV Magazine Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/EV-Magazine/160885270616110

Source Radio Presents: The Late Shift Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Source-Radio-Presents-The-Late-Shift/125440260846723

Thursday 31st March – Filming.

Me, Alex and Laurie – Ann took part in a full day of filming from my last blog post. once I posted that piece I met up with Alex and laurie ann and we booked out a camera (D90) and also went to alex’s to pick up a tripod before making the train to Aston. Once arriving in Aston, Sunny gave us a lift to the birmingham FA where we proceeded to get a bunch of ‘filler’ shots which were intended to break up the DVD a fair bit. these included shots of the pitch, the workers, the logo,etc…

we spent about an hour or so doing this and then went onto discussing plans for editing of the brochure and dvd, I decided on doing some edits of photographs for the brochure as well as doing what I could with editing, however Alex would remain as main editor.

we then had a bit of a break before heading over to West Bromich Albions football ground the hawthornes, where we proceeded to get photos and videos from the referrees awards ceremony, this was an interesting experience as it shown the difficulty of getting good footage whilst staying out of peoples way, I do believe we got some good footage though. once we left we decided to meet up the next Monday to again sift through the footage, however I lent Alex my Hard drive so that he could get a head start before hand, Sunny also sent me some photos to have a look at and try some effects with.

Monday 4th April

We met up again as a group at the ellen terry building to sort through the footage, fortunately Alex had done most of the hard work for us all ready, he had sorted through all of the footage and presneted to us what he thought the best shots were in a fairly organized order. This was extremely helpful, once we shown this to Sunny she agreed with the majority of shots but felt we needed to order them into categories for each of the different sections we had been given, whilst doing this we realized we had nothing for the section ‘women in football’ and realised we were missing a tape that had some footage of a recent girls football game on it. We also discussed ways to ‘jazz’ up the video, we discussed using after effects and I said i’d give it a go, but none of us are exactly brilliant at it. I had to leave the meeting a little bit early as they were fine-tuning the footage we had but I felt like I knew what was going on, We stated we would meet again on Wednesday (later changed to Thursday) to get one last bit of footage in Coventry.

Thursday 7th April

We met fairly early in the day at Ellen Terry to get camera equipment and get a lift from Sunny, we then went to Moat House Coventry to get some footage of the facilities, we spent a while getting some nic e experimental shots there and then discovered there was a training session going on, which we decided to spend a bit of time filming. after the shoot was done, we discussed how the project had gone thus far and what needed to be done, I had to get the remaining footage off of sam davies so I arranged to meet her the next day. Alex went home-home that night so after capturing the footage I took the camera off of him to return to the loan shop. He will continue editing from home on his Mac.

Friday 8th – today

From the friday what has happened on my end has been, getting the lost footage from Sam and then on Monday capturing the footage onto usb. I have also edited a number of photos to send to laurie-ann who is doing the brochure. at this point in time, I need to upload the footage online for alex to download or send him the usb via post and also pass on the photos to laurie-ann. I will also experiment with after effects tomorrow and try to get some effects using that for transitions in the video.

Below are photos taken throughout this period.

At this point in the process of the DVD I realised how big some of the ‘smaller’ issues from before were affecting me now. Throughout the course of the filming no one person was at every shoot, therefor there was a major breakdown in communication, each of the workers shot pieces using different cameras, different settings and different definitions presenting footage would looked very odd next to each other, I thank Anca for uploading the footage onto my hard drive to present but some of the footage looked horrible in the compression it was given, all of the shoots were done in 16:9 ratio but some uploaded in 4:3 ratio meaning that some of the footage looked a lot worse than it should have done. As we were looking through the footage we kept notes of the timecodes of any ‘great’ footage that we had managed to capture, the number of shots we were satisfied with was dissapointingly low. To combat this problem we will be doing two things.

1. We will Import the ‘dodgy’ footage again to try and improve the quality of the footage we have,

2. Today (Thursday 31st March) Me and Alex will be meeting up with Sunny in Birmingham and filming a bunch of ‘filler’ shots aswell as a referees conferance, hopefully this will sort out some of the issues we have with footage.

It is entirely possible as well that when we get back to the edit again (which is starting from next monday)  we will find some footage that we missed which actually could work quite well,

At this stage I can now reflect at mistakes and problems at the earlier stages that I have now learned not to make in the future.

1. I have learnt that the most important part of any group, especially one of the size of this project is COMMUNICATION! I started a group on facebook to keep in touch with everyone, however this has not been completly effective due to people not seeing the messages and also not posting important infomation. for example it would have been good to see the recording settings people used for each of the shoots, so that others knew what to shoot in.

2. It is EXTREMELY important to have a defined leader of a given group. I think the main problem of this group was that I was seen as the ‘go-to’ person of this project, both from Sunny and the group in general, In theory I had no problem with that, as I fancied producing the piece and orginising that way, but we never defined a ‘director’ for the piece, I think people just assumed I was in charge of that whereas I left it in charge of people as they filmed, seeing as how I wouldn’t be at many shoots. In hindsight it would have been good to have planned a storyboard and shot list BEFORE we started shooting one piece of footage rather than shooting and seeing what we had. from this I learnt that my leadership skills can certinanly be improved, however this project has been a major learning curve in what not to do in similar projects in the future.

_______

Above is my montage of the work from the words I have used for 260 MC, the more observant of you will notice that I have used some footage from outside of the words I used but I can assure that all of the footage was shot at the same time as those words but may not have been used as they didn’t ‘fit’ with the words video.

Making this video was obviously a process of the last 10 weeks work and I will now go into detail about each of the words that we had, what happened at how it affected the montage in the end, I will also be offering my opinion of what worked, what didn’t and what lessons I have learnt to follow in the future.

Wall.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I don’t like it. I never really did, This was a beginners attempt at stop motion but it felt rushed as I was making errors during the production and had a “better make the deadline” attitude to it. In hindsight, I would have done things A LOT differently. For example I would have spent more time and attention into each frame, I would have used a better location and better lighting than the tungsten lighting of my bedroom and a better backdrop than a plain black jacket. What made me feel even worse about this video was that I seen two very good stop motions that week in the form of Leanne and Stan’s pieces. What these pieces did where mine fell short was take much more attention to detail for each frame and also make something that looked interesting. I was also impressed by Stan’s idea although I had seen the concept before I had not seen it executed in the same way. What I learned from this week was to take pride in my work but sometimes No work is better than crap work. A point I will be raising up again later.

Dirt.

I never did finish this piece, despite filming two different pieces for it. I don’t want to use the ‘I was busy excuse’ but I genuinely couldn’t think of an idea for this piece that I liked and when I found the time other words took priority. However I tried experimenting with lighting for this piece, The idea I had was of an alcoholic realizing the situation he is in but being unable to get out of his predicament. I had a provisional title of ‘the dirty glass’   I still have raw footage of me playing the role of this piece, and messing around with emotive lighting, however I didn’t end up editing this piece because of two reasons. 1# being that because I was trying to shoot and act the piece out, framing and such looked a bit odd. I didn’t like the look of the shots in general and 2# I really dislike appearing in my own films, I am one of the worst actors you’ll ever meet and extremely unphotogenic (fussy reason I admit) I also filmed a dirty back alley and had ideas about doing a poem for the area I got some nice shots but the footage ended up being corrupted. I would have just reshot, however I was banned from the loan shop for the last few weeks.

City.

For city I wanted to mess around with photography, I booked out a camera straight after the lecture and decided to mess around with long exposure photography, I ended up with a few photos which are available to see on this blog.

I decided against using these images as I had no ‘idea’ to base around them. I decided to work with James Dann and keep to the photography aspect of things and do a piece inspired slightly by our mutual love of Channel 4 sitcom ‘The Peep Show’ The idea being the inner emotions of the people of a city and the contrasts and contradictions of those people but how similar they ultimately are. This piece I was fairly happy with in it’s narrative form but felt that some of the photos were ‘go nowhere’ ones they also looked a bit ‘touristy’ and not really too artistic,

I also worked on another city piece later on. This one I must credit mainly to Sam Soane for the idea, editing,execution but Me and Jambo went and shot the footage for the following piece (which contains some of my favourite parts of my montage.)

Time.

Time was another one that took a long time for me to settle on. I really didn’t like the idea of using a clock which I had seen a lot of other people resort to, I had an idea of using footage of the present day but giving it a vintage feel and a nostagic look back from the future on it, but this idea was quickly shot down. This word was placed on the backburner for a long time as everything else set into full gear. I did eventually get involved with this video.

This video was mainly an opportunity to take advantage of a lovely day and get some ‘people’ shots. something I was severally lacking in my words thus far. I wasn’t involved in the writing or editing but did take main camera role for the shoot. I disliked a few shots which didn’t make the main edit. If I were to shoot this again I would spend more time on the piece as well as getting some more water shots as they were definitely the highlight of the piece.

Shape.

This was another piece that unfortunately was not finished…well that’s a slight lie. The piece was finished but will probably never see the light of day. What happened with this piece was that we booked out the TV studio and messed around with lighting to create a dark shadow, Myself, Laura Garwood, James Dann, Sam Davies and Gergana Todrova messed around with shadows to create different effects and even threw in a human pyramid in the end. unfortunatly we only had the one back up of this piece and was on G’s hard drive, which stopped working before it was placed online. From this word I learnt to ‘Backup everything’ and to keep extra attention on light and shadows.

Light.

For light I yet again worked with Mr. James Dann and once again used photography, however I wanted to experiment and create an animation similar to a few seen in lectures. I liked the video I ended up creating but, I could have made it so much better in hindsight, I relished later on that I could have made a fluid animation using just two photographs for each ‘scene’ by doing a blank photo and one with a full fluid line and then filtering a little bit more the line in each frame to create a waveform to suit my needs. So that’s a major live animation lesson I have learnt. beyond that I realise the piece has some issues with consistency and I can be seen in a few photos and maybe should went closer into the targets but in conclusion I do quite like this piece for it’s charm.

Symmertry

Symmertry was probably the most fun I had in the actual filming process. For this piece I worked with Sam Soane, James Dann and Laura Garwood. In this piece we filmed at laura’s and messed around with paint and see what asymmertical shapes it would make, Complaints of the piece though include that we couldn’t get a better location, It was really difficult to get lighting right in the kitchen. also It would have been nice to have gotten different camera angles as well. This piece did get me some really nice shots for the show reel due to the outside lighting creeping in to create a nice ‘glossy’ effect.

Text.

This piece was simply an excuse to use AfterEffects as it was program I wanted to use but had little time to get started on, I viewed a tutorial online to get started and create the Text piece you can see above, I planned to use it in my montage but the fact it was in 4:3 Ratio and the fact that it didn’t suit the rest of the piece played into the reason why I chose not to. but I’m glad I made it as it has given me a lot of confidence of using AfterEffects and Motion in the future.

My Own Word ‘Water’

The word water admittedly came about because I wanted to use some stock footage I had shot in prague whilst shooting for my professional experience piece over there. I had myself a free day and along with Matt Riddle and Sean Keaney shot some footage of the wonderful city, my only regret of that is that I didn’t shoot more. I ended up using the word water as I felt that the shots of the river in Prague were the most beautiful and wanted to create a good looking video piece, which I felt my work had been lacking before. I also wish I spent more time in editing and messed about with colour correcting etc, more.

The Montage.

Finally that brings me onto the actual Montage, for this piece I used the footage I had access to (I did not have access to good quality version of the time piece) I used some ‘leftover’ footage from shoots I did for other words, particularly city and water. For the montage I messed around a lot with colour correction and on some shots smoothcam effect, I felt that it really added a nice shine to my piece and made it look more artsy, before I felt that some of the shots had been very bland and didn’t think I would use them, I do have complaints about the piece though, after watching it again and hearing some comments I feel that there are too many similar shots and the piece does go on too long, also there is not one ‘person’ in the piece, If i had more time I would have liked to get  more people in my montage. I would have defiantly liked to have gotten some sports or music pieces filmed as not only would that have helped the ‘people’ aspect of the montage but I would also like to go into filming music acts or sports after my studies at university and it would have been nice to show that off a bit.

The Module.

In hindsight I have really enjoyed the module It has taught me a lot both technically and about myself as a person when dealing with the pressures of constant deadlines. I honestly felt that there was too many words too often to get a great idea from on this module Out of all the words I’ve done there is only 2 maybe 3 I can say I am happy with, if given more time to prepare I may have come up with better ideas, I certinaly would have had time to prepare actors,locations etc rather than some of the dull ones I ended up using. but I understand the point of this module and made me appreciate how important it is to work in a solid group, some of the best work from myself and from others on this module was achieved by getting a group of similar interests together and playing off each others strengths, So if this module has taught me one thing, it’s too know when not to do it alone.

The earliest records of short film date back all the way to 1894 with Thomas Edisions ‘Kinetoscope’ A device created for personal viewing. These aswell as the early projected films of the time were usually just one shot of footage or interest films detailing major events such as A royal event.

1895 may have presented the world with the very first horror short. take a look at this footage and judge for yourself.

unimpressive? well consider the audience of the time, those seeing this piece for the first time unaware of the concept of video appearntly fled in terror fearing that the train would drive off the screen and run over the audience. It’s quite an interesting thought and must have certianly been an eye opener to the sort of emotion that film could bring out of people. [Source]

As film was beginning to stand on it’s own legs it began to imitate over forms of entertainment such as magic shows and variety acts 20 minute shorts showing off these types of shows would be broadcast at music halls and fairgrounds.

The early 1900′s had however seen a major revolution in filming and editing techniques and these breakthroughs brought to the world classic shorts such as Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) The first feature length films are recognised to have came around at the start of the next decade. as Feature-length film grew in prestige and marketability, shorts continued to be traditionally shown alongside news items of occasionally live acts

This included up to and including the second world war where short films formed updates and reasons for the war currently going on across the planet.

Dr Richard Famer sees the second world war as “something of a high-water mark for the short film in Britain”, though not everybody liked them. “While the government was extraordinarily keen to place its messages in British cinemas, cinema managers and patrons were much more ambivalent,” he says.

“Some short films, especially those that showed British servicemen actively fighting the war, proved to be very popular, but there were also concerns that the cinema would gain a reputation as an ‘interfering marm’ if it dedicated too much time to short government films and not enough to the [predominantly American] feature films upon which the magic of the pictures rested.”

The clear differences between the fantasist feature length American films and the informative government shorts played a major role in short films decline in popularity during the 50′s and 60′s The popularity of motion movie trailers also added to the shorts consistent disappearance from mainstream cinema chains. however they were still popular with visual artists. Some consider short film to be the ‘Les Enfant Terrible’ of the art world some artists have used this medium as an opportunity to experiment. Short film makers recieved a major mainstream outlet for their art in the 1980′s however with the creation of Mtv.

The main problem with this though was that the narrative of the video had to follow the flow of the music, music video director Tim Pope says that ideas from music video production and editing were later fed back into feature and short length films that are now commonplace, such as faster edit cuts.

The ninties  brought with it digital editing which brought in both affordable and digital recording equipment which was lightweight and easier to use. this lead to a wider range of independent film-making especially shorts. many feature length directors begun their careers in short.

all of these innovations were bringing shorts into the mainstream but one major innovation would bring it to unimaginable heights. The internet.

Fabien Riggall, founder and creative director of short film company Future Shorts says that they get over 1,000,000 hits a month on their future shorts webpage and many believe that shorts suit the landscape of the internet user and the generation using it due to it’s short nature. sites like Youtube and Vimeo have made it easier than ever before to upload and distrubute short films. sites such as the BBC film network are also giving a level of prestige and intrigue into short films, Of course the downside of this is that many more poor quality films have been uploaded and the ratio of good/bad films is probably heavily favoring the bad.

Short film has come a long way since the locomotive train, but where will it go in the future? some put the future of advertising in the hands of short filmakers with pieces like this adding artistic flair to adverts

Others see the playing field between shorts and feature films leveling out and possibly seeing a lot more cinema showings of said short films.

whatever the viewpoint it seems likely that short film has an interesting road ahead, it will be intresting to see where the art form goes in the near future.

Our group Pantherology Productions have had a lot to deal with on this module, over the course of this blog post I aim to go through all the issues that have hindered us and benefited us along the way to creating the film we will be presenting (at time of writing) in 11 hours time. What will be the public’s response to the now officially titled ‘The Only Reason?’

We should start where most good stories start, at the beginning, When we first started the short film group we had a number of different troubles with getting a story idea that we could all agree with. I had my ideas and a couple I seemed to really like, but other members of the group had their ideas that they also cling onto, I think we all wanted to be creatively involved in the piece, which was encouraging from one point of view that we were all fully committed to the group (A fact I can honestly said never diminished for everybody involved) but problematic from another as we couldn’t seem to find one idea to stick behind.

Eventually we had to present an idea for the rest of our peers to hear, we had presented our little ideas to a smaller group of peers before but it had proven in general not very helpful for getting a final idea. We presented Jambo’s Hair inspired idea of a couple on different sides of a protest. We were all not confident with the idea but decided to show it to see if we could get something from it. I honestly didn’t like it as I thought a protest scene would be too difficult to portray effectively with our budget and experience. We had a group meeting with Steve that day and together as a group we realised we really needed to start at Square one Me and sam pitched another idea which can be seen on a previous post of mine but again it was not liked by our audience. We then had a random as idea of filming in a shop, from a suggestion of using costcutters by Sam we eventually decided we wanted to film in ikea. We had a ‘test’ (in the loosest sense) shoot in ikea that afternoon before trying to see if we could film there.

‘warning!!!!!!! about as unprofessional and offensive as 40 second filming can get technically.

We knew even from our inital glee of possibly filming in ikea that two things needed to be done. 1# we would need to pester ikea a hell of a lot over the next week to get a filming time and if failing that store another one in a realistic area. 2# we would need to develop a backup idea just incase we couldn’t get the ikea shoot. This lead me to developing two characters for the sake of it and then trying to base a story around them. I eventually got help from Jambo and together we had created….Simon and Jasmin after a meeting later on we decided to edit the characters slightly and Jasmin became Elina. we started developing an idea around shooting in Costcutters and ended up with a first draft of a script.

We then had to sort out our actors, we had online ads and physical ads around coventry university however our idea to have a table for people to see what was going on proved to be our best decision, despite inital worries we would not be able to do so because of an open day at the uni. In fact our two main characters would not have had their audition if we did not have this. I was not persoanlly in the audition room as I was taking care of admin for the group and greeting potential actors, I felt this was best as offically my role of lighting/camera op was not directly involved with the audition process and felt it would make more sense for our producer and director to be there as a guarntee and for whoever else wanted involved. I was happy to take that role but obviosuly I was leaving it up to my team to sort out who were the best people for the role.

(by the way I am showing the WORST videos we have at the moment, but don’t want to embarass anybody apart from the panthers and brian)

Once we had our two main characters we had to find a Marek, this proved difficult and was only sorted properly a few days before shooting, but thankfully we found our man. Sam and G also we did aspects of the script that were lacking in mine and jambo’s draft aswell as a storyboard and shot list. We all went into our roles and were not solely alone for sorting out their end of the group deal, (i.e my camera and lighting bulbs were turned on) Giving that i was not very confident with lighting I did quite a bit of research, some of which can be seen on a previous post. We shot first on the tuesday at Jambo’s house, these shots eventually did not make it into the final piece as we decided it didn’t fit the overall mode but was still a helpful experience to have before the main shoot.

The main shoot analysis from my POV can be read here.

After all this i could rest a bit easier, I was not involved in the editing team so me and jambo went on to the marketing side of things, with jambo focusing on film fest research and I on creating the poster,etc… I did feel bad for not being there for the editing but understood that having all of us there would be nothing but problematic and would not help make a good film or keep our friendships intact.

We then had the rough draft showing. This was the point when our coursemates would see the film for the first time and offer their advice and opinions, nervous? you bet I was. I knew that there was sound issues that needed sorting out aswell as afew other little bits but we were all worried about how well the narrative would go down with everyone looking at this with fresh eyes. The feedback was mostly positive, people credited the quality of shots and lighting (YES!) aswell as aspects of the story but felt that some scenes were a bit off, for example Elina leaving at the end was interpreted as just taking a call rather than leaving Simon as we wanted people to think. but overall we felt good that not too much would need to be done…we needed to shoot one little bit again but beyond that not too much

but then……….ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!

G’s Hard Drive containing all the footage went. when I say went the HDD didn’t want to work anymore, I think I went through all 5 stages of grievance upon hearing that news, As far as I was aware there was no backup. Could that be it for our short film? so close to deadline and when we were all so close to finishing the film?…fortunately all hope was not lost. we in fact DID have a backup of the rough draft as well as backup of the footage shot extra. If I was a religious man I’d believe it was divine intervention or something, Never felt so happy about seeing data files in my life. Anca continued to edit with G while I got the credits done and sorted out the music for the piece giving it an AM radio feel rather than a standard recording feeling.

At this stage I know wait to see what people will think of the final piece. wish me luck readers.