Semester Review.

It's not been an easy semester for me. I don't want to get too self pitying but I was going through some very difficult problems in my personal life during this semester. I was working hard at uni and I was having to work hard at home as well which wasn't easy. I do feel like during this year the one thing I've learnt is my limits. I know how much pressure I can take before I snap, and it pleases me to say that it's quite a lot, which I know will be a useful skill heading out into the industry.

It was probably the lowest I've felt over the three years, but it forced me evaluate what it is I love in life, and I've found it's this. Making films and TV shows. Working on Beaulieu has been the most fun I've ever had on a production, and I am incredibly proud of the final project. That's not to say I'm not proud of my other work, but I have to mention Beaulieu especially because we were so sure we had bitten off more than we could chew at points, and we just supported each other on this crazy production.

Through experiences working on the two films I was involved with I've discovered a lot of problems within myself. One major problem I have is with my temper, I can be very quick to snap at people, having lashed out at multiple points throughout the year. Since I've managed to sort out the problems in my personal life I've definitely felt myself being able to keep my temper under control more, and it's definitely something I know I will not be letting come into my future work as it only causes far more problems.

I feel like I've really become a better film maker over this semester. I think because they were our final projects at the university I was really invested in making sure they showed the best example of what I am capable of. With Beaulieu I've really come learn a lot more about story, and how to tell that story visually without having to rely on dialogue to keep the viewer watching. And with Love in Your Pocket I've learnt so much about making a documentary. With both I've learnt about what problems you can encounter and some ways around those problems.

Coming out of the end of it all, I'm going to miss it, but I'm looking forward to trying to become a grown up.

Post Production.

This is going to be quite a long post as I'm going to be talking about the post-production process for both of the projects that I was working on. For the two projects that I was working on for the end of third year, I was more involved with the editing process than I had been on any project I had worked on before. 

The obvious challenge with Beaulieu was that it was just the two of us in the edit suite, and we would have to go through the entire process, from logging all of the footage through to delivering the final product by ourselves. Luckily, after a meeting event organised by one of the lecturers, we had met a first year, Natalie Janicka, who was interested in our project and gave us some money as part of crowd funding. She then offered us her help if we wanted, so she was a lot of help with the editing process, as well as helping out on some of the shoots. Between the three of us we managed to work really well to make some difficult decisions.\

Due to the way we had shot the film, we knew that editing was going to throw quite a lot of challenges our way, and like shooting, we had taken the approach of allowing ourselves enough time, but also making sure that we were really utilising every minute that we were going to be in there. Because we were allowing the location to inspire us about certain things to do in the film we had made some decisions during the production process that we would change certain bits. Fortunately for us, because we had no dialogue, or really any solid plot points that needed to happen in a certain order we allowed ourselves the chance to be really creative with the editing. 

If you look at the film as it turned out, it’s actually very different to how we had imagined it, but in my opinion it’s actually far better than I imagined it would be, and I’m really proud of the three of us for that. Having logged the footage properly, noting down what was good and bad about each take, we already had a head start with the editing process in a way that we just couldn’t do with the shooting. As soon as we got the footage in, we made a rough assembly based on the story we had originally planned for and taking into account that changes that had decided to make whilst shooting. 

After making the rough assembly and decided what we really like and what we didn’t like about the film and then made some changes. As we did this more and more we started to find our attitudes towards certain parts of the film really changing which was interesting. I think it was just us becoming better editors, because of course, considering that we had shot the film ourselves there were certain shots or sequences that we found ourselves becoming really attached to because we were so proud of how we had managed to achieve it during production. But as we watched them more and more we started to lose that attachment and started to watch it more as a viewer, and how it was as a piece of entertainment. This meant us really trimming down some shots, that before we had held for a really long time before cutting to something else. 

Also because we didn’t have any dialogue, apart from one line in the last shot of the film, we were able to move clips around from the original order we had them in. The other thing we’d done because we weren’t going to have any dialogue was to pick some music that we really liked that we would be using as the soundtrack for the film. We picked these songs fairly early on in the pre-production process so by the time it came to shooting the film we were really familiar with them and knew what sequences we wanted to use them for. Having this in mind whilst shooting and then taking that into the editing process has allowed us to come up with some really interesting sequences that really compliment that music that they’re with.

Editing for Love in Your Pocket wasn’t such an easy task. There were countless technical issues encountered for this project which ended up setting us back quite a bit, as well as people in the group (including myself) having personal problems that ended having an effect on the group. These problems combined ended up with us having to ask for an extension which we were lucky enough to receive. This allowed us more time to edit the project and I joined the edit after Lawrence and Hannah had compiled a rough assembly, and I’d finished work on Beaulieu.

This project took a lot of work, and was moved around and reshuffled a lot of times before the final cut was made. Again, similarly to Beaulieu, we had filmed the same action from multiple angles, and had filmed each somewhat separate from the others so we ended up having the opportunity to really shuffle it around. The biggest challenge with the edit for this project was getting the film to a point where it felt like a complete package. During the rough assembly Hannah and Lawrence had just put together each scene separately from the other one and hadn’t put the back on the timeline. This meant that when we did get to the point of putting them together there were no real transitions between the scenes, it would just suddenly cut. 

It also caused a problem for the voiceover Hannah had been hoping to add, because there just simply wasn’t any screen time to cover the dialogue she would need to record. So this meant having to go back and play around with every scene again. Hannah then wrote her voiceover clips and recorded them, and we added them in, which really brought the film together in a way that wasn’t there early on. 

I really learnt a lot about the editing process with the two projects, and combined with the fact that I directed both projects (co-directed with Elliott on Beaulieu) I think it will make me a better director on any future films or programmes I’m lucky enough to be able to direct.

Production

Production on Beaulieu was by far the best experience I've had working on a project for university. It wasn't easy, actually at times it was incredibly difficult, but in the end it was totally worth it. We spent four days shooting at our location in Kent and then two days shooting at a house in Hitchin for our interior scenes.

Because the crew was so small, it meant that transport ended up being very easy. I drove us all down to Kent on the first day, and after that Elliott was staying with our actor, whom also happened to be his girlfriend. This meant driving two hours there and two hours back every day for four days, which was really draining but I was so excited to be shooting this film that I didn't really feel it. I had some personal problems I was having to deal with at the time we were shooting which unfortunately did impact on the production on one day in particular, but the crew were very professional and although filming was delayed we all got our heads down together and got what we needed to get done done.

As I said previously, we didn't have everything planned out and we were following quite a loose structure. We'd decided what scenes we would be shooting on what days, but we deliberately wanted to leave a lot of it until the day we were filming to decide how to shoot certain scenes. We allowed the location to inspire us and we managed to come up with some really creative and beautiful shots when we were filming.

Another part of the filming process was the fact that we really wanted the character of Beau to be reflected in the film. For this we would give the camera to Merrin (our actress) and allow her to shoot certain bits that we would be editing to look like footage shot on her super 8 camera that she carries around in the film. Merrin did a great job really making her character a three dimensional being, considering she wasn't going to be having any dialogue. We would then ask her to repeat her movements with the super 8 camera and we shoot around her, which helped create a really nice continuity for the action and reflect the character.

When you look at the film, the weather looks absolutely perfect. Which is somewhat true, the sky was mostly beautifully clear and gave us some really nice natural light to shoot with, which was great considering we weren't in a position to have a full lighting rig with us. On top of this it was actually really cold, as we had a strong breeze coming in off the sea, but Merrin did a fantastic job hiding it on camera, we just had to make sure one of us was ready to run in with her coat as soon as we called cut.

Love in Your Pocket Pre-Production

I really enjoyed the two projects I worked on, mainly because they were so different and it allowed me the chance to pick up a lot of different skills, and learn a lot about being a director. I've said before that there were quite a few hiccups when it came to the pre-production for Love in Your Pocket, at least from my perspective.

Pre-production got properly started quite a bit later than I had anticipated and it was a very different experience to Beaulieu, because the project was a completely different beast. It meant scouting a lot of locations as we'd need somewhere different for every contributor we met with. It was a really great experience going to different locations and meeting people, and it really showed me how much we've all grown since the first year.

Having met people about locations we then had to meet the contributors whom Hannah would be talking to in the film. Hannah, Ben and Lauren managed to get a lot of the contributors on board without an issue, but there was one that we were worried about. The plan was for Hannah to meet a colleague of hers called Steve, who we had planned to chat to, at the pub they both work at, over a drink. He highlighted to us that he can get a little out of control around alcohol if he's nervous so we decided to sit down with him to make sure that he was fine with what we were doing. After meeting with him we decided that it wasn't going to be a problem and he was just being overly cautious.

Unfortunately parts of the film weren't planned as well as they could have been. There was a scene we wanted to shoot on the streets of London where we would be taking the concept for one of the dating apps and applying it to the real world to see how people's attitudes changed when it became face to face. The planning for this wasn't focused on properly, but I was assured that it would all be alright. We did end up facing quite a few difficulties on the day, never mind we were shooting this scene a week later than we had already planned. We ended up having to completely abandon our original plan and come up with something on the fly, which did end up working. It did show me that when it came down to it, we're all very good at working under pressure and getting it done.

Beaulieu Pre-Production

In preparation for Beaulieu we decided first of all to have a look at some films we wanted to take inspiration from. Two directors we were going to take particular inspiration from were Wes Anderson and Richard Ayoade as we both liked their style of filmmaking. Both have a very visual style which is quite similar.

The approach we wanted to take was to make a film that didn't rely on a script or dialogue to tell the story. We wanted to push ourselves to tell a coherent story with nothing but visuals, and to make it beautiful. Even though the films we were going to be taking inspiration from had dialogue, they used the visuals to really help keep the viewer interested.

One point we needed to make sure we really focused on was the location, so we started by scouting possible locations online. We knew we wanted the film to be set at the seaside so we started thinking of seaside towns we thought would be able to provide us with a beautiful location. Being students, we immediately went down the cliche route of choosing Brighton, but after doing a bit of research we found that we would have to spend a lot of money to get permission to use this as a location so we started looking elsewhere.

We found that Kent have a fantastic film council that is very supportive of student productions. Their website has a great search feature that allows you to search for the types of locations you would like to use. After finding a location that looked suitable we decided to pay a visit and see if it would be suitable.

So this was the first thing that spent money on, after managing to raise over £600 on our crowd funding page for the film. The location was perfect and easily accessible with my car, so we knew where we would be setting the film.

The two of us wanted to take a different approach to the filming, and actually a lot of that came down to the fact that we didn't really know the location all that well. Although we had visited the location we just didn't have the time to properly scout the location for particular points we'd like to use for certain scenes. As I mentioned in a previous post, the fact that we were both on the same page meant that this wasn't going to be a problem, it was just going to be difficult. So we made a rough plan, and made sure that we'd allow ourselves enough time to get it done.

Progress.

When it came to the final projects, I was taking on major roles in two ambitious films. There was obviously a lot of responsibility on myself when it came to the drama I was working on, Beaulieu, because there was only two of us involved it meant that we had to make sure that we were managing to cover all the work that another person would normally take on. We were managing to make it work very well mainly because both of us understood that we were taking on a huge task, whilst working in the smallest team either of us had been part of.

Whilst we were making good progress on our film, we were both involved in another project; Love in Your Pocket. This project was a documentary about dating apps for smart phones that I would be directing. The team for this project was considerably larger than the team for Beaulieu, with around 8 people being involved. I felt that after the Christmas break progress on this project didn't move as quickly as I had anticipated. As I was directing and Elliott would be camera operator for the project the two of us spent time researching how similar documentaries were filmed so that we would be prepared for when filming would start.

I don't want to pin blame, but there were a few member of the team that were involved with a studio project that would be filming in mid-March. From my point of view it seemed that they were waiting for that project to be over with before focusing on Love in Your Pocket. There had been some progress made on the project but the speed definitely picked up once their other project was finished, and from my point of view I felt that they weren't appreciating that just because they were now focusing on one project we, and other members of the team, were still focusing on two. This did lead to few arguments and people's investment in the project being questioned but after I explained how we felt it was quickly sorted out.

What I learnt from this is that having more people in your team doesn't necessarily mean that it is going to be easier, as I felt the work I was doing on the two man team was a lot less hassle than it was working with a bigger team. I think the main thing that helps make everything easier is communication and making sure everyone understands the attitude the crew should be taking to the production. Myself and Elliott knew that were doing things differently to everything we'd been taught over the past 3 years, but because we were both on the same page there was never any problems. A big problem I had with Hannah, the producer of Love in Your Pocket, was that I didn't know how involved she wanted me to be with content, considering that she had an assistant producer, who I assumed would be helping her get it covered. After we discussed this I became more involved, but I feel like if that had been addressed from the beginning then progress on the project would have moved faster and would have been easier.

Getting back into it.

In my Semester review post I said that I was tired and felt like I couldn't handle it anymore. I came from that, after taking a well needed rest over the Christmas, with a new attitude. The way I'd seen it, I had been down as low I had ever been and didn't want to hit that again. I wanted to come back and prove that I can do this, and I can make something brilliant and worth watching.

I'd spent a lot of time over the Christmas break thinking about the projects that I'd agreed to be a part of, and whether or not they were something that I actually wanted to be a part of. It wasn't that the two projects didn't interest me, or that I thought they were bad, I just realised that it would showcase what I'm actually interested in pursuing in my career, which is single camera drama and comedy. After speaking to Elliott, I realised that he felt that same way and we decided to branch off and start our own project.

This is how we came up with our film Beaulieu, which was bred from both of us having a desire to create something that really focused on being visually interesting and not relying on characters giving dialogue to carry the story. We were allowed to pitch it to the tutors and they really liked the idea and quickly gave us the green light.

We then had to consider the people we would like to be involved with the project, considering so far it was only the two of us involved. We selected a few classmates we'd be interested in having on board, but they didn't seem interested when we first pitched them the idea so we decided to go it alone. After the project started to pick up some steam we had these people come back to us saying that they had changed their minds and would like to be involved, but we'd already started making great progress with just the two of us and we didn't want to mess it up, so we decided to carry on.

Semester Review.

If I’m honest I kind of feel like this has been my worse semester of the course. When I started back I was really excited, but over the course of the three months I just felt my energy being drained. I can’t really explain what it was, as I have been through tougher situations without it affecting my work so much, I could just feel myself becoming really drained and lacking motivation to do anything. 

I did end up getting really upset about this, as I had been asking to produce a documentary for a visit to the university by Reverend Jesse Jackson, which was a huge opportunity. Ultimately I think was too big a project for me to handle on my own, but I don’t the commissioners understood how big a project it was either. I became overwhelmed by the scale of it, but I didn’t feel at the time that I had anyone I could go to to say “help me”. Not that there aren’t people, looking back now I can think of a lot of people I should have gone to, but at the time it just didn’t occur to me and I did buckle a bit. For me this all really culminated on the day after being told in the morning (by a member of staff) that I had done a terrible job and ending being left to look after the bags whilst the event was happening. I really felt like I had failed, and after this I just wanted the semester to be over and to take a break from it all. 

I was going through a lot of stuff personally, that I wasn’t handling well at the time, but have since sorted out and I feel a lot better. What it did make me realise is what a close group of friends I have, and those are the people that I enjoy working with. 

I am proud of the work we did together this semester, and I think we’ve all developed a really good working relationship which helps us to get stuff done quicker and more efficiently as we all know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

I look forward to working on my final projects and making something that shows what I’ve learnt over the past three years, and hopefully I can use in the future to get some work.

Networking.

We had Akil Ahmed (apologies if the spelling is wrong) come in this week to have small one on one conversations about what we are hoping to do once we leave university, and advise on the best possible course of action to achieve this. 

My view at the moment is that if I’m lucky enough to get any opportunities then I’m not going to be too fussy about them, especially at the beginning. I spent a lot of my school life being unhappy and unsure about what industry I want to work in, now that I’ve found one that I’m going to be happy in I’m happy to take anything as long as I’m helping make TV shows.

I do love Dramas and Comedies, and these are two genres that British Television has a history of doing very well, so I said that is ultimately where I’d like to end up. But at the same time, I’d love to try lots of new things, as I’ve only tried a few different things on my course. I’ve said already that I’d love the experience of making a documentary again, as I only did that in my first year and it didn’t go very well.

My main problem was that I wasn’t sure about how to go about getting in contact with people about getting work experience. I’ve tried applying for advertised work experience placements before but haven’t had any luck, as it’s so competitive. The advice I got was to think about what shows I’d like to be involved with and try to get in contact with someone from the show and basically ask them if there was any chance of getting on set. 

I didn’t realise it could be as simple as this, I had thought of it before but I didn’t want to seem like some annoying student. But if this is what I’ve got to do, then this is what I’ve got to do. I’ve had a think about what I’d like to do and I plan on getting in contact very soon and hopefully something will come out of it. 

At the same time, it kind of made me realise that I should be a bit more focused on what I want and where in the industry I want to end up. It’s all well and good saying that I’ll be happy to be working in the industry, but if I’ve got something to aim for then it will keep me more focused and more driven, and I could end up doing something I never thought I’d end up doing.

Response to Pitch.

If I’m being honest the feedback for this pitch wasn’t very good. It’s not that I think our idea is bad at all, I just think that were weren’t very good a putting it across to the tutors. 

There are lots of areas of the documentary that we haven’t got solid plans for at the moment, because a lot of depends on what kind of situation our presenter will get themselves into. We have talked a lot about where we think the story could end up going but the truth is that until we start production, we don’t really know where that is going to be. I don’t think we were clear in letting the tutors know that we are prepared for whatever happens and we understand the difficulties that we are going to face. Having said that, I do think it was completely fair for the tutors to bring it up as a point as it is something that we do have to be aware of.

The liked that we already had plans for a presenter, with our host pretty much guaranteed before the pitch. I think Hannah has done a great job finding the presenter, managing to find a you woman, with a background in technology journalism, which fits our documentary perfectly. Weirdly enough, if we hadn’t already had the presenter sorted out, then we wouldn’t have as many plans laid out as we did, so it was lucky that we had that sorted.

Overall, I guess they must have had some faith in us because the project was green lit without a second pitch. Even though we had trouble sometimes with putting across what we meant, I think they could see that we were all passionate enough about the project for it to work, as we were backing each other up when things didn’t look like they were going so well. I have faith in the group that we’ll manage to pull it all together and make a fantastic new documentary.

Response to Pitch.

If I’m being honest the feedback for this pitch wasn’t very good. It’s not that I think our idea is bad at all, I just think that were weren’t very good a putting it across to the tutors. 

There are lots of areas of the documentary that we haven’t got solid plans for at the moment, because a lot of depends on what kind of situation our presenter will get themselves into. We have talked a lot about where we think the story could end up going but the truth is that until we start production, we don’t really know where that is going to be. I don’t think we were clear in letting the tutors know that we are prepared for whatever happens and we understand the difficulties that we are going to face. Having said that, I do think it was completely fair for the tutors to bring it up as a point as it is something that we do have to be aware of.

The liked that we already had plans for a presenter, with our host pretty much guaranteed before the pitch. I think Hannah has done a great job finding the presenter, managing to find a you woman, with a background in technology journalism, which fits our documentary perfectly. Weirdly enough, if we hadn’t already had the presenter sorted out, then we wouldn’t have as many plans laid out as we did, so it was lucky that we had that sorted.

Overall, I guess they must have had some faith in us because the project was green lit without a second pitch. Even though we had trouble sometimes with putting across what we meant, I think they could see that we were all passionate enough about the project for it to work, as we were backing each other up when things didn’t look like they were going so well. I have faith in the group that we’ll manage to pull it all together and make a fantastic new documentary.

Development and Research for Final Project.

For the final projects development I was approached quite early on to get involved with another project. As they had sought me out I didn’t want to say no, so I got involved as the production manager. The project itself was a studio based quiz show, which isn’t something I set out to do at the beginning of the year. If I’m being honest, I didn’t really want to go back into the studio because we had already done a lot of work in there over the past two years. Our biggest project in the second year saw us making a four part series of 20 minute episodes based in the studio and treated as if they were live. In my opinion, making a 10 minute show in the studio just didn’t seem like a bigger challenge so it wasn’t something I was initially interested in. On top of that I had directed one of the final projects the third years had been working on when I was in the second year. But it was a format I hadn’t worked on before so I thought I would give it a go. I’ve been asked to be Production Manager for the project, so I’ve been reading Production Management by Linda Stradling, which I bought after she delivered a really good guest lecture.

I haven’t really been involved with the development of that project but the concept intrigues me and I’m excited about trying a new role, and learning more about that side of production, as the book has already taught me a lot.

I have been involved with the development of another project, based off an idea my friend Hannah had. She suggested creating a documentary about dating in the modern day. My main concern was that this has been done before, but she was quick to point out that we would be focusing mainly on a new form of online dating. There are several apps that have launched on smart phones that really give a different experience to the online dating world. The project itself is titled Love in Your Pocket. 

What we’ll be doing with the project is finding a presenter and asking Him/Her to take part in one of these new apps and documenting the experience. For inspiration I have been looking at the documentaries by Louis Theroux and Cherry Healey. What these two presenters too is really get engrossed in the world they are documenting and ask the type of questions that average viewer would probably want to ask. In terms of visual style it will be mostly about making sure I’ve got enough cameras to capture the action. This is something I noticed immediately when doing research, as any documentary we have worked on before has only used one camera. The plan with this documentary is to set up dates with other people using the app, so I’ll only have one opportunity to capture the event but as I have a lot of experience working with live projects, I feel like I’ll be able to achieve this.

Response to Feedback.

Overall, I’d say that the feedback we received for this project was fair. There were positive points picked out, but there were also some areas that we were given constructive criticism for. What I thought was good about the feedback, was that it was mostly issues we had already identified ourselves, so it shows that we’ve gotten to a point where we can be objective about our own work.

One point that was raised was that some of the shot choices seemed a bit odd. There’s a shot in the film where two of the characters are having a conversation in the corridor and we’d decided that we were going to shoot it handheld. Now I’ve already spoken about some of the troubles we had on the actual production day for this shoot, so that isn’t something that I’m going to talk about again, but it definitely had an adverse effect on this scene as we just didn’t have enough time to get it done right. The criticism was that the shot was just a bit too shaky, which when I look at it now I can see and I appreciate the opinion. What was interesting here though was that one of the tutors completely disagreed and liked the way that that scene had been shot. It was interesting to see differing opinions between two people, both of whom’s opinion you respect, not agreeing on whether something was good or not. I did appreciate the feedback, but I think it showed me more than anything that you aren’t going to please everyone, and as long as you’ve got a reason for something being shot a certain you shouldn’t really have anything to worry about. Just make sure that you’ve really thought through what you’re doing.

We also received feedback about the script, and the structure of the story. The pointed out that there were some bits that didn’t quite make sense on the screen. One of the main points for this was the use of the original dialogue from Shakespeare’s script. We used in two different ways, for when the politicians were debating, as we wanted to convey this idea that everything politicians say is sort of made to sound really clever. And we also used it as an internal monologue for Romeo’s character when he’s falling in love with Julian. It was pointed out to us that using it in two different ways as well as mixing in contemporary language could become confusing to the viewer. At the time it wasn’t something that I’d really spotted, but as soon as it was pointed out to me it became very clear what they were talking about. I think in the future we just need to make sure that just because something is clear to us, doesn’t mean it’s going to be clear to the audience watching it. We knew what we were trying to do, but to someone who has no idea what they’re about to see I understand how it could be confusing.

I think the main point I took away from this was to plan, and then look back at what you’ve planned and make sure it makes sense. It’s quite easy to get carried away with an idea that you like without stopping to think about what anyone else will think, but it’s really important to do that.

The Set Brief Experience.

For this project we were given the choice of working on Drama or a Documentary. I said before that these were the two areas that I was interested in working in again, and now I had to make the choice as to which one. Our group all really wanted to make a documentary, but as we only had a couple of weeks before we had to deliver the final product we decided to make a drama.

The reason behind this choice is that when you’re making a piece of fictional work, then you are in control of what happens. Not that’s it that easy, but all you need is a story and some actors and you can get it done relatively simply. The main thing that concerned us what that if we made a documentary, then it all hinges on the contributor being willing to participate, and if they change their mind at the last minute then the entire project can fall apart. On top of that, none of us really had any connections to anything that we thought would make an interesting enough subject so we opted to make a drama. 

We were given a choice of three famous scenes to base our script on; a scene from Romeo and Juliet, Pulp Fiction or Sleeper. We decided to go with Romeo and Juliet as the scene we were given was where their eyes meet across the dance floor, and they fall in love. As there is no dialogue in this scene we thought that it was left quite open for us to interpret it in different ways. We decided to do a modern take, but not in the same vein as Baz Lurhmann’s Romoe + Juliet.

We decided our roles for the project, and as we’ve all worked together before we know each other’s strengths and we all have certain roles that we like to do. There was no arguing about it, really we all knew what we would end up doing; I was the director. My main concern was that we managed to recreate the idea that the two main characters have a big reason for the fact that they can’t be together, and the idea of two families not liking each other just doesn’t seem like something that could still really happen. The idea we came up with would be that the two main characters would be from rival political parties. On top of that we also decided to make the focus of the story a homosexual relationship, rather than a heterosexual relationship, as in the original. This worked really well with our idea of putting a political spin on the film as we decided we could incorporate the real life debate of same sex marriage law, and have that be what is making the love between the two leads forbidden.

As a director it was a fun new challenge, as based on the script written by Hannah, we had quite a good little story to tell in a short amount of time. Rather than just adapting the one scene, it was written as a very short story, nearly all taking place in the same room but still incorporating other locations. 

Time was a big factor with this production. I mentioned before that we were worried that making a documentary would just mean that our time was way too tight to get anything done properly, well that ended up being a problem with this production. As we needed quite specific locations for our film, we only had access to one of the rooms for a total of three hours. This was going to be the only time that we would be able to use the room as a shooting location before the film had to be delivered, so it was imperative that we got as we much done as possible and used our time wisely. This is where I first real problem lay, as shortly after we arrived at the location we heard from one of our actors that he was running late. 

Not wanting to waste any time I got everything in place and shot everything I could do with just the one actor there. But after that it was just a waiting game, and he was over an hour late. Not only was he late but he hadn’t learnt his lines. Normally when I’ve worked with actors before they’ve either learnt their lines, or we’ve agreed before that will be a bit more of an improvisation element to it. But with this film we were quoting Shakespeare, and it was very important to all us that we kept some of the original dialogue so we had a strong connection to our inspiration. Having one of the actors not know his lines was incredibly frustrating, especially as we were already falling behind, but I knew I couldn’t let it affect the production so I just took a deep breath and threw myself into to get everything done as quickly as possible.

This did lead to a good new learning experience for me, as I ended up having to work very closely with the actors. Before this I had just blocked the actors, and as they already knew their lines, there was maybe just the occasional note I’d have to give about the performance. But with this I really had to help him get his mouth around the words, which involved breaking it down into small chunks that he’d be able to memorise and then putting it all together in the edit.

It also meant that we had to change what we had planned to do in quite a significant way, just because time wouldn’t have allowed us to get everything done if we had shot it in the way we had originally planned. When the film gets into Romeo’s monologue, it was originally something we were going to have him deliver into the camera, but as this we had to keep breaking up the dialogue for our actor, this wouldn’t have worked so we had to change it into a voiceover.

It all worked out in the end, and for such a short film made on a tight schedule, it really taught me a lot. It’s definitely something I’m taking forward from this point, in that you can never be too prepared and it’s always a good idea to have a back up plan in place. 

Final Project Ideas, Influences and Approaches.

Choosing what to work on for my Final Project is a tough decision. I think it’s the fact that the word ‘Final’ is such a huge part of. It feels like this is what I’ve been working towards, but at the same time I’m just at the beginning, I’ll be learning about the production of television shows for years to come yet. 

There are two different things I’d really like to work on, and have a creative handle on. I’d either like to work on a documentary, as I’ve only done one in my first year, and it didn’t go very well. And the other thing I’d like to work on is a short film combining comedy with drama.

Documentary, as a genre, wasn’t something that massively interested me before starting the course. I had seen documentaries but they were only really the ones you see on Channel 4, and I only really watched them because everyone else was talking about them and I wanted to be part of the conversation. But the teaching on this course really opened my eyes, and I’ve been watching a lot more documentaries, and if not documentaries then a lot more factual programming at least. 

I’m a big fan of Louie Theroux and his documentary style, but he tends to hit some quite hard to deal with subjects. Cherry Healey is someone else who has adopted a similar style but keeps hers a bit more light and gets a bit more personally involved on an emotional level. This is something I’m interested in trying, as I think it’s becoming a more and more popular way of getting viewers to become more involved with the programme as they have a face that they can be familiar with and it helps them become more engrossed, as they feel like they are going on a journey with the presenter.

As I said above, I’d like to work on a short film combining comedy and drama. I’ve been trying to write some scripts combining the two genres, but I haven’t got anything at the moment that I’d feel confident enough to work on. But the combination of the two genres is something that I really enjoy as a viewer, so it is definitely something I’m going to keep working on and possibly consider when it comes to the final projects.

But more importantly I want to be part of team that I work well with. I’ve worked on quite a few projects over the past couple of years, and the one most important thing I’ve learned is that you have to like, or at least have a good working relationship, with the rest of your team members. There has to be a level of respect and understanding for everything to work, otherwise it tends to just leave a small amount of people doing the majority of work for the team.