Production diary content

  

A major part of my role in pre-production was joining Mason in conducting the pre-interview we held with Rezza. unlike Mason who had already met, and was friends with Rezza, I had to make sure I was friendly and made him feel comfortable, especially around the people he had never met before. I asked him all of our questions and promoted him to explain in better detail answers where I thought he could expand. I also came with Jake and Bee on our recce to the primary school and surrounding areas, collecting photos and information about these places to later share with the group. This also helped Jake and I have a tighter grip on our vision for the overall piece, which was really helpful. As director and the creator of our idea, I had a major role in exploring the route and angle we were going to take in our project, especially wanting to focus on males in a caring role and the social impact of that, something I hope will feature in our final film. Alongside Jade, I had big part in exploring the more creative side of our project, focusing on colour and especially the projection technique we wanted to use.

Overall, I felt fairly prepared for our shoot and I think seeing the locations and conducting the pre-interview definitely eradicated any previous fears I had about us not being prepared enough. Due to how well I think we work in our group, the actual shoot was really fun and seemed like quite a comfortable situation, without much anxiety despite the time pressure etc. We had all of our paperwork completed in time and we had quite a solid production schedule which definitely helped, despite us running off course with it at points.

As director and the only person other than mason who had already met our contributor (in the pre-interview) I once again took on the role of interviewer in our final shoot. I felt as if I took on the role as a final decision maker, especially when choosing between shots and angles presented by the camera team.

On our first day of shooting, we were only able to have our contributor and the cinema space that we were using, for a couple of hours. Setting up our very first shot took a really long time and also trying to work out the most effective way of showing the images from the computer so we had some issues there as the pictures weren’t playing In the way we wanted. when we had all of that fixed and our first shot was finally set up to the standard that we wanted, the rest of the shots for the day were really quick and efficient. we had a couple of issues regarding getting a close up of our contributors eye as we wanted to see the reflection of the screen but we quickly overcame that by getting similar images or colours on phone screens and shining them closer which I thought was a really good bit of collaboration within our group. The final shot of the day was extremely rushed as we had to leave the cinema for the public to come in but I think me and Jade especially did a really good job of achieving the look we wanted in an extremely stressful last minute.

I feel like overall, we worked really well together and I can’t think of any moments when there was tension in the group which I think was largely due to the planning section and how well we bonded overall and the fact that we all had a very clear vision of the project which obviously meant there weren’t any major moments of disagreement.

I think the shoot went really well overall and although there were some technical and time issues, we got some really great shots and achieved everything we wanted to and I think certain aspects such as the projections were even better than we could have hoped for. I feel like my technical skills have improved overall and I think this project has been really helpful.