TVP1230 Location Filming Reflective Analysis
Over the past year, I have worked on two different productions on the TVP1230 course: documentary and drama both 5-minute long. I have improved in multiple areas, the most prominent being my individual self-reflection and growth, and my team skills. This analysis is an attempt to outline the developmental changes I effectuated throughout the duration of the course, supported by constructive feedback, advice and referencing texts.
For the first production – a documentary about Italian busker based in London „Giulia Marelli, the life in a day” I was working as a producer. From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to show a story of a musician so as a group we started doing research and contacting London street performers. With director, we chose to make an observational documentary to capture things as they happen and to add commentary we used an interview to give the audience the context. To become aware of what it means to be a producer I had read the article „From script to screen: Careers in film production” in which they describe this role. According to this producers are film’s managers, from securing the financing in preproduction to approving the completed film in postproduction. From pre-production through postproduction, producers are responsible for the overall supervision of a film. Their responsibilities include creating a budget and approving changes made to the script, or filming schedule. Producers may hire other workers to help with some of these tasks. Thanks to this definition I was able to solve the problems we had during our production and understand fully what my duties were. First of all, I had to create a filming plan to reduce the number of shooting days because our budget couldn’t cover more than 3 days travel receipts and also I needed to figure out the best way to transport all of the equipment. Another problem we faced was the poor quality of the footage from the first shooting day that was unusable. It was caused by the lack of communication between director and camera operator but most of all by miscommunication within the whole crew. After this, I have learned that it is helpful to give instructions and make sure that every team member is aware of their role because we are all in the process of gaining experience and it is vital to learn from our own mistakes. Even though we knew about it we decided to show the rushes for the rough cut to give our lecturers the basic impression of what we are aiming for. After receiving the feedback from the rough cut we had to reshoot everything. I consulted with my director that we should change the camera operator and I suggested to do more cutaways of Giulia’s house. For the next filming day we were more prepared and it was a success. This kind of constructive feedback is really helpful as we are all amateurs and willing to take as much advise as possible from lecturers to make the best piece. I realized that our main problem was that we didn’t really know what we wanted to achieve so next time I think its essential to answer the question about what do we really want our audience to know after they have viewed the film because it guides the entire production process. However, this could have gone better. In the future if I am a producer I will arrange more meetings in every stage of production to keep everyone informed. After working on this documentary I completely agree with the producer-director Michael Merino’s statement I found in the article mentioned earlier “You shepherd the project from script to screen, you are responsible for everybody and everything.”
In the second semester for the drama „Lonely Boy”, I changed my role to a director, because I wanted to have more control over the creative process of the production. As we learned from the previous production we decided to do the brainstorm to pick an idea that we all felt strongly about so we could all be involved at the same level. I wrote the script with my producer and what we had in mind whilst doing that was the rule that our lecturers kept reminding us of – „Show not tell”. According to the „Video Production Handbook” by Gerald Millerson and Jim Owens, It is important to avoid overloading and don’t be long-winded or use complicated sentences. Later I found out that it's vital to be more precise while creating the shot-list in terms of the duration of each shot because we used too many tracking shots and we ended up with 8 minutes edit so we had to cut some of the scenes even though they were significant to the plot. I think I took a quote from the writer and director Sabastian Corbascio „The stage loves words; television and the cinema loves movement. If that means taking out an entire speech and replacing it with an arched eyebrow, do so.” too literally and our drama had too many silent scenes which made it too hard to understand some of the psychological stages of our protagonist. Then we had a meeting to create a presentation to pitch our idea. Because we were prepared well and also had a visual representation of our drama such as storyboard and mood-board lecturers it gave us a green light and we started looking for actors. According to the director Elia Kazan, eighty percent of the challenge in directing actors is finding the right actor for the role (Badham & Modderno 2006 p. 44). We put the posters about casting, but we only got one response so we decided to find actor through the agency. We had got more than ten candidates so we asked them to record a tape with a part of the script or to meet us in person so we could talk about our project and give them more details about it. I found it really interesting how the relationship between director and actor is complex but also important to have a satisfying final result. I had worked as a director assistant before so I noticed that many actors prefer jumping straight into shooting without doing rehearsals, whereas Weston, Badham & Modderno and Lumet all recommend rehearsing (Weston 1996 235-244) (Badham & Modderno 2006 p. 57-75) (Lumet 1996 p. 61-62). Badham & Modderno (2006 p. 95) write the following: ‚Just because some brilliant actors feel comfortable not rehearsing does not mean that all actors feel that way. The vast majority of actors are extremely insecure and want, no, they need time to prepare. They need to work with their scene partners. They need time to discover the possibilities of the scenes. They need to get over the very real anxiety of doing new material. Very, very few people can do that without rehearsal.’ That’s why I decided it’s better to rehearse first because then actors were more comfortable and I was able to give them instructions. Another thing that I learned was that it’s crucial to have a backup plan just in case of serious problems for example, when we wanted to make a bike scene outside it was raining so we decided to scrap this and changed the script so it would make sense without it. I also have gained a comprehension how creating a more specific plan in terms of lighting and positioning the camera would help us on a day of production, because we spent hours on rigging different lights for each shot to make the location look as we imagined.
This year has provided me with an extensive degree of experience and thusly an improved outlook on the varying applications of the theoretical components, compounding on my learned knowledge. The combination of texts, lectures, experience, and feedback have instilled the knowledge both in theory and practice of new skills. After this year I fully understood that producers and directors need to be organized, creative and be comfortable with multitasking. From my personal standpoint, it is, however, the real-life experiences, the pressures faced within the industry and learning from both my errors and successes, that have been the most influential for my learning process.
References:
Badham, John & Craig Modderno. 2006, I'll Be in My Trailer: The Creative Wars Between Directors and Actors, USA: Michael Wiese Productions, pp.44-219
Weston, Judith. 1996, Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film & Television, USA: Ingram Pub Services, p.314
Lumet, Sidney. 1996, Making Movies, USA: First Vintage Books, p.220
Owens, J. and Millerson, G. (2013) Video production handbook. 4th edn. Johanneshov: MTM, pp. 27-34.
Nichols, B. (2017) Introduction to documentary. 2nd edn. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
From script to screen: Careers in film production (2013). Available at: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2013/summer/art02.pdf (Accessed: 2 April 2018).