Arts Award Challenge

What is new about the project

For my project I am doing a video with a group of friends that are on my course. The project is that I will be doing is a video in Albert Park with Nicole Swainston, a student in my class, as the actor walking around taking photos of the scenery, with some of the parks favourite sites. I will be the director for the making of the video. I will be calling in assistance from other members of the class to act as part of the production crew: Sarah Lemmon will be the Camera-girl, Nicole Swainston will be the actor and Marc Robinson will be the editor.

As the director, I will be in charge of which shots are required, making sure everything needed is filmed, and coordinating the whole production. I have never made a video as being in charge of a production team before, so this is all very new to me.

What are my strengths and weaknesses in this area

My strengths in this area are:

• that I can give good ideas to the rest of the team on where we should shoot and around how long we should shoot for on each shot that we will take

• I have good time keeping and organizing how long things are going to take, and how many times we would have to do the shots before I am happy with the final work

My weaknesses in this area are:

• I am not really sure if we will be able to stick to the original idea because of lack of time available, or if we will need to develop a different idea. 

What am I going to produce

I am going to direct a video showing some of the sites of Albert Park with Nicole, Marc and Sarah from my class.  Each one of us will put our own ideas into the making of this video, welding together to make the video look and sound as good as it should. However, as director I will have final say on the finished version of the video. In this video there will be no speaking as the video is just Nicole walking around taking photos of the park. When we edit the video it will have some calming and tranquil music in the background. 

Stages of planning and preparation

For the planning and preparation of the video, we made a mind-map type of thing to jot down all of our ideas.  

Here is a screenshot of the mind map:

Here is the original idea:

My original idea was to do a ghost girl wandering around in the park, but with the limited time and material we had to use. We could not produce what we wanted, so quickly we decided to do something we had seen on YouTube, where no one would talk. A silent video.

Here are the stages needed to produce the video:

1. Come up with the original idea

2. Develop this idea with mind maps and through talking go others in the group.

3. Pre-production: Risk Assessment, Call Sheet, Equipment Booking

4. Produce the movie

5. Post -production - editing from Marc

6. Upload edited video

7. Get feedback on video

8. Review work produced for my challenge

Pre-Production

Producing the Project

This is how we will be producing the video. First of all we each need to plan out ideas on what we want to do for the group video. Using mind-maps and brainstorming ideas together and writing them down. We then have to create pre-production documents to organize ourselves before we actually produce the video.
Afterwards we have to book out equipment, but all we need is a camera which will be good as it will be easy to book it. With that being the only thing needed to book, we should be able to get straight on with making the video.

Sharing it with others

How I will be sharing the video is by posting it in a group chat on Facebook to friends and people that are on the course, or I shall do it to individual people and ask for feedback. I could send the link to the students and ask if they could give me feedback on the video itself when I upload it to YouTube.

How the filming went

When we went to Albert park to actually film what we had planned we didn't have the things we wanted to use on the day so we had to quickly plan a short film of something totally different from what we originally planned. 

Every time we take a shot either people walked past or something or someone obstructed things, as the park was very busy. 

This shot above took a while to take but in the short amount of time we had to film, we had to push on and work on where Nicole would move to, although in this scene Sarah (camera-girl) was walking behind Nicole so then the camera was wobbling all over the place, making the shot no as steady as it was needed to. We should've zoomed in slowly instead of walking and filming behind her. Nearly all of the film was shaky, but if only we had more time to shoot it, I think that the film would have looked a lot better overall and we would have been able to take better shots.  

The main program we used to edit this video was Adobe Premier Pro. 

It was really easy to use and get the handle of it. As in it was easy to learn how

 to use it to edit the film.

This is the edited video from my YouTube channel.

Here I have sent out a request to everyone on the course through Facebook to get feedback/reviews from others.

Feedback

Here above is the feedback from 3 of the students on my course. Looking at the feedback they have given my some positive comments.

Review

The things I got out of this challenge are things like being able to work as part of a team and also being able to get my point across with others in my group with confidence and being able to agree on things with others. In the making of this video I think I have achieved what I wanted with having being able to experience an important role in our team as the Director. Our group got along and did well in the making of the video, there were no mishaps or any uncomfortable issues as everyone had their say on matters and were able to contribute with anything they wanted to, either to make it better or to do something differently. 

In my opinion with the limited amount of time we had to do the video I felt that we wouldn't be able to produce the video in time, but with that said we pulled through and after we finished the video it felt good and more importantly we felt that the video looked really good, as it was only the real first and proper go we had at making a film. After we had finished it we were proud with everything we had done and with each of our roles. The video had then got shown at Cineworld with all the different Levels of Media to look at every-ones work throughout the year and what people had to show everything off. So which must of meant the teachers must of liked what we had done.

What did I learn from it?

What I had learnt from it is was how to be able to direct a team of how to angle to shot, how to keep everyone together, making sure everyone knew what they were doing and when to cut the shots. Maybe not how a real director would be like in making a real film but in the sense of that I got to try some of the job roles that a proper director would be like.

What went well?

I think the things that went well the most was our teamwork and ability to concentrate on the task at hand, as everyone was busy and no one was messing on, we were all so focused which also helped getting the job done on time. 

What was difficult?

What I found difficult was the planning, when we started to plan it out with all of our ideas it seemed great but then on the day when we needed other things like sheets amongst other things we couldn't do what we originally wanted to do. So then on the day we had to quickly plan and improvise on what we were going to do - but we finally pulled through and made a great video.

What would I do differently if I did this challenge again?

If I did this challenge again what I would do differently is get better organized and make sure we have all the materials needed for the film we planned to do. If I wasn't so caught up in my own emotions with personal life then maybe we would have been able to produce something better. Also I would of taken the time to learn about the different roles as well as learning how to use the different equipment that was there to be used. I may also change my idea to something different completely like making a moving image with a 3D waveform which would take a lot longer to do and more time - but it would be worth it.