transcription project- week 1

For our new project, we were taken to London to several specific events in order to inspire our new projects. These were The Southbank centre to see a display by a range of award winning photo journalists, The Photographer's gallery to see the Feminist Avant Garde display, and finished with seeing Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie.
I am a big fan of documentary film making and so I feel Louis Theroux was the biggest impact on my idea. I was fascinated by how people react on camera, especially when under scrutiny, and this is magnified when you criticise their passions or beliefs, as Louis did when confronting current and former scientologists. This gave me an idea, attending a design and media school meant i had access to people who would also be extremely passionate about things that i could interview them for, and then scrutinise. I decided to run tests without a camera, simply stopping people and asking them about what they care about, their talents, political opinions, from here i could make comments and ask questions that demean them or criticise their view. This process was extremely helpful to me as it allowed me to make mistakes before hand and refine my questions so that my recordings will be efficient and get the best responses.

Who am I?

The Who Am I? project was an extremely difficult one for me as a film maker. The idea was to shoot a 1 minute film that we felt, after a much planning, represented us, or some aspect of our personality.

to begin with we conducted interviews with friends, family, and other individuals to help inspire us as  to our stand our stand out traits and features. I did actually enjoy this segment of the task, it was fun and i feel i will use it in the future.

Problems arose as i moved to filming my piece, i felt a large part of my personality revolved around my job as a barista, which takes up much of my spare time away from class, and so i decided to shoot a comedy on that. I felt the biggest mistake came at the start when i decided to work without assistance from any of my classmates. Though the project had to be individual we could work together to help each others project, but i chose not to and ran into several difficulties as a result. As i was working alone i struggled to pin down a single idea as i was the only judge of their quality, and was constantly developing the idea in several different directions in my own head, with a partner or group with me the idea could be put out their and its development streamlined, rather than expanding in several confusing directions. once i picked a story i struggled to take it further in terms of structure, it was supposed to be a comedy but i struggled to judge whether or not my own jokes were actually funny. after much of these problems and stress i actually decided to scrap the project whilst still in the storyboarding stage and try something new, that i had put far less planning and time into, and relied heavily on improv. i did this because i felt the root of success was to do what i enjoy, by shooting a project i didn't like or care about, i was dooming myself to failure, and so improv comedy is something i enjoy, and i did with my younger brother.

Though this was a much more fun project, it did not lead to success. My lack of planning meant that in post production, several key shots were missing and the film could nit be completely edited, causing me to scrap this project.

Overall i learned to never work alone, films a team project and too much work to be dictated by one person. and to always at least have a story board or shot list or both to ensure the film is entirely shot.