Understanding and Adapting My Ideas
Going into this month as a Director/ writer made me feel a little lost at first. I was worried as I felt like I should be doing something more. The reason for this was because instead of doing the work of a team, I now had two teammates to help me with the project tasks. Initially, a lot of the opening work was done by George as the producer. Cailan was also adapting my pre-production work into storyboards. It took me a while to fully understand how I slotted into this opening phase, but I did eventually understand thanks to help from Simon and through various group meetings.
My job was to keep the team together and constantly provide information to whoever needed it. This meant I was speaking to George about contributors for example, and with Cailan I was talking over each scene and how I saw it being filmed. I ended up reviewing more reference material to allow Cailan to craft the best storyboards possible, I think this extra research that I did really helped ensure Cailan and myself were on the same wavelength.
George and I were having daily conversations about contributors, locations and other miscellaneous scenes that we needed for our project. I really liked this part as it was great to help out each other in determining how we can get the best contributors possible. This leads on to adapting my ideas, as we had a few of our big contributors who we had planned to involve, decline the opportunity to be in our film. This meant that I started to learn about other peoples' stories and how they could possibly fit into our story. This mostly is the case for the motor racing driver who overcame adversity. We had really wanted Billy Monger to be involved, but due to him working on his race schedule in 2019 along with a constant flow of interview opportunities, I can understand why it was not possible.
I was proactive after this disappointment and went about finding new people. I found a lot of inspirational stories that would work for our documentary and passed the information over to George. We even had a disabled motor racing athlete get in contact with us, which we are pursuing as his story is once again incredible.
The opening weeks of this project also allowed me to understand my own ideas and adapt them. Having the time to go back through the script and re-read it has meant I have changed it a little since I submitted it for pre-production. Changes such as including prompts for George, highlighting the golden moments and adaptions to wording. I also emphasised certain details when re-reading the script as this will allow Cailan to understand my creative vision, ensuring that it captured how I see it on the day. All these tweaks and changes allow for a more polished script and one that is constantly evolving as we confirm contributors and locations. Overall I think we made strong progress in terms of future scenes in January.
How shoot days went and why & how we went about our resolving issues
For me, shoot days were where the lack of time to prepare really hurt us. On all three shoot days, I had gone to the effort to produce detailed shot lists of every single angle that I wanted. However, these were not referred to when filming, meaning the film crew missed some of the most important shots that I had asked for. I thought I had made this clear in the material I had sent to the team, but they all acknowledged that they did not look at these on the shoot days. This was a disappointing moment for me because, as a contributor, it went really well. I passed my racing license and the karting sequence gave us a lot of coverage. But looking back on the footage from the license especially, we are going to really struggle in the edit.
George had apologised on multiple occasions for his mistakes on the race license day, which was the day that disappointed me the most. I planned for trackside filming, which George said he had obtained. But I was only told on the day that this was not the case, meaning a lot of my planning was worthless. If I had known we did not have this access that would have been fine as I would have been able to plan accordingly. But the fact I planned for something that we did not actually have access for really disappointed me. Communication during this weekend, especially Saturday, was our biggest failing as it meant we did not have the required coverage for the sequence I had planned for.
George has admitted his faults for this weekend, which I understand as part of the learning experience. Going forward we also know that George should not be on the camera and it was his job to acquire someone to film in his place. The coverage from his camera and another camera during the race license acquired no useable footage which was a disappointment. Along with this issue, the main camera in the car and filming me driving only captured 90 seconds of useable footage. This is because the camera was not set up properly. George had obtained this camera and said he had tested it. Meaning when I saw the footage I was really frustrated to only have 90 seconds instead of a possible 20 minutes. George understood all of the issues this weekend and admitted that he really struggled. I know going forward to work more closely with George to ensure he does not feel overwhelmed and I encourage him to speak to me when something happens, however small.
As a team, we are happy with the footage acquired from the medical (Even if a proper test shoot for this and the licensing scene would have massively helped) and the go-kart test shoot. Going forward I have spoken to George to ensure the number of test shoots in our schedule is increased vastly. We went from 1-2 test shoots to at least 6. This means any future issues will hopefully be sorted before we film the actual sequence. I admire George for taking responsibility for the failings of this weekend. While we did get some fantastic footage, it undoubtedly could have been more. Better communication on shoot days as well as thorough and frequent test shoots have been scheduled due to the issues we experienced this weekend. While it did not go perfectly, we did learn a lot and this experience means that going forward we will be in a better place. Any issue that becomes apparent can now be solved before we shoot for real. These issues have actually benefitted our project, as, without this experience, we may have gone into future scenes with a lack of preparation.
Research to complete
This month has allowed me to learn a lot about how we work as a team. It also allows me to understand what I need to be doing better as a writer/director. Communication is undoubtedly something that has improved over the past months, but something that could still improve further. My blogs will now show how I learned from the issues we encountered on our shoot days and how other crews have overcome something similar.
Research going forward will enable me to understand why being clear about what you want to get from each shoot is vitally important. I also need to better understand how best to communicate this to my crew. I am very aware that it would be easy as writer/director to not listen to the ideas of my crew, but I know from past experience that does not work. Therefore, I want to research further why and how I listen to the ideas from my group and how I go about introducing them into the project. I know that my crew is very talented, so listening to them will be very important in securing the best grade for this project.
I also need to learn to properly break down every sequence and establish what the key aspects are to ensure the sequence works as planned. Key shots and answers will be important in allowing the story to have a similar flow to the one I originally planned, without making it staged and dishonest. A big area that I want to research is how to communicate these ideas effectively to the team because as has been seen, some of my work so far has been ignored. With all of these, along with any other issues that become apparent, I will be looking at how industry professionals went about tackling these issues and why they did what they did in filming.
Overall, I can learn a lot over the coming months and I will need to, to allow this project to flourish in the way I know it can. One of my biggest issues at first was allowing people into a project that I conceptualised months ago. It was hard to take the criticism and ideas at first, but I started to understand that it was to the benefit of this project. I feel I have improved as the month has gone on, but a lot more can be done to ensure we don't run into similar issues in the future.
Conclusion
While I was very disappointed with the footage obtained by track cameras on Saturday, I was happy with the majority of the rest of the footage captured over the three first shoot dates. We now know as a team that we need to spend a lot more time doing tests and working out the fine details. It has been hard for me as a director/writer to be open to change but I am improving which is allowing the story to be more honest and personal. We have all learnt from the issues during the opening month of this project, which actually puts us in a much better position going forward. These issues have allowed us to realise what we need to improve on, which will hopefully be a blessing in disguise. I am very excited to now spend more time planning each scene, enabling it to work smoothly and capture exactly what I want. We all now know what we need to do to make this project as thought-provoking as possible and I am ready for the challenge that lays ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment