Final Major Project Unit: Project Update

In terms of equipment so far, I’ll be shooting on a Canon 6D with a full frame sensor, so it will perform well when shooting indoors and wide shots. I have a zoom recorder which we can use to record the interviews and we’ll need radio microphones for when we film actuality sequences with the contributors. 

At first we have our main contributor, John, who is a hoarder, so we went to film in his home, I’m thinking some wides of the room, where he sits and thinks, or if he’s busy working on something. He also has connections with the sea, as the night of his diagnosis before he was brought to hospital he wanted to fly to Cornwall and walk into the sea. As Lauren as done a pre-interview with him, she can guess what kind of things he will talk about. We’ll need to do pre-interviews, which we can record, with our other contributors, or just email them some more basic questions. It helps to paint a picture as to what to shoot, and where we can shoot them. 


We filmed at John’s house, and set up the interview shot just to test the water. See what worked. Filmed it in a wide and a mid and CU so we have a variety of shots. Even though the plan was not to use them, they’re there as a back-up. We then got some talking outside about his car which was more natural. We might try this again and actually follow him out somewhere. Also need to get some shots where he doesn’t talk but is just in his own world like we’re not there getting up to the things he might do alone. 

So that was successful, we went back to edit what we found at my house the next day, I went through and edited out all the questions and replaced them with subject markers. I also tried to take out any waffle. We worked on structuring the questions into groups so there’s no repetition or going back and forth from subject matters. 

We then went out in the pouring rain looking for locations, up near Bearsted is a high point which would be nice to film. I would have loved to film in the rain but I wasn’t prepared to do so, I’d need someone to hold an umbrella for the camera. But I’d like to get some rain shots to contrast with the sunset shots (the weather is a metaphor for the mood swings). 

I think testing with John initially has helped and give us both much needed confidence in going out and interviewing others. At first I was concerned because John is such a fast talker and started with very long joining sentences which is difficult to edit. But when watching back, I’m not sure if I just got used to the way he speaks, but he didn’t come across as too fast. We just have to make sure they give shorter and to the point answers with the things we need, but then perhaps have open questions where they might find deeper answers. Lauren has been working on the questions to improve them and put them in groups relating to topic and she's also colour coded them. Even though we can't write a proper script yet without the stories, we're starting to think about the style and how we'd like the documentary to flow. 

We have launched our website so we can start with promotion and blogging. Just need to remember to post a lot as films which I've seen always keep a blog of the making-of.

We'd also like to think about where to show this film afterwards, it will reach an audience on the bipolar UK website, but we might consider festivals and film websites. For example, I found this website www.filmsforaction.org, good place to post independent documentaries, especially one like ours, Just found one on there called ‘Feel for Poppies’ made entirely on images and voiceover.