Hey! So just to say I have began a new blog for my second year as a Media Production student, why not take a peek?
https://grantsnaithyr2blog.wordpress.com
UNITED STATES – CIRCA 1950s: Woman with surprised look. (Photo by George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images)
As part of Coventry Universities amazing international experience programme, I was granted the opportunity to travel to the city of Istanbul in Turkey to engage in the culture and explore the world.
First of all id like to stress how much I am grateful to Coventry University for their commitment to ensuring students are given the chance to indulge in international travel on a professional level, it was honestly one of the deciding factors for me when I was considering which university to attend and it has exceeded my expectations. We were offered trips to New York and Amsterdam in addition to Istanbul which I heard from other students went equally well.
Okay so Istanbul, the only city in the world to be a part of both Europe and Asia, straddling the Bosphorus way and I have never been to another city like it. You can immediately see the impacts of various cultures and civilisations colliding together. Underground Roman cisterns such as the Basilica Cistern to the remnants of the Southern Wall of the Byzantine Hippodrome, all of this placed in a bustling city of 14 million. The Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace were particularly beautiful to walk around, their sheer size and intricately detailed paintings just took the breath away. The history of how the Sultans lived with their harem and councils, as a person interested in historical sites, was particularly interesting.
Ive lived a relatively sheltered life when it comes to indulging in culture, usually being the kind of person who prefers what I know but I decided to throw myself out of my comfort zone and thoroughly enjoyed it. I got to sample the food and drinks and found I enjoyed a lot of it, we had a regular eating spot round the corner from our hotel. The owner, Martin, became very good friends with us and as the night oil burned on we would sit at a table with him and just fire questions at him about life in Istanbul. Questions like why are there so many homeless on the streets, what are they typical niceties of social engagement here and just why are there so many carpet sellers here? He was a well of knowledge and taught us so much and served us great food at discount price.
The other lovely people in this picture are my classmates Karen and Brandon. Now I had spoken to them before going on this trip and even worked with them on projects but what I found whilst out in Istanbul was we developed a much stronger bond, and to me thats the most important thing about life in University is developing these bonds and contacts so that in the future as we all look to enter the big world of media we can call upon one another and help each other along.
Together we explored the beautiful mosques, the majestic historical sites, but we also had chance to see the less travelled routes of Istanbul. We walked some rather unkept streets and saw many homeless clutching young and begging for money. We were later informed that some of these are victims of Syria fleeing into the country whilst the other half are simply making a living from begging. One particularly harrowing moment on our trip was when we witnessed a child of no older than 2 running down a street hand outstretched to this group of gentlemen for money. She strayed far out of her mothers sight and just moved from crowd to crowd, refusing to leave till she’d been handed money. It was quite sad to think that this girl at such a young age knew only how to beg and hadn’t got to enjoy the life we had.
Today we met as a group to discuss what direction we wanted to take our project in, luckily we all agreed relatively quickly that exploring the world of cosplay was a unique and interesting concept that offered many realistic channels to pursue for VT’s and demonstrations. However, during our seminar with our lecturer a
few cracks in this appeared in that if we were supposedly making a series, could cosplay really have enough content to be a weekly episode. So we began to explore the concept of covering all things geek with aims at keeping it centred around fandoms. I began to research into the possibilities for our show:
– Video Gaming: Largely accepted in modern day society on a variety of platforms: playstation, xbox, pc, mobile phones and so on. Because of this there is no end of options for interviewees, even opening up the possibility of interviews in the streets. In addition, the game industry is forever growing and there is new news related to it all the time meaning our story can be relevant to the present day. Luckily, there is the UK’s biggest gaming festival taking place in Coventry itself named Insomnia 54. http://insomniagamingfestival.com
I think also began thinking about the set and what it should be made up of as this was a major concern of our group. I think what will really sell this set will be the small details as opposed to the overall look. Some bright colours coupled with dotted geeky memorabilia like posters, game consolers, films, board games etc. Here is a small example of what I think a good set would look like for this project.
Here are a number of stills captured during our experience working on 160MC T2 People 2 People. During my time working on this I have learnt invaluable skills of communication, understanding and compassion across all of society and walks of life. I found that everyone has a story to tell no matter how mundane they may think themselves to be and as Media practitioners it is important to capture these stories and share them through the globally understand cinematic language. I also learnt that the world of Media can open so many doors to so many different walks of life that it is essentially a passport to everything, I never could have imagined the sheer quantity of opportunities that a Media Production course at Coventry University could open up for me and only within my first year. A big thanks to everyone in these pictures: Jarno Kilstrom, Chuck Weber, Dominic Flynn, Simil Gurung, Craig Thompson and Maurice Shakespeare as well as my amazing team Karen Jensen-Clark, Michael Moser and Chris Caswell.
Having reached an important stage in the 160MC T2 process I decided now would be a good time to view myself and my groups progress so far as a whole. My group is comprised of myself, Michael Moser, Karen Jensen-Clark and Chris Caswell. I consider it a blessing to be working with such a group as they all have a key attribute that I value highly: desire. We may not all be the most successful or skilled individuals but there are none others who desire this more than us. They are devoted and eager and that has made for an extremely pleasant working environment of like minded individuals. In terms of areas to improve upon I would say we could do with more regular meeting times whether that be in person or via Skype and constant book keeping of the meeting minutes so that we can reflect back on that and work a little more efficiently.
As an individual I would say I have flourished within this group as more than just someone with the desire to be a director but also as someone willing and hungry to get hands on and involved. Karen is exceptional at explaining and demonstrating the use of technology that otherwise escapes me and it is because of this I have been able to experiment more.
At the beginning of our project we went out as a group and met with as many people as we could and captured footage to edit into a one minute documentary ‘clip’ that summarised each character. From this was born the idea of ‘The Midlanders’ which can be seen in one of my previous post, which all of the group is committed to. I think by getting footage captured from an early stage was a strategically key moment, this allowed us to view our characters on screen and see what we missed visually and what could be done better, this also helped to get our subjects used to being on camera and trusting in us. Before we would roll out the equipment on each subject we would have a genuine conversation with the people we were about to interview. We didn’t want them to feel uneasy or worried, or at least as much as possible. We interviewed the following people:
Simil Gurung – The subject I presented for my individual piece was Simil Gurung, a young man from Nepal who had dreams to become a famous chef. He told us his story of hardships in the youth culture of Nepal and his path to his chosen career goals. (See Meeting Simil post)
Jarno Kilstrom – Jarno is a Finish pilot who teaches people how to fly from his school at Coventry Airport. He told us stories about his first flight, his passion for flying and some of the more harrowing tales of his time in the air. We chose him to be an interesting subject for The Midlanders and will be one of six subjects in the first series.
Craig – Craig was a young man who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Type III at the age of 27 and he talked to us about the hardships of him coming to terms with the fact he would be struck to a wheelchair for most of his life. It was a moving story and he was also chosen to take part in the Midlanders.
Maurice Shakespeare – Maurice was a lovely man who was the grandfather of Chris’s wife who we had the pleasure to meet. He told us how during the Second World War he was evacuated out to the countryside. He was Michael’s individual piece for the presentation and ultimately our group was approved on the premise that we do our final People to People piece on Maurice. Since then we have gone back to meet with him as a group just for a chat without cameras and equipment to get to know him a bit more. Maurice will also feature on The Midlanders, most likely as the opening piece because of his strong ties to the area and the history of the region.
Chuck Weber – We also had the amazing opportunity to have an interview with the recently appointed Head Coach of the Coventry Blaze Ice Hockey team and spend a few days filming their practice sessions. This was a real treat and one we simply stumbled upon whilst walking around looking for opportunities. This presented some great prospects for visuals and will probably feature as the finishing piece of The Midlanders.
Following the amazing outcome of my hunt for stories across Coventry and the Midlands whilst working on 160MC T2 I have found myself really inspired by the stories i’ve heard and the courage of the so called every day man or woman to openly pour out there hearts and minds to someone they perhaps don’t know so well just because they desire to have a voice. I got to thinking that something like this combined together could be a really powerful tool for good. The idea came to me that perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a type of interactive documentary website where you could explore the 1 to 3 minute stories of people all across the Midlands be they; shop keepers, actors, teachers all the way up to professional sportsmen and business owners. At the very least it could be a web series published on YouTube or Vimeo that expresses the minds of the people of the midlands.
This tool could be used in several different ways:
Protest – The people of the midlands could contact myself to express their passion for a particular story, to air their dislike for something or campaign for something to change.
Advertisement – It could be used as a way of advertising a service or business from selling homemade jewellery to a small high street shop.
A Personal Expression – It could very simply be that someone wants people to know their life story; the hardships they faced, the joys of their life.
I am really quite keen to explore this idea of a web series or interactive documentary that gives The Midlanders a voice, a unified status to the world of how society, economy and ecology are in this present day of age.
In this post I am going to be analysing and reflecting upon my experiences of my first Coventry University Media Production project, to create a short 3 minute film in a group. Our film is titled ‘Conflicted Mind’ and is centred around a character called Lydia who suffers with schizophrenia and hears voices in her head, she is attended to by a house calling nurse named Jenny. Firstly, i’d like to apologise for the fact that this video is on YouTube and not Vimeo, the file was too large and I will be sorting this issue out and putting it on Vimeo shortly.
Pre-production
Working on the early stages of this short film took far too long, and in all honest stretched right the way through into production itself which I think effected the final piece quite a lot as I’m sure is apparent to the viewers. The issue stemmed from the inefficiency of our group to work as a team instead of a bunch of individuals fighting for our own independence, we were all guilty of pride. Myself and our cinematographer Michael were especially guilty of this, as made apparent in my earlier blog post ‘Clash of Kings’. Though we all had a unified idea of our films basic plot, me and Michael found thirteen points of confrontation, in which we contested the particular artistic style of showing certain aspects of the film, the little details are always the most important. In the end, I think I compromised more than he did, it would have been interesting to produce two versions and see which was preferred, but there just wasn’t time. Maybe one day i’ll revisit this project with the old footage and edit my cut and share the outcome. Many members of our group became sheep early on in the pre-production phase as well. “Im happy with whatever you decide” became a motto. I think I personally could have been more organised by arranging strict meetings and schedules to meet to and recording meeting minutes so as to document our ideas more clearly. In addition to this, I took on the role of location scout and really found my biggest challenge in this department. I contacted several hospitals in search of a medical room to film as a mental hospital for our Lydia but had no success. In one particular day I called 6 separate people including one who was in a medical conference in Turkey, and travelled up and down six flights of stairs in the Graham Sutherland building to try and secure a medical mock room in the health faculty building of the university, and still got nothing. This lead to us altering the narrative slightly to Jenny being a house visiting nurse, which I think actually helped us out in the end as it presented us with more interesting shots and also put additional props at easy reach which we might not have brought along had we been filming elsewhere. One thing I found I did rather well in this stage was to propose questions to the group and coax ideas out of individuals by making them think. I felt confident in my role as a director/producer and despite it being a roller coaster of ups and downs, enjoyed the overall experience.
Production
I found Production the most enjoyable part of the entire project, when film day rolled around I was like a giddy school child! I believe I posted about this previously, the day was so much fun. We had a good team put together both from the Media Production course and personal contacts that I knew from outside. However, once again the lack of co-existence of my group reared its ugly head as me and Michael encountered issues over our thirteen points that we hadn’t fully hashed out beforehand. The result was that we mostly filmed Michael’s ideas, however we did include some of my input so in the end I was reasonably happy. I think as a director/producer I should have put my foot down more and stood my ground about my artistic vision, I feel my version would have actually been a vast improvement. On the plus side however, the group functioned technically together on the day of shooting, we captured some brilliant shots and sounds and had everything recorded in note pad form to aid in the final stage.
Post-Production
I had very limited input to the Post-Production side of the project which I think ultimately was the nail in the coffin for this project. The excessive amount of time we had dedicated to Pre-Production had meant that by the time we had finished filming we had two days to finish editing before hand in day. Unfortunately, during this time I became ill and was unable to attend the editing process, but stayed in communication wight he group during it as best I could. Without my hand to keep the peace the group seemed to turn in on itself when I received an agitated text from one member of the group about another member who had been unable to attend the film day and was unhappy with the footage and the actors. I tried my best to keep the peace from a far but lost my cool with the other member and spoke my mind too bluntly, and lived on to regret it. Whilst I wasn’t there our cinematographer took the editing under his wing and implemented his vision as best as he could whilst still keeping in some of my input. The final product can be seen above. Im not entirely sure what happened to our soundscape, something that had previously been praised as the strongest in the class, as it seemed to become twisted into a choppy and unclean version during editing, I think it had been tampered with to fit the films timeline but in the process had been warped into a lesser form. I was however very impressed with some of the visual work produced by Michael during the editing process and I think he ordered the scenes very well to match what we wanted to show. We had wanted to darken the scenes where the ‘Shadowy Figure’ emerged into the film to give an inner mind like experience however as we ran out of time we had to abandon this idea, however we did chase down our technical skills instructor to find out how we could have gone about this so that we were in the know for next time.
Response
The hand in day rolled around so quick and sudden and having only seen the finished product once I felt less the confident about how our film would fair against the rest of the class. However, as I sat and watched other groups works I discovered that most of them had encountered similar problems of extended pre-production and last minute editing and sketchy soundscapes. Whats more the lecturers mock results were coming in between 50 -60, which is pretty good considering below a 40 is a fail. Ours got a 51 from one lecturer and a 60 from another. It was the most ‘dividing’ of films out of the groups as non other had been given such a difference in marks than ours. We were told it had the most intriguing of introductions out of all the films, that our beginning was solid, our camera work was technically good and that they had enjoyed the acting work of our Lydia played by Natasha Cleverley who was also one of our make-up artists. Points to improve on included better script work, a more complex look at the character of Jenny and a lack of experimentation with effects in the editing process. In conclusion it was a real roller coaster of emotions that ultimately lead us to a happy place. I feel that this is a strong entry for my first Media Production film that can be used as a spring board to bigger and better things.
Special Thanks
I’d like to make special thanks to all of those who helped to make this project possible, our actors (Jamie, Natasha and Abbie) did a brilliant job despite the nerves and really helped us out when others dropped out at the last minute, you guys are like heroes. The donor of the suit and trousers for the Shadowy Figure (Stevan) I am so sorry about the button! Our make-up artists (Kirsty and Natasha) did an excellent job in such a limited time to make our Shadowy Figure look menacing and our Lydia look haunted, we are only sorry that we could not apply the final special effects in time to truly breathe life into your creations. To our sound recordist (Chris) who brought his technical know how and brilliant mind into play more than once, really don’t know what we would have done without you. To my mum and nan who kindly let us turn the house into a bomb site so we could make this project happen when I had spent so long on the hunt for a location to no prevail. And last but by no means least, to you the viewers, for taking the time to watch our film whether you loved it or hated it.
The Journey Begins 