Critical Analysis Within 160MC T2

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.

Looking For Talent

So a few of you know i’ve been busy in my spare time working on the early concepts for a short film I intend to start producing throughout the course of 2015, the ultimate goal being to enter it into a competition or festival. Its really early stages so far yet the few people i’ve gathered around me for this have shown such amazing commitment already and all seem really eager to get involved. But now on the edge of 2014 and the start of 2015 I have decided to extend an invitation out to everyone and anyone who would like to get involved whether it be in production, post-production, acting, lighting, make up, distribution, music anything! Without giving too much away here are a few images just to wet your appetite with (the storyboard provided by Carl Packer). If you are interested and would like to get involved please feel free to comment or message me with your interest and what you could offer to the group. Please bare in mind, not everyone can get involved as a group of too many people will become difficult to control. Thankyou 🙂

The Cogs Are Turning

My steampunk team have been hard at work in the absence of our meetings due to my other university commitments, and might I say, I am extremely proud to be working with such talented people. Yet again, i’d like to share with you some of the great work by Carl Packer. Here is a storyboard he has produced for the opening scene to our short film.

 Doesn’t that just look amazing? And he’s captured exactly what I had in my head from just one short conversation. This scene features our main protagonist The Captain and his only companion the mechanical owl. The exact look of the Captain is as of yet unconfirmed, however I have took onboard Natasha and Kirsty from my short film 160MC project to go over character costumes. Next up we have some artwork of the Captains ship again and the early model.

Another member of the team has been knocking around a design for a pair of steampunk goggles as well though we are as of yet unsure where this will feature, the Captain, the Owl or simply background stuff is all open at the moment. Kyle Wood has produced this textured version of the goggles.

Becoming a Word-Smith

I’ve realised that my blog posts some to have become few and far between and I assure you, there is good reason for that. At the moment I am deep in the throws of writing my first University paper for the end of module 105MC. Me and my group are producing a collaborative book, comprised of our own individual chapters and a bibliography, I have taken it upon myself to write the introduction to this book, perhaps the most important piece as should this not capture the reader then the rest will not get to unfold. So far, i’ve covered a lot of theory and analysis in my piece, but have failed to address the very aspects of ‘introduction’, to discuss and open up the book itself and vaguely cover what our beliefs are on the key concepts.
My blog posts will be picking up once again after this Friday when this has been handed in and my Character Concepts presentation has been delivered. Its been a very long week, with sleepless nights and headache mornings, but I will get through this, and then onwards to christmas!

Who Would Want to Work With People?

Once again I find myself in a position of conflict within the groups structure, but this time perhaps more so as half of the group seems to have decided to take up arms against the final product that myself and another basically produced alone. So as you know if you’ve been keeping up to date with my posts regarding raw 105MC documentary our myself and a lad named Oliver stayed up till the early hours of dawn to finish off the video to the best of our abilities and meet the deadline of 10am hand in. I went to sleep that night feeling naively happy with what I felt was the best outcome from the limited filming we had gathered.

Oh was I so wrong, the editing process had basically been between myself and Oliver despite us opening it up to everyone to come along and have their say and input, they just didn’t seem interested. Yet this morning I wake up to a text from Oliver saying “Don’t think the rest of the group liked the video”. Immediately my eyes rolled in my head and my heart sank, I was reminded of Project 160MC and the troubles my group then had encountered during the editing process (something about the editing process just brings the devil out in people). I went onto our Facebook group page and was reading comments like “This isn’t uni standard” “They can tell its not organised” and all of this from the two people who had the least input into the project itself. They had all been given clear dates and times for filming, for editing meetings and for reviews of the footage before uploading yet they seemed unable to steer away from the lures of student life.

I am by this point furious if you couldn’t tell that for the second time (and likely third by the time I get round to reviewing my most recent 160MC project) that I have felt like we have dragged someone along in the group only for them to turn around and say its shit when it is simply too late to do anything about. I don’t know if I’m just choosing the wrong people to work with or if every group is encountering these problems but frankly all its going to take is for one of ‘these people’ to say the wrong thing to me and I will simply find myself speaking my mind.

The Ball is Rolling

My documentary team for 105MC is really on a roll now with the addition of a new member who has really breathed life into the project, he seems to have a way of kick starting energy into the team whilst I organise what we each do. We had a short team meeting today to discuss our new plan of action and broke down into pairs to handle the key elements; post-production, production and the final piece, the book. We chose this based on our individual strengths and what we had done to date, this would also be our particular topic that we would cover in the book. Myself and Madeline are taking charge of production, this includes any extra filming needed as well as that taken at the actual East Winds Film Festival. Oliver and Dhani would be in charge of post-production, both are skilled film editors and have agreed that Oliver would edit whilst Dhani provides feedback and documents each step for use in their chapters of the book. Then Aiden and Ben, our two journalist members, would be taking care of planning each chapter of the book. They would write a brief for each of us telling us what our chapter needs to cover in order to be a success. All in all, I feel pretty confident now about the conviction of our group. For once I don’t feel like we are lugging dead weight in a project!