Evolution of Story Symposium- work experience

On February 19th 2020, Solent University hosted it’s first ‘Evolution of Story’ symposium, a series of panels given by various storytellers and academics about how far storytelling has come and will continue to go. I was asked if I would like to come along and film the event as well as be a data wrangler for the shoot. The event took place from 10am until 5pm and we had to be shooting pretty much the whole time so it took a bit of organising in order to charge batteries and swapping out SD cards every couple of talks because we didn’t want anything to run out halfway through a talk. The event took place in a lecture theatre so getting power and finding a place to store the equipment were more hurdles we had to overcome in order for the production to run smoothly.

There was a full livestream broadcast on the day on the Solent Media YouTube channel, however I was part of the team filming from the back of the room and was more focused on doing close-ups which could be later edited into highlights and were taken from a more attractive angle than that of the livestream. We worked with a relatively large team for this event. We had Steven and I, who were the camera operators, Maddie who was the producer, James who worked on the livestream, Tom who was in charge of audio and Anna who was the photographer. This size of team allowed us to bounce ideas off each other quite a lot and gave us a lot of help in terms of logistics.

What I learned from this project is the importance of a data wrangler in a big production, how to use a large team to your advantage and also a lot about professionalism on a set.

Project hours: 8

Total hours: 38

Southampton Christmas Light Switch On – work experience

Back in November I got the opportunity to go to Southampton’s light switch on event and film it with my friend James. This was one of my favourite work experiences thus far because it felt truly one of a kind. Me and James worked very independently because we got given complete creative freedom by the organisers. The equipment we brought with us was two Canon XC15 because they are very versatile in terms of focal length and have good in-camera image stabilisation. We also brought one tripod so that one of us could stay stationary at all times and capture what was happening on stage, the other would be mobile and capture close-ups for the most part. We were able to film everything from the performance from East 17 to the light switch on itself from the Southampton FC players.

After the event me and James headed back to editing studios where we cut up a quick 3 minute highlights video which we then sent back to the organisers. In conclusion, I really liked this experience because of how independent it allowed me to be, but at the same time allowing me to work in a team and communicate with James as and when I needed to.

Project hours: 5

Total Hours: 30

Starting a YouTube channel

The movie video essay community on YouTube is a rather crowded area, each channel offering something slightly different. At the moment I watch about 10 channels regularly, two of which I want to talk about further.

Firstly, the channel ‘FilmJoy‘, which is probably the largest production channel I am going to talk about. They run a multitude of shows the most popular of which is ‘Movies with Mikey‘ which is a movie breakdown show presented by Mikey Neumann, and was the show that first got me introduced to the channel. Mikey’s knowledge of film and extensive research is what really sets him apart from other similar channels, not to mention his unique, whimsical editing style and comedic flair. The strategies FilmJoy employ are the use of the community tab where they will normally post an update a few weeks in advance of a new video that they will be releasing just to get people excited for the content. The community tab, as the name suggests, allows them to interact and get feedback from their audience. What FilmJoy gets right is their interaction with the audience, attention to detail in the videos they make and also they have really good thumbnails which doesn’t hurt.

The second channel I would like to talk about is ‘Karsten Runquist‘, which is more of a personal movie based channel, which is run by film student Karsten Runquist. Karsten makes videos that are more in line with the content I would like to make. Quick and easily accessible content which again is well researched by someone who’s his stuff. I always get the sense when I watch Karsten that he is making videos that he enjoys making and not conforming to what the audience wants to see. A recent series that he has started is called ‘what I watched this month‘ and is quite self explanatory in that he says what he watched that month, rates the films from 0-5 and gives a little punchy review of the film. I think the intrigue with a channel like this is mostly about the personality behind the screen rather than the content they put out. You watch the channel for Karsten, because he’s funny and he loves films. Karsten also runs a podcast which is a great use of cross-media marketing that a lot of YouTubers are doing nowadays in which he promote his channel on the podcast or promote the podcast on his channel, which he does again by using the community tab.

If I had free reign the YouTube channel I would set up would be kind of a mash up of the two channels I have discussed. The videos would be personal and well thought out. However, I need to be careful that the videos I make are not derivative of any existing content. It would be easy to poach Karsten’s style because of how simple and elegant it is, but I don’t want to do that. Obviously the USP of the channel I’m going to set up is the head to head comparisons I am going to make, which are going to have to be well-written and performed by me in order to capture an audience.

Ethics and Contributors

Since our documentary is about a topic that has been quite controversial for a couple years now we have to make sure we are presenting it in an unbiased matter and we do not misconstrue our contributors words. Also we have to be sensitive about the news stories that have been born out of the 5G controversy like the several tragic news stories in the US that blame 5G radio towers for giving school kids cancer. For obvious reasons therefore we will not be focusing on the tragedies exclusively but rather the human side of 5G. Similarly, we must acknowledge that these controversies do exist in order to properly tell the stories of anti-5G campaigners. When we interviewed the 5G protesters in Brighton we made sure to inform that we were filming a documentary about 5G before we asked them questions, but we wanted to be as hands-off as possible to get the most real and genuine responses, because as Winston (2000) says ‘Documentarists actively work to remove themselves from a controlling position’ (pg.146) this is in order to stay true to what contributors say and avoid backlash after the documentary is released.

A lot of these ethical steps we need to take are also down to the edit because this is where words can be misconstrued, twisted and taken out of context which something we really want to avoid, so we want to make sure on shoot days we get what we want out of our interviewees so that we don’t need to change what they say in the edit to better our narrative. Therefore during shooting if we need to ask questions twice to help tell the best story possible we will. We need to remember that these are real people and not trained actors or as Bill Nichols (2017) calls them ‘Social actors and as such these ‘social actors conduct their lives more or less as they would have done without the presence of a camera’ (pg. 31). Therefore representing them fairly is as easy as rolling the camera and letting them speak their truth, but also we have a narrative to serve and if their answer is not good enough, we’ll have to ask again.

NICHOLS, B., 2017. Introduction to documentary. 3rd ed. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press

WINSTON, B., 2000. Lies, damn lies and documentaries. London: BFI

Trainspotting (week 4)

This week we looked at the six modes of documentary filmmaking and also started planning the shoot including what will be involved in the introduction, the body and the conclusion. In order to get inspiration for our documentary we watched ‘Enginemen’ which is a 1959 documentary about the British railway, this documentary was a mixture of poetic, observational and a little bit of expository. The movie is very well paced and starts with some long takes of the workers and the railway and the pace changes as the mode of documentary does, non-diegetic music starts playing and there is voiceover for the first time and it’s the railway workers talking about working on the railway and improvements that could

Screen Shot 2019-02-14 at 10.31.59 — Documentary narrative and story structure

be made. We started making a rough plan for our documentary with a beginning, middle and end. For this we revisited a old meta documentaries to check how they were paced and structured, so that we had a vague idea on what we can include and when. I doubt our documentary will hold any resemblance to the aesthetic or structure of Enginemen documentary but it was good to see how the modes of documentary inform the production of it.

Trainspotting (week 3)

This week was a very important one when it comes to the overall outcome of our project because we got to visit a very rainy and windy Ropley station where we met some of the volunteers working there, as well as Becky. We as a group were given a tour of the site with a volunteer called Kieran who gave us a lot of information about the various trains and train restoration departments that were on show at Ropley station on this particular day. I was particularly interested by the fully restored trains that were out on the tracks as well as the signal box which had a very unique aesthetic but looked horrifically complicated to operate.

Once we were done with our tour we sat down as a group and got an opportunity to speak with Becky about the specifics that she would like from the meta documentary. Becky reiterated what she said in her email to us about her not being an essential part of our documentary but said it would be a huge relief for her not have hear her own voice when watching all 60 documentaries. As a result when we sat down and discussed some of the questions we might ask we excluded Becky because we won’t be featuring her in our documentary. So therefore we created a document with all the questions we have for students, volunteers or potentially teachers. Becky also mentioned research on previous meta documentaries and how we should have a good balance of interviews with stakeholders and a lot more focus on the students which was absent in previous examples. We came up with 7 questions for students, 4 questions for teachers but only 3 questions for volunteers/staff, so that’s something we will have to build on in the coming weeks. luckily we are filming on the 15th of March meaning we have the whole of the 1st of March to carry out more research and planning not to mention free time in the intervening weeks.

In Summary, we are in a good place right now as a team and this trip definitely informed the further research we have to do in the coming weeks and having a foundation of questions is really nice to have at this early stage. Getting Becky’s insight was immensely useful as she knows better than anyone what is best for the railway when it comes to making these videos. In the coming weeks we will build on our research by looking at industry standard meta documentaries and also developing our skills with the equipment.

LEGO Back to the Future movie

This is the first video I have shot using the Canon XC15 and video tripod and also the first full length video I have edited using Final Cut Pro X. I am really pleased with how it came out and I would like to talk about our entire creative process.

Me and Tom as part of our video production unit were tasked with shooting and roughly editing together a video of a process. Tom suggested that he had a collection of LEGO sets at home that we could build and then time-lapse. We planned to shoot on Wednesday 6th February but we didn’t really have an idea of where we could shoot. So we met up at 11am and began searching and eventually we stumbled across a table in a booth in The Spark building which we were very happy with because it was relatively quiet and self-contained. We set up the camera that we collected from the hatch and began shooting some B-roll footage of the box including a pan shot and a pulling focus shot.

Pan Shot

Pulling focus shot

Establishing shot

From there we wanted to get building because we knew it was going to take a while, all told the shoot took around 2 and a half hours, just under 2 hours of which were spent building. We used the 30 degree rule of film making when shooting the time-lapses which means with every camera angle change we moved at least 30 degrees around the subject so that you are giving the audience enough new information and therefore the jump cut is justified (Garcia, 2014). This is a few examples of the shots we used for the time-lapse:

Over the right shoulder

Close up

High angle

Low angle

After the car was built we needed to get B-roll footage of the final product and this was probably the most fun to shoot as it allowed us to be the most creative with how we showed off the car and the two figurines that it came with. We again included a pan, as well as a static shot of the car pulling up, an imitation of a flyover drone shot and a crash zoom on the number plate, and these are screenshots of a few of them:

Pan

Static shot

Crash zoom

All in all the whole shoot was really fun to do and I enjoyed taking a directorial role and operating the camera. Also, as all the footage was on my SD card I took up the responsibility of editing the footage. Me and Tom discussed while shooting about ideas for the edit and we really wanted some of the music from the film in the background, and I know for industry and commercial usage this movie would need to be edited with royalty free music but for the purpose of this project I used the music to enhance the edit. which included the Back to the Future theme playing over footage of the flux capacitor being inserted, which we found funny as an idea.

Edit timeline

Flux capacitor shot

Overall I really enjoyed this shoot and look forward to doing more projects like this one, that challenge my creativity and media producing skills.

One Minute Film School – The 30 Degree Rule, 2014 Directed by Drew GARCIA. . Jan 26,

Trainspotting (week 2)

This week we learned that we would be the team responsible for filming the meta (making of) documentary, which means we will be filming other people film other people, as well as interviewing people of our own to get an insight into the relationship between Mid-Hants railway and Solent University, which all told should be a really interesting challenge for us as a team. I am really happy we were chosen to do the meta documentary because incidentally that was the one I had already done the most research on, so we already had a head start. However we needed to obviously do a lot of pre-planning before our shoot days and that preparation started today.

For next week’s session we had the task of creating a presentation consisting of 2 slides per person, and as we had some free time during the seminar today, me and Tom got started on our 4 slides and this is what we came up with:

With this presentation we basically wanted to lay the foundations for our intentions with the project while also self-evaluating before the project starts using a SWOT analysis so we can identify areas where we are strong and have potential and things that can be improved or things to be cautious of. This week we have also got into contact with Becky Peacock ahead of our visit next week so that we could get some information of people we can talk to in relation to the video. So I feel we are well prepared for our visit next week.

Sam

Trainspotting (week 1)

In our first lesson of video production we were properly introduced to the assessment brief that we found out about on Tuesday afternoon for the first time. For this task we have to work in small groups of three which consists of a producer, director and camera operator. At first we struggled to cut our group down from 4 to 3 people. There were two people outside of our initial 4 person group who weren’t in the lesson but needed to be in a group, so instead of dumping one person from our group to work with the other 2 we compromised and split our 4 into 2 so each pair would get one of the two people who didn’t show up, we thought this was the most fair and professional thing to do so everyone gets a good deal.

I will be working with Tom and Bella on this task and in this first lesson me and Tom discussed some of our ideas whilst filling out this team canvas. As Bella was not there today and we needed to sort out roles we decided that Tom will be cameraman, I will be producing and Bella will be directing. Below you can see our team canvas that we filled out that discussed our values and rules amongst other things.

I am really excited to get started with this project as I believe it presents some interesting and new challenges that I haven’t encountered up until this point in the course.

Sam

Role of the producer

A producer is one of the most important roles in the media and requires a lot of skills and involves a lot of roles. Networking is the backbone of the producer role because you need to be able to find the most talented people for a role as a producer and networking makes this task a lot easier. Once you’ve found the most talented people you need to be able to communicate well with them and have good team-working skills. You also need to have a strong creative mind in order to contribute to the production. I believe I am a good people person and have good leadership and team-working skills and also have a strong creative background, however this isn’t all a producer has to be good at.

A producer also need to have good business and financial sense. They also need to make sure the production is legally compliant and have good problem solving skills. I don’t believe I have fully refined these skills and that may be due to the fact I haven’t worked in a professional media production so I haven’t had to worry about budgets or choosing a talented team of people.

A media producer who I really admire is Spike Jonze who has worked in film, TV, music videos and commercials for the past 20 years and has been really influential in the media industry. His versatility is the main thing I admire about him, in the late 90s and early 00s Spike was producing and directing music videos for Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim, from there he went on to produce many MTV shows such as Jackass and Bad Grandpa. In 2014 Jonze won an Oscar for Original screenplay for ‘Her’ and also had a producing credit on that movie. And finally in March 2018 Spike Jonze produced a visually stunning advertisement for Apple’s new HomePod. So it’s fair to say Spike Jonze has been around the block as a producer.

What I have learnt from Spike Jonze is that a producer has to be adaptable for their role because they have a lot of roles to fill, it helps that Jonze has 100 directing and 20 writer credits also to his name, so he is clearly someone who is comfortable with many aspects of media production. He is also someone who had to work very hard to get where they are, he came making small music videos to producing an Academy award-winning movie. What I can take away from this is that I need to be prepared for anything and also I need to have my own identity as a producer, just as Spike Jonze has develop his own unique style.

Sam

Bibliography

SCREEN SKILLS, Producer- ScreenSkills Available from: https://www.screenskills.com/education-training/careers-information/job-profiles/content-creation/producer/

IMDB, Spike Jonze – IMDb Available from: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005069/