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
Portsmouth. My main responsibility on this production was to produce the launch livestream for DarkFest for this I worked with Katya Gait who was our camera/gimble operator for the 
which was a great continuation from my last work experience. I also used this event as a chance to springboard my way into more work experience; for example I will be a camera operator for the DarkFest/Cursed City finale gig in Portsmouth on November 9th as a direct result of this event. The Snow Witch art exhibition massively exceeded my expectations, it was a really fun and friendly experience and I can’t wait for more of the same.
On the first day of shooting we shot in the library and also in a classroom in the spark. on this day I started by coordinating light but slowing moved into helping Jay, who was also doing work experience for his MCP course, with the camera operation and we both worked as advisors to Antonia about how shots would look and what we thought was best for the film but at the end of the day it’s her vision we are serving. I really enjoyed this first day because it kind of broke me into what work experience is
like and what movies sets are like to work on, they are actually really chilled out and really fun. We were using a Canon XC15 which luckily I am familiar with and could advise technically with a little bit. The lighting we used was a panel light and two box lights both of which I had used before and therefore could operate quite well. Overall, this project gave me a good introduction because they were luckily using equipment that I was familiar with, other than the sound equipment, so that I could be more hands on
university campus and today we had the same team as the first day however Jay couldn’t make it so we had Emma-Louise come in and help instead and similarly to the first day we worked together on lighting and took it in turns with camera operation which was really fun again. we shot about 5 or 6 different scenes in 2 sets, the bedroom and the kitchen. Today I learnt about the challenges of camera operation because we had to film multiple conversations and interactions between characters which meant positioning and continuity was everything and its difficult to do that when this is your first time shooting a movie but luckily Antonia was there to advise us all the way through.
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