Production review

Shooting days – our call sheet is

Teamwork - we all took apart in doing different roles and a lot of us are doing some roles together, this is so we all get an idea of what each role is like and so we all work together as a team.

Individual roles: We each have different roles for this project but as there are so many rolls that are needed in a documentary, we have put certain roles together.

Below is work by Charlie Derham

We started off production with our interview with Dr Peter Greenhouse I planned heavily for this interview as I knew we would only get one shot, my aim was to look professional, get professional cut shots and manage good audio from my camera, there was some electrical noise but this can be ironed out in post, also the room we were in was very warm, the colours can be corrected in post. overall, we stuck to our health and safety plans in pre-production and made sure we washed our hands both before and after we were done filming and when I got home I also wiped down my personal equipment.

For our next filming date which was a cold Monday on Weston seafront, I made the day before a choice that we all arrive an hour early as there was rain expected in the afternoon, luckily, we all did manage to get there for 9 a.m. However, I got there a bit earlier, so I had time to grab a coffee and wake myself up as the first thing I wanted to film were all our drone shots. I’d say we managed to get all the shots we required and more, but enough cinematic ones to make the audience go wow when they are watching our documentary back! After this, I grabbed some hand-held shots and some time lapses of people walking by. Then we shot our Vox pops which went well, and we were surprised how open some of the women were about their experiences, I thought this would be nice side track to the other serious interviews we were shooting.

The day after this Laura and I went into college for 9 A.M. to both reflect on Mondays footage and to perfect our pre-production folder which needed some work, after checking our footage from Monday we were happy with the content and began talking about the rest of our interviews with the 3 other women we had to interview.

On Thursday in the first week of filming, we shot an interview with Ian Eisenstrager (Claire’s coach) a training session with Claire Derham and Ian and an interview with Bridget Winterbourne who went through an early menopause, these interviews all went brilliantly, the audio from the H4Zoom was perfect and the backup from my camera was also perfect and ready for editing with no re-shoots required however the sunset on Bridget Winterbourne’s interview may have interrupted with the visuals a little, hopefully I can fix this in post.

Finally Friday our last filming day, we had 2 interviews lined up one with Lydia Davies and one with Claire Derham looking back we used a two camera setup for each interview which really does add a different perspective when watching a documentary, a close up and a wide angle, though I'm not sold on the quality of the College’s JVC camera’s and have a feeling I will be stuck using my GH4 only. This is the case for all the interviews so far.

For the cut shots I captured of mum boxing, I filmed these by myself with no help from the team as we really didn’t know when the weather would be good enough to pull off some of the shots that I did looking back however I wish I kept my drone more steady whilst flying over Brean, but other than this I was happy with all of the footage, I did also check if my team were ok for me to film all of these shots, the same goes for the shots I captured in Sennen, St Ives and Carbis Bay in Cornwall, I told my team would you be ok if I captured these shoots with my drone whilst I’m in Cornwall and everyone was fine with it so that was good, same again for filming Bridget Winterbourne's artwork it was me alone shooting with my slider steady cam and tripod.

So, on the whole, I’d say production went really well as we worked brilliantly as a team, it was unfortunate that we lost both Kirsty and Amelia but other than that setback right before filming week I think we managed really well and I am really proud of my team.