Narrative Stage 4 - Report

My experience of this project began with the contact of only one other group member - Dave. It seemed to take us two weeks, for some reason, to get hold of the other four. This was probably due to the fact that we were basically, all still strangers. Once two more members were found, we asked a staff member if they knew who our two remaining, illusive group members were. Apparently they in fact, did not exist, or did not attend the university. I think this worked out better for us. The reason being that a week prior to the project brief, we had a couple of seminars on working as a group. I concluded from those sessions that groups of a large size (above 5), tend to communicate poorer than groups of a medium size, and so the end product is often of a worse quality. For example, as a test in the seminar we split into 3; an individual, a medium sized group and a large group. The individual did not have the range of skills that the groups had, and no peers to ask for help; thus he produced an average presentation about a slightly irrelevant topic. The large group’s members did not communicate well, and attendance varied greatly from meeting to meeting, and so, produced an obviously below-standard presentation. The medium-sized group carried out impressive research on the correct topic and produces a decent presentation, referencing primary and secondary research findings on their topic.

[wow - this is going to be a long post!]

We did, however run into problems with our group even though there were a good number of us. For example, 3 of us live in the city centre, a few minutes walk from each other, and could meet up at short notice easily. One member, unfortunately, lived at the wrong end of a 45 minute bus ride, or a £7 taxi fare. This made it difficult for Hannah to meet up with us during filming and editing; and as a result had to arrive later to scheduled sessions. To compensate, Dave and I, living the closest to the Waverly building, could arrive early and set up the scene and equipment, ready to start filming as a group when Hannah arrived.

An obstacle which I think we tackled well was communication, with the group sometimes not able to meet, those of us who had done some work or thought out a problem, let everybody else know what was what. We used the online discussion board to keep everybody on track. For example one week a member of the group was having some domestic issues, and wasn’t able to meet, while another went home for a while. I posted an update as to where we were in the production, and what needed to be done next. This [please see image A of the appendix]

[yeah go on, keep reading, DARE ya]

Another problem which got relatively well solved, was when only Dave and I were available to work on the project, the evening before our first big filming day. We thought we would get organised and draw up a shooting schedule to allow the next day to run well. Having no experience of this, and working with people who had never worked from a shooting schedule before, we kept it idiot-proof. We listed each key narrative event alongside the shots we thought we might need to convey that event to the audience. With each shot we listed the different camera angles we might need and the props we needed for the set, so we could get those sorted in the morning. I’d like to take most of the credit for this moment of organisation, as I think without it we would not have gotten nearly as much done as we did that day. We messed around quite a lot letting each person have a go at filming, rather than focus on getting the shots we needed, to the quality we wanted and in the time we had. It was the list of shots which got us moving onto the next jobs, as it showed us how much we still needed to get done. I would have liked to do a much more precise schedule, allocating a rough number of takes and different possible angles to each shot, so these things get pretty much decided before filming. This minimises the frustrating, time-wasting discussions. I found that getting organisational ideas down on paper was very useful.

In addition to the schedule, I proposed prior to the filming stage, that we all draw up a table with each key narrative event, and how we could see the film looking. For example there would be a key event in the first column, its shots with angles and editing ideas, what the audio was doing at the time and any other notes you had on the key event in the other columns. [see below] That way we could meet back up and pitch our ideas clearly, to the group. We could then make group decisions as to which elements of each other’s ideas we use for the narrative.

[quality illustration!]

An interesting thing I realised from the very early stages of this project, from the first meeting which included all four of us, while deciding on a narrative idea. Our creativity was pathetic at the time; we only had one idea, which involved filming at night, a stalker/victim sequence. While thinking about the complications of shooting this idea, I remembered a moment of drunken daydream I had a few days earlier, about the birth of a post-it note, whilst imagining the sound of human birth at the moment of it being unpackaged. As daft and amusing that it was, I pitched it to the group seriously, with a couple of examples of shots and sounds we could use. As far as I saw it, my idea only got accepted because there were no better or more in-depth ideas for it to contend with. I concluded that no matter what doubts you may have about an idea, or how silly it’s concept, if a decent argument is put behind it, with convincing examples, it is possible to make it look much more deeply thought out, and concrete than the idea actually is. Also your idea may in fact be a quality idea – which mine might well have been.

I believe our project ran pretty much as I expected it to, having moderate experience in the production of small scale films like this. However, unlike my A-level media coursework, this had an apparently very strict, 2 minute deadline. I found this a bit of an obstacle. I knew, having a fair bit of editing experience, that we would have to shoot a lot more than 2 or even 5 minutes of footage; so we did. We ended up with around 17 minutes being captured from our tape. This included many shots with more than 1 take, so it was easy to whittle down a lot of time simply choosing the best take. With these decisions made though, we still had about 7 minutes of footage on the timeline, and had to make quite harsh decisions to cut out entire scenes. For example we cut out our post-its’ sex scene, as it took up too much un-necessary time – which was a real shame! Ideally, we would like to re-edit a longer, director’s cut, which would include all the deleted scenes – that’s if we have the time and patience after the project deadline.

One of the biggest errors we made as a group, I think, occurred without any of us even realising it, (except me a few days later). Our film was edited in Premier on PCs. The practical reason for this was that Paul had the equipment the night after our first big filming day; he helpfully captured those shots and stuck them on a portable hard drive. The editing software he had on his home PC was? ……yes; Premier 6.5. This is not necessarily a major issue, but taking into account that only 1 member of the group (Paul) had any Premier experience, and half of the group (myself and Hannah) had experience editing in Final Cut on Macs. The decision then looks very irrational. If we had edited on Macs, I think Hannah would have had a lot more involvement with the editing than she did, and enjoy it a bit more because of it. As it happened though, I found converting my skills to the Premier interface was not difficult at all; having edited on PCs a little as well probably helped. So Paul and I did the bulk of the editing, incorporating the others by having them watch and suggest things; teaching them a little too so they could do a little when they wanted. I found this contrasted greatly with the editing part of my A-level project. For example the main goal then was the final version, and not having to try and spread the workload. I realise now that we actually didn’t have to do this. If I remember correctly, in our stage 1 presentation, we said that those with specific technical abilities would use them in that area of the production; and those without, would stick to what they were best at. I would much rather have worked this way, with a couple of us editing only, (and to be one of those editors). Possibly a selfish view, but I am positive the editing would have been done quickly and more efficiently. With a better final cut? Who knows? Through this I did gain yet more experience swallowing frustrations to keep a bit of peace in the group, and learned to have faith that get the work would get done, and get done well - as any polite, minor control-freak would do.

During the course of this project, the main things I can take from my experiences are; Planning is very important, if only on paper. We did very little research or preparation before we decided on our idea, even before any of us had filmed in the studio for the first time. The most obvious evidence of this has to be the poor lighting we used in the office scenes – Paul’s shadow is far too obvious on the far wall, starring the audience straight in the face. This is incidentally the element in our film which I am most unhappy about, and we were unable to fix it through lack of knowledge. This was unhelpfully, before the lighting seminar, which introduced us to three-point lighting. Obviously, we should have looked over the book in our reading list, which told us how to do it. Won’t make that mistake again!

Communication between group members is crucial to the working performance of the group as a unit. Allocating tasks to the correct members of the group, with specific deadlines and time scales also contributes to this level of performance. Regular meetings and/or discussions (online or in person), serve the purpose of keeping everybody in sync with the group’s collaborative working to reach its goals. Of course to set these meetings and to break down the task into member-specific goals there needs to be some sort of administrative organisation. This can be done by either one person or decided by everybody. With us it seemed to be mainly two members of the group (Dave and I), with the other two taking a more passive role.

Finally the member’s need to be physically able to do the tasks set in front of them, or find out how to do them from staff, peers or books! I taught myself how to edit in Premier for example, and am hugely looking forward to the next group task – and put these, hopefully perfected group skills to good use.

[and now for something completely different...]