Edale: The shoot.

What a very tiring day that was. I think it wouldnt of been half as bad if we hadnt had so much equipment to lug about with us! >.< Although im glad we did as looking at our initial footage we got some very good shots.

We did run into some major problems on the shoot how ever, the main one was the fact that the digital screen on our PD170 broke after noly having filming about 20 seconds footage! Although we could use the small view finder it was in black and white and the inforamtion on it was limited so we did did struggle to do things such as focus and white balance, so we will just have to wait and see what the footage looks like on the mac.

Edale: And now we have a crappy camera.

Because I live in Doncaster and George has been so busy we havnt been able to book our equipment out until today and it turns out all the PD170's have gone! >.< Now we are stuck with the HD Sony camera. The quality of them is good but there light sensors are automatic and poor, so in the changing light levels on a rainy day in the peak district it could cause us some major problems. :(

UPDATE:
So I was moaning about how we missed the PD170's to a friend on Facebook and they told me Dom had block booked them out and we had to tell the people in stores we were taking out the ones he had block booked for the day trip, we checked and sure enough we have a pd170! ^-^ I'm glad we have the better Camorra now, but it's a shame it isn't as lightweight as the Sony! Haha

Edale: Planning planning planning.

We have written up a full prop and equipment list and I think we might be struggling a bit with the amount of things we have to carry but I'm sure we will manage. One of the props we might struggle with is the front of a tv screen. We are planning for all eventualities though, so we have made a cardboard one just in case we don't manage to get hold of a proper one. We don't want a last minute desperate panic for props. Everything else on our lists are relatively straight forward and shouldnt cause us any problems.

Edale: English weather being what it is...

I've been looking at the weather forecast today for next weeks filming. It is NOT looking like it is going to be a fun day. :( I'm sure we won't melt in the rain, but that won't stop us being a bit down trodden when wet through and cold. Haha I'm sure a bit of rain won't bother our filming too much though, that's why me and GEorge are now stock piling plastic bags. XD I can only hope the forecast improves the nearer we get to the time.

Edale: Suddenly, an idea!

Ok, so we have thought about the technical problems we think we will face with our work and we are pretty confident that we will be able to get around the more basic problems we are able to anticipate. Unfortunately neither me or GEorgina have the money to go to Edale to do some location scouting, so we are planning for a few variations on the perfect set and we will just have to see what we can find when we get there.

We have started doing some planning in terms of the equipment and props we are going to need and we have figured out a rough proposal of the video in full. It's only a really basic plan ATM but even doing this basic plan helped us notice some flaws in our logic that has helped us be able to plan for some problems we might face on the day.

Edale: First thoughts.

Ok, so me and George had our first planning meeting today, it went quite well and we ended up getting lot further in the planning process than I thought we would. I honestly can't remember everything that was said, but one thing that was a staple point throughout the conversations was that we wanted to try and do something a bit different under the heading of an experimental film.

To that end we decide we would like to try and stick to the brief as closely as possible, more specifically the part that says "a portrait of place". We have come up with a number of different ideas but one is sticking more than the rest. We have a few variations of it but we are going to discuss it's validity and weather it's going to be possible in a technical sense next time we have a meeting.

So, we meet at last first blog post...

I have been struggling somewhat with the idea of my first blog post. It’s not that I’m afraid of it in any way; I’ve just been struggling with what to say. I thought I would have a look around some of my peers blogs for inspiration when I started thinking about how difficult I find it to "get inspiration" from others creations. I tend to find myself wanting to improve or alter the original idea in a way I believe to be better, but although I had the inspiration to make the alterations, I don’t think you would call that true inspiration.

So instead I find myself thinking maybe I should explain a bit about myself, as I cant of accidentally taken anyone’s ideas in the creation of the person I am. But where do you start? "Hi I’m Stephen and I’m a student" doesn’t seem to really cover my entire psyche and being, and it certainly doesn’t make me easy to compare to others.

So then I tried to flip it on its head, and I wondered, rather than try to describe myself as an individual, why don’t I try and describe myself as part of a collective, the human race. Which made me think of a video that over the last 9 or 10 months I must have watched dozens of time.



I’ll talk about the video in a moment, but if you have watched it (which I hope you have) I would hope you can see where I come from when I say it boggles the mind. 7 Billion people, I can’t even begin to comprehend that. I worked as an announcer at a football stadium for a short time last year and after we had 2000+ people in the stands I started to lose any sense of the fact that they were individual people, rather than a huge sprawling behemoth, never mind 7 billion!

But when I first saw this video, I thought about lots of things like life and death; whether I will add to the population by having kids, whether ill live to see the 10 billion mark, but more than anything I thought about what I could do to help. What could I do to change the world and make it that bit better for even 1 person out of the 7 billion of us. I hope I do get the chance to make a difference in the world, and I hope it’s through film.

The video itself is fantastic in my opinion. It jumps straight in with no warning and starts spewing facts at you. If I were to describe this video without you having watched it I’m sure "It’s a 3 minute video full of facts about the human race's population statistics" would have sounded as boring as hell, but they make you watch. The quick upbeat nature of the video and the way they cleverly link In a physical sense of the text one fact to another makes it so that even if you want to turn it off, by the time you have read one fact your eyes are following the text to the next fact, meaning by the time you realise how much you have read its over!

Of course as the video progress the facts, animations and text all slow down somewhat and the pace of the music slows to follow it. They then hit you with some of the bigger facts and figures, and allow you slightly more time per fact to try and digest the more important information. I think it works really well, because a lot of the time with videos about the plight of the world you just get sadness straight away and you turn off. Here they have managed to get you interested right from the word go, and then once you have an interest (and a slight background in the subject) they hit you with the hard hitting important stuff, that if they had started dully listing from the word go, you never would have even known about because you would of turned it straight off.

I really enjoyed this video, and I’m going to see if I can hunt down some more like it. Maybe i could use a similar style in any upcoming documentaries I do? But I’ll have to think about that closer to the time.

P.s. Sorry if this seems at all disjointed. I’m afraid this tends to be how my mind works and most if not all of my blog posts will be like this. If you read enough of them you might get used to it, but I’m afraid I don’t think you will ever understand the seemingly random connections I make from one thing to another, as I’m not even sure how I do it myself.