Filming Shots

Here are some photos I took whilst we were filming the documentary in Raunds -

Pre-Production!

Here are some of the documents we used in the pre-production of 'Daddy's In A Band', beginning with our proposal -

Daddy’s In a Band
Proposal 12/11/08

Daddy’s in a band is a four minute documentary following a day in the life of a single father as he juggles the troubles of caring for his young son, whilst also dealing with the stress of becoming successful in his rock band.

The documentary will be set in Raunds, a small town 20 miles from Northampton, where our character Tom Robbins and his 4 year old son Liam live.
Our story will chronologically record an average day for Tom and his son. We will be documenting the highs and lows of their every day lives whilst observing from a ‘fly on the wall’ perspective. We propose to film this documentary on the 19th of November 2008.

Starting in the morning, we will film the routine of getting ready and the walk to school. During the ten minute walk, we will film him talking and joking around with his son, using long shots as well as close up profiles to give the audience both the wide and the finer perspective. The audio will be gentle morning (walking music).
This opening sequence will be used to demonstrate that our story is about an everyday father-and-son so that we can build upon this image as the film progresses – which will later be contrasted by a substantial amount.

In the next sequence we will be following the private time of Tom as he goes about his daily rituals of household chores and composing music. This is the point where we get to know him better through a series of informal questions, finding out about his past and how he came to be in the current situation. We will then learn his hopes and fears as we move on to discuss his views on the present and the future for both himself and Liam.
As he goes about his song writing, we will be finding out details of the band and the contrasting side of his story. This is one of the ways that we are going to build up the overall energy of the film.

We will be using a talking head style of documentation allowing extra cutaways for post-production. This sequence will be done mainly with medium shots with close ups on his face and his hands (for cutaways and to demonstrate his abilities in creating songs and playing guitar etc). The mask of the contrasting side of the story will be slowly unveiled to the audience from this point. This, we feel, will also display the emotional depth of their relationship. The bond the Father and son have is an immense dependence. Something that we can hopefully pick up on, this will again increase the energy of the film.

As it nears the end of another school day, we set off to pick Liam up from his class – however due to the complications with filming at schools, we have decided to have Tom and Liam walk through the front door with them in the same clothing they did in the morning to show that time has passed. The audience will accept this cutaway as natural as nothing ‘new’ has been shown. This will not only save hitches with filming at school but also practically speaking, moving the crew around. The next shot will be the pair leaving the house with, setting off to the park for a bit of father-and-son time. The subsequent shots will follow-on from the park playtime to dinner, which will be in the park with chips on a bench somewhere. The style will be similar to the morning scene in which the more emotive side of the story will be further investigated. However, we will start to build up the other side of the story at this point – by perhaps switching the style of audio to something a little more ‘upbeat’.

The succeeding sequence will be the pair once again returning home to get ready for Toms’ gig – during which we will be able to interview Liam informally and alone, finding out about this amazing 4 year kid. Further questions will enable us to gain insights on his thoughts and views on daddy and his career. This will be a build up towards the other side of the story too. When they return to the house we want to have a few clips of Liam sat behind his own miniature drum kit and answering some simple questions, if we include this into our documentary we will be able to get another view on the situation that the father and son are in. As the questions are directed to Liam we know we will get an honest account of his thoughts due to his age and our audience are likely to be moved by this approach.

We will then attend the gig with two cameras, one onstage and one downstage. We will film Tom at his gig whilst Liam is sat backstage/within the crowd to watch his father.
This part of the film will be the ‘gem’ showing the contrasting side of his life. Most of it will be long and medium shots to show less attachment (series of close-ups conclusively leads the audience to feel more personally in-touch). However close-ups will be included during the shooting stage to ensure enough editing material is available for post-production.
We may want to pursue this bit as if he is out there rocking the world, far beyond reach of his child to enhance the contrast between the emotive and the supposed-to-be successful detached side but somehow deep down Tom and Liam knows that there’s something special they have and nothing will change that – and that is what we are trying to show.

We find this story unique and exciting. We feel in most peoples’ minds the idea of a rock star and a gentle caring father simply can’t coexist. We wanted to investigate how this is possible and most importantly, we think it’s a heart-warming story with a twist that’s worth telling.
At the end of this, we hope the audience will be able to hold back prejudice against single fathers and the general perspective of ‘single parenting is bad’. Although we are only students, we feel that this is an important part of the society that is often misinterpreted and under-valued – hence the making of this documentary, to show the public even with such an ‘extreme’ career, a good father-and-son relationship can still be maintained. We think that it is important to put this message across as there are so few single dads in the UK. In 2004 there were 254 single fathers as oppose to 2829 single mothers, Only 2 percent of families had a single father. This shows that Tom is in a fairly unique position and yet he manages to juggle being a good father with trying to become famous.


Here are some of the storyboards we drew up -

Editing Mayhem!

I managed to upload some earlier versions of the edit at uni today, and here they are!

This first one starts with a shot of Liam at the top of the stairs in silence, as Adam had a song in mind to play over the top of it. It's a good opening shot, and the music fit really well with the footage (unfortunately it's not present in this edit) but eventually we made the decision to use just Tom's music in the film, which I think works a little better.

This is only the first minute and a half or so of footage, and there are some moments where Tom hesitates, repeats himself, or says things that weren't really important enough to make the final cut, so a lot of it had to be trimmed down.

This second edit starts with the opening we used in the final edit, albeit in a much longer and silent form. The film is starting to take shape a lot more by this point, but it's still too long and there's a lot of unnecessary footage and clutter.

The interview with Tom's flatmate and band member, also called Tom, was cut entirely as we all decided what he says doesn't really add much to the documentary and used up time that could be used to show the relationship between father and son in greater depth.

By this stage the film is way past the embryonic stage, and almost ready to stand on it's own two legs and take it's first formative steps. The intro now has music (but still no titles!), but we had to cut out a major chunk towards the end as I noticed Andria actually wanders into shot in the lower left hand side of the screen. I'm not sure how this glaring error had passed under the radar for so long, so we got rid of it! The first few shots were left pretty much untouched in the final version, apart from a few short snippets of audio for the running length. We also chose to discard the footage of the empty playground when Tom talks about childhood, as the shots seemed a little out of place with the rest of the film and just took up valuable time!

The interview with the other Tom has been replaced with more audio of Tom talking about his relationship with Liam and some shots of him, and a lot of the audio has been trimmed down to remove moments for Tom pauses for more than a few seconds or repeats himself. It's also the first time the shots of the band have been included, and is pretty much representative of the final product apart from the lack of credits.

Edit Sweet!

We just recently managed to sort out the internet connection at ours, meaning I'll be able to post things on here much more frequently now!
I'm currently beavering away with the editing for our documentary, which is going really well. Premiere is a cool programme, which is pretty easy and fun to use. After making an initial attempt at an edit, then scrapping it after group feedback, I got stuck into the actual edit which ended up at a whopping 5:38, and wasn't even totally finished! We've since trimmed it down to 4:38, and need to shave off about another minute or so to fit in the final part of the documentary. This shouldn't be too hard, as there are a number of shots that either don't quite work, have bits of us or our equipment in shot or simply don't serve much purpose in the documentary.
I've been trying to render the different versions, but currently each time my computer's perished before it's actually finished! I'll try doing it in the Waverly building at some point so I can put them all up here, I've still got each significantly different stage of the edit saved so I can revisit them at any point.

Creative Opportunities

This week our journal task is -

"Using your own personal experience, write a few lines that describe how a personal contact has provided a creative opportunity for you"

I thought of two good examples for this, one more kind of career orientated, and the other just good for the soul. The first came about through a drama course I used to take part in. After working with the people there for several months, one of the guys who ran it told me about a film company called Suited And Booted. He gave me their details, and I applied for a short film course, and ended up making a 90 second film about a woman who lived with a moose. The experience was very educational, and also a lot of fun! (Incidentally, as an example of something getting in the way of a creative opportunity, I was invited to a film festival in Spain after our film apparently won something over there, but couldn't go as it clashed with my GCSE exams....which is lame, haha!)
The second example is just through friends of mine. My mate Jack, who I'd known for several years, asked if I wanted to go for a jam with his mate Dorian, who I didn't really know too well at the time. Jack invited loads of people over, with loads of instruments, and, erm, we didn't really get much done. However, after a few weeks of 'band practice', fewer and fewer people started turning up, until it was just me playing guitar, Dorian on drums and Jack providing the vocals. We recorded hours and hours worth of jams like this (albeit with varying degrees of quality!), and eventually got to play a gig, just by pummelling away on our instruments...which was good fun, and the start of a beautiful friendship! =D

Editing Test!

Here's a little test using Premiere Pro to edit together several interviews our group filmed the other day. It's pretty rough around the edges and the sound is all over the place, but, hey, it's only a test!



I found this pretty easy to do, which is a good sign for further editing. I still need to figure out seperating the audio channel from the visual one, so I can use people's answers as voiceovers whilst showing other footage.

Networking

For our journals this week, we were asked to comment on Jool’s statement ;

“The essential point of networking is human contact. Business has killed networking by making it something for the career orientated person.”

Personally, I’d disagree with this statement. Whilst networking is obviously an essential part of business, it allows companies to expand their reach and for individuals working in business to find and meet more people, I think networking can exist outside of business altogether and for many more reasons than purely financial gain. For example, during fresher’s week at university, students visit bars, clubs, etc. in order to meet new people and therefore gain more from their experience at university in a new city. This in itself could be called networking, even though it yields no monetary rewards (it’s probably actually quite damaging for the bank account, along with the liver), but it’s a prime opportunity to meet new friends and gain more life experiences. This style of social networking may not be as efficient, precise or structured as the kind employed by a business, but it still works very well and it is used by thousands of people who’d never even think of referring to it as ‘networking’.
Sometimes these more social networks can be born out of business like situations, but even still it’s hard to class them as ‘career orientated’. Take things like thriving underground music cultures, particularly evident in the rave scene, communities of people drawn together out of a passion for music and a desire to stage events for people with a similar outlook. The existence of many successful underground dance events owes everything to a dedicated network, and whilst there may be some nice little earners along the way, this isn’t the main incentive or point to organising such an event. It’s the same for many other diverse interests too, like the booming underground metal scene of the late 80’s, built up by many passionate individuals who circulated and traded tapes they’d made of bands who didn’t always have record company backing (appropriately referred to as the ‘tape-trading’ scene). This wasn’t at all business minded, it would have cost a fresh faced tape trader the price of a tape, envelope and stamp to send their bundle of riffs to another like-minded music fan somewhere else across the globe, with only the promise of someone else’s compilation swinging by their way in the near future to show for it (which sounds worth it to me, to be honest!). This stands as a prime example of a thriving, non-career centred network.
I can fully understand the need for networking within a business environment and the important results it can yield, but I don’t think human contact is necessarily driven by, nor relies on financial gain or the need to further one’s own career.