Production Diary

Production Diary 

Completing all pre-production that is possible to do before production means that I can now start to put my product into place. My first advance into production will be organising interviews.

24th March 2022

After coming up with suitable interview questions, I sent them to my lecturer who will then pass them onto people studying Musical Theatre. Being able to interview students at Sunderland College will be perfect as we can film on site and they are young performers in the North East, which is a main feature in my ideas.

6th April 2022

My first interviews have now been organised for 7th April, but I wanted to try and obtain some test footage first, to see what angles work / don't work, instead of leaving it to the day. 

With the help of Lucy (production assistant) who sat in front of the camera so I could move the camera / focus etc. we found the perfect set up. I decided to just be a voice as the interviewer, with the interviewee in a talking head type set up.

7th April 2022

The first of my interviews were recorded today, using the set up established the day prior. They went extremely well, although there were supposed to be three interviews instead of two, but there was a miscommunication and the third was not sent up to the studio. Still, the answers I received were exactly what I hoped and I am pleased with the direction that the documentary is going in already.  

 

Here is a behind the scenes shot, filmed by Lucy Baker, showing the established set up and camera settings. As the background in the studio is white, it was important to fix the ISO to be lower, so that the shot is not too over contrasted.

With the assistance of Lucy Baker, we set up a microphone to obtain better audio for my documentary. This was the TAKSTAR SGC-598 Recording Microphone. It was fairly easy to set up, as it came with a wire to plug in, although we did have to adjust the volume levels to make sure it would pick up the interviewees. Neither me or Lucy had ever worked with a recording microphone, but it worked extremely well and we had no problems with it. The interviews using this microphone are the clips that sound the best, so it definitely paid off.

27th April 2022

Today, the second and final interviews were recorded. This was the first of my footage not filmed at location in Sunderland College. Thankfully, this is the location that I help out with as part of my CDF placement and that I attend in my spare time, meaning I was completely used to it and was guaranteed to not run into any problems. 

These are a few of the screenshots from the shots. It was important to me to include the logo on the wall, to represent one of the small groups in the North East and thank the company for allowing me to film here.  A talking head type shot was the choice I went with to achieve this. 

As this was filmed outside of Sunderland College, I could not access equipment from there. This meant that I worked with my iPhone and a tripod. Luckily, the lighting in this location was adequate, so won't require any fixing during post-production. I had previously filmed using my iPhone on other projects, so again, there were no outstanding issues that had to be resolved.