Evaluation

For our first film, Liverpool Passions, I was director. Despite a very troublesome production, I believe that what we ended up with was a very good film and reflects the hard work we out in as well as the great experience we had working together. Our original idea was to make a film about why people declare themselves as Jedi on the census, and compare that to christianity, as Liverpool has a very strong Catholic history to it, but also the highest proportion of ‘Jedi’ in the country. The idea was to, through a slightly humorous means, ask serious questions about why people are religious or feel the need to protest against organised religion. We then changed this idea to one where we would interview many people of varying faiths and passions, and intersperse these interviews in order to compare the way someone would be devoted to books to the way someone would be devoted to faith. In preparation for this, I had to try and find representatives of different faiths, since I had some connections to people working in the church in Liverpool, while other members of the group tried to find people with other passions. 

   It seemed very early on that the religious people and the humanist that we contacted were more passionate about getting involved than the non faith related parties we contacted. After sending out numerous emails, the three who I found who were free on the particular days we needed were the vice president of a sceptics society, a Christian artist who works on many faith based projects and a Hindu temple. Other members of the group had also made contact with a few shops owned by fanatics, such as record collectors and book collectors. In retrospect it would have been a good move to try and focus more on the passions than the religions when contacting people, as in the end we wonky had one non religious or anti-religious person to interview. However I feel we managed to edit around this issue by revising our idea to fit with the interviews we had got, which meant making a film exclusively about faith. In future, when making documentaries, I will put more thought into pre production as this seems to be a much bigger part of documentary than of fictional films.

   Filming in Liverpool was a great experience. While the somewhat limited time frame meant that we were under a lot of pressure, which was only added to by the fact that we didn't know our way around the city and our group suffered a number of minor injuries, we overcame this by keeping a positive attitude. In fact, a lot of my job as director in Liverpool consisted of motivating the rest of the crew to get round everywhere quicker so that we had time to get as much as possible. In the end, four of our potential contributors pulled through. These were the three I had contacted and the owner of an antique book store. We also got permission to film in a record store near the book store, which in retrospect was a bad idea as we thought we were going to get an interview there, however when we arrived it seemed like the owner just wanted us out as quickly as possible and refused to be interviewed or let us talk to the customers. This not only meant we got no useful footage, but also that we wasted valuable time we could’ve spent elsewhere. On each location I made sure our Cinematographer got a good amount of cutaway footage, so as to add to the ease of the editing. I also wanted every interview filmed from two angles to help with this.

   The four main interviews we got were of a very high quality. For the Hindu couple we interviewed, we interviewed them at the temple, as this location was where they worshipped. The Humanist we interviewed was a member of a group called sceptics in the pub, so we chose to interview him in the hostel bar. The book store owner, we interviewed in his shop and the Christian artist, we interviewed next to the Anthony Gormley statues on Cosby beach, as this was the site of her organisations first event. While all of the locations worked visually, the beach and hostel bar presented some sound challenges. We got around the issue of the sound on the beach by using radio mics, which were obscured by her scarf, meaning the sound of the wind wasn't picked up as well, however the mics kept cutting in and out so some of the best sections of interview had to be done from the boom mic, which hadn’t filtered out the wind nearly as well. The hostel had a lot of background noise which, though not sounding out of place as it was in a pub, was slightly distracting to the interview. If we could go back I would have liked to find another pub, which would have been very quiet at that time, and filmed there, so as to get less noise. Both interviews were toyed around with in post production with noise reducers to try and clean the up which helped a lot.

   While the religious and humanist people we interviewed were fantastic, it would have been better for us to find more people who were talking about something unrelated to religion. As Brian, the bookstore owner, did such a god interview it was a real shame we had to cut this out. We also left out a spontaneous interview we had captured with a street preacher named Michael, as we didn't have any more smaller interviews to include and so his would’ve seemed very out of place and shifted the balance to making it more of a film about Christianity. We also got some nice vox pops in shops with some very interesting people with different views on religion, however we didn't have enough to make it worth including them. I feel it would have been better for us to have gotten lots of very short vox pops on the street with random members of the public as this would have given a greater range of views and allowed for better representation of faiths not covered in the main interviews.

   When it came to editing, me and the editors had to sit down with the transcripts, which I had gone through and highlighted the key moments of, and stitch together a coherent sequence of points that would bounce off one another. This was perhaps the hardest part of the process for me, as there were many things I really wanted to include but in the end couldn't due to time limits and them not being relevant to things other people were saying. By this point we had already agreed to make it exclusively about faith, and so Brian had to be left out as well. We also included very little form the second camera angles, as it was hard to sync them up and we only had limited time to edit. In the end I think what we created flowed very nicely and reflected well what the contributors had said to us. With this being the first documentary I have directed on my own, it was in many ways a learning curve for me. If I were to go back, I would do many things differently, but I am proud of my contribution as director and of the team I worked with, and feel I managed to lead them well.

   For our second project I was chosen to be the cinematographer, and decided me and Georgia, the art director, would work closely together, since we both had more experience in the role the other person had taken. To get a more cinematic look, Adam wanted us to shoot on DSLR cameras. Knowing Georgia was a big fan of them I agreed, which in retrospect was a mistake as I realise now I can’t stand them and would have been much more comfortable with an XF-100. However, the look of the film is very good and so this wasn’t much of a problem for the film as much as a personal bother for me. Rather than storyboard, me and Georgia filmed a kind of video storyboard for me to work from as a reference point. We covered form every shot of the video storyboard on the shoot, although didn't include every shot from it as we had some spontaneous decisions of the day which were better.

   When it came to designing the set, Georgia was ill and so, leaving me strict instructions, it was up to me to some degree to construct the master shot and the set at the same time and do the lighting. Georgia and I had agreed to decorate the back wall with many creepy paintings, which I chose with Adam. We also said that lots of clocks and cuddly toys littering the shot would make it creepier, me and Adam thought it would add to the creepy tone if these were facing Edith just like Jacob and so positioned them in that kind of way. It was also imperial that everything was well lit and so I had Adam and Lucy stand in for Edith and Jacob when positioning the lights. My aim was to clutter the edges of the frame with stuff and Jacob, Having Edith in the middle with a nice spotlight on her that didn't stand out too much. I had to face many challenges and make many decisions with this. Such as, how to manage double shadows created by the multiple lights, which I tried to hide behind the characters for the most part, or obscure in the shadowy edges of the frame. I also had to get the lights, balancing all three of them, at such a level that Edith and Jacob were both well lit, Edith more so, with dramatic shadows but not overt spotlighting. getting this balance right was near impossible, so in the end we chose to forgive a bit of a deliberate spotlight in order to get more prominent shadows haunting the scene. I also had to balance the colour palette, by putting lots of reds in the foreground, and on the paintings, against the green wall and the green light that would bounce into the dimly lit areas of the shots.

   Once the master shot was set up and the lights set to their appropriate settings, we were ready t begin filming. Before our shoot with the actors, Georgia came to the set to make some final changes to it and give me advice on shooting it. When filming, I chose to contrast Ediths very standard, straight on shots with Jacobs distorted, Gilliam inspired cantered shots. This suggests her comfort and power is the opposite of how he hates his situation and has less power. It also creates, early on in the film, both the unsettling and Jarring feel and a very formalistic tone that means the audience addresses, while still seeming a bit odd, are accepted by the audience. The power relationships are changed at the end when Edith starts being shot in distorted ways and Jacob eventually steals her spotlight in his own variation on the master shot at the very end. The best shot I got, I feel, was the “Biscuit Cam” shot where Jacob tries to grab a biscuit and his hand is slapped away by Edith. This shot reflects both my influences from Gilliam, in the distorted appearance of the hand and the cantered angle, as well as Kubrick in composing form the centre outwards. I am very proud of my cinematography on this project, but if I were to go back I would use an XF-100 for personal reasons as well as so that I could have zoomed in further on certain things and would have been able to use a tripod on many of the shots of paintings or stuffed animals that we cut away to for the deaths sequence. I would also be more careful with aperture, which was hard to control on the DSLRs as they keep resetting, and perhaps forgive a little more deliberate lighting in order to get better shadows on the walls.