Dartford Lions Bonfire Night:
Bonfire Night Production:
Dartford Lions Club approached the college with a proposition for the media department to cover their yearly event for Bonfire night.
This to me seems to be a big first opportunity to work for a large event and I am looking forward to creating content for them. I feel as if this is a good opportunity for the class as a whole to get experience working together on something this scale as, we have been told there can be more than 15,000 people there on the night.
This also is a good opportunity for me as, I have never really shot anything in the dark before so it will be a challenge to make sure everything is correctly lit and working in order to obtain good footage for the editors.
Meeting with Dartford Lions:
This was our first meeting with the committee of Dartford Lions, this was a long first interview but, as a class we got a lot of ideas over to the visitors which seemed to impress them and give them confidence in what we are going to provide for them.
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Some of the ideas given such as, a new Instagram that Megan will run and an individual interview tent where specific interviews will take place, these types of ideas plus many more filled our visitors with enough confidence in what we are capable of and personally for me I believe they are excited to see what we come up with.
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The meeting itself went well for me personally I believe that I got a lot of point across and let my ideas flourish enough for committee to understand my insight of what we want to create.
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However, after this interview it was also brought to my attention how much we have to plan for this and that we are going to have to practice filming in the dark as, not many of us have experience with this. Furthermore, I need to create a set for the interview I have a good simple but effective idea that I think will work well enough and look good on the night.
Planning for Bonfire Night:
The following day consisted of establishing everyone's roles and what we need to all focus on doing as a class. For this specific shoot I chose the roles of Co-Producer and Camera operator. I was happy with my choice's as, I have never been apart of the producing team and was excited to get stuck into this challenge.
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I think I have good enough people skills to take this role and I believe if I am passionate enough about a task I can really develop this role and plan this project well enough so, on the day everyone knows what and who is going where without getting confused or annoyed at the situation.
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For Emily and I there is a lot of work that needs to be sorted in the coming weeks however I think it is achievable and I am feeling confident at this time.
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I have also taken the role of camera operator again as, once again I feel this is my strongest point and on the night I have a lot of strong ideas that I believe will make the edit look really good as long as, I capture them correctly. The only issue the operating team have during this event is, we will be filming in the dark meaning, we are going to have to use lighting everywhere we go but, remember to watch we shine our lights and not have them set to bright as, we do not want to disturb the public to much.
Media Poster:
During the meeting with the committee Rags asked us if we could produce a simple, fun and effective poster that we could put around the event to let people know that there will be live coverage of the event via a media team.
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Sam created this poster to let people know that we will be there, I think this works well as, it uses the correct college colours, logo and text style whilst also having a fun element to it.
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The simplicity to help people read the text without getting distracted and easily lets people know that there will be cameras there so, they are not so confused or startled if they see us with cameras at the event.
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It also helps us as a team as, it may entice more people to come to do an interview with and will possibly allow the event to get more publicity when the edit is finished and posted on social media as, people will want to watch their own interviews to show to friends or family, further spreading the word of the event.
Emails sent to the committee:
These are the first of many emails we have sent to Rags asking for specific details Emily and I need to further our planning, I believe the email Emily created was professional and asked in the correct manor for the items we need.
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However, as you can read in the second email Rags did not come back with the many of the items we had originally asked for which I believe could be down to our original email as, we did ask for a lot of different things in one email which may not have been the best idea.
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So, after talking to Emily I came up with the idea to send separate emails over a few days with the different things we need, I feel as if this will work more efficiently as, it is less work for Rags to achieve in one sitting as, he seems to be a busy man and I feel breaking up our needs will help him gather what we need more efficiently.
Interview booth set design test:
My original set design consisted of a simple set for the interview containing; two stalls, a camera, two lights, plants and a white backdrop. I feel as if this will create a good but simple atmosphere for the interviews and add a different take to the edits.
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Harry and I decided to do a test run with some of the equipment to see how it would look after a bit of experimenting we realised that one backlight would not work as, it would be to harsh for the camera and it would make the purple back drop obsolete so, we brainstormed for a while and came up with the idea to use to two reflectors and two lights to capture the right amount of light without making the set to harsh. I think worked perfectly and it will be easy to setup and create on the night of shooting the event.
Radio Advert:
Emily and I was asked by Rags if he could come in to college to create a short advert or have an interview with us to talk about and promote the fireworks however, when looking at the date we realised we would not have much time to create anything due to, half term.
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So, Emily decided to create this short advert piece that will play across the college over the radio for the week before the fireworks night.
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I think this advertisement is short but effective by getting the name and point across very quickly allowing someone to hear it and know what the event is straight away, meaning they will not have to wait around to find out when and where to go for the event.
Pre-production Paperwork:
Final Preparation:
On Tuesday Emily wanted to have a talk with Rags to go over a few questions about the final week of the bonfire night, we covered a few issues Emily had and wanted to get sorted before the final day and to get any more information on what to put on the socials.
Emily's notes:
Sam's Posters:
-Graham asked for Sam to create simple posters for advertisement for the tent so that when people walked past they knew why we was there.
-Another idea we had was to create a poster wit ha QR code to link to the social media page for the Dartford lions, we thought this would be a good way to boost the social platform as we saw good results from the last QR codes we used at the Freshers fayre.
-The final poster Sam created was for the day of the event, these were created to be put around the park to tell people that there would be a media team filming there. This allowed people to know there would be a camera near them at all times and to come talk to us if they wanted an interview.
The Final Equipment Check:
My final task before the filming day on Saturday was to layout all the equipment for the shooting day, I did this as a final check to see what we still needed to collect and to see if anything went missing.
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After laying everything out I realised we was still a camera short as well as, some headphones so I located them and added it to the list to book out. I left this out for the next day as, my tutors were collecting it on the Saturday and needed to quickly move it out of the college.
Penultimate Day:
This was the final day before the official bonfire night, we had been asked by Dartford Lions to go film the setup of the event. So we took a few cameras and a tripod just in case.
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It started off a slow process waiting around for something to happen but Rags came up with the idea for us to film the tickets at the raffle. So, I setup a camera on a tripod and began to film that.
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This helped me personally as, I got to see how sometimes filming requires you to sit around and wait for things to happen, I now know what to expect for future shoots if something like this happens again.
Filming Day:
Problems we had:
Firstly I feel as if we faced many problems on the night where we could of done some things differently to prevent these things from happening. One major problem we faced for me personally was kit organisation, even though at the start of the night we placed all the equipment on the table in different sections this did not help as, during the night the crew kept switching kit and putting it back in different places which made it difficult to locate certain pieces of equipment.
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To prevent this issue from happening again I think we need a system where we either have a person overlooking kit all night or a tally that people can write on to say who has what kit and where. This will help in the future as we can then just call each other or wait for the kit needed to come back so the next person can take it out.
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The next issue we had on the night was the lack of communication, even though we had walkie-talkies people could not hear each other due to the loud music and the crowds furthermore, even when we could hear each other everyone seemed flustered due to the amount of things that needed to be filmed which meant everyone was confused on what needed to be done and where everyone was, which ultimately led to less footage being filmed or certain things not being added to the edit.
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However, despite all the issues the crew faced we ended up with some good footage that can be easily turned into a decent edit, we may need to rethink some of the edits we originally wanted to do as, we do not have enough footage for separate edits but, I am confident that we will create a good promotional video for Dartford Lions.
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The Final Edits:
-Thankyou letter from the client
Final Evaluation:
Overall, I feel as if the night could have gone a lot better as well as, many things leading up to it.
However lets start with the positives, firstly I think the crew planned the filming day out well, we had a good understanding in what we needed to achieve and we did well to create posters for the event and promotion for it. We had a decent selection of kit that was all organised and ready for the day with the likes of spare batteries and cameras just in case.
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The meetings with the clients also went well, we managed to get every point across and any questions we had were followed up in formal emails created by Emily, I think the class worked well together despite a few issues and it was a good first attempt at a big event like this.
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That being said, there was also many issues we faced whilst filming, not all of them being our fault but, there is definitely room for improvement moving forward. The biggest one for me was communication, throughout this project our communication between one another was poor, a lot of people were getting confused with what they had to do and when/where they had to do it, which caused many problems between the crew. This lead to me eventually becoming hot headed and I became unprofessional when dealing with an issue, this problem was later resolved before the night of the filming so no hard feelings were left on the night.
To also resolve the communication issues in the future we need to work on talking to each other about issues we face instead of keeping them to ourselves and also, we need to work on using the walkie-talkies properly as, these were given out however, no one could hear each other over the music so we need to learn how to use them effectively for next time.
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Another issue we faced was lack of organisation of the kit on the night of filming this was because we did not have a system put in place of what kit was where and who had certain kit, even though we had more than enough kit when something came back broken or a certain piece was needed it could not be found as someone had taken it or it was in the wrong place. To fix this issue next time I think we need some sort of system in place where we can write down who has a certain piece of equipment and where they are going so, that way everyone knows where the kit is at all times.
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The final big issue I think the crew faced on the night and post editing was the amount of footage captured. This was not entirely our fault though as, our client was very pushy with telling us what to film and capture on the night meaning we did not have enough time to capture certain elements of the festival that we wanted to capture. To get around this issue next time I think we need to cover more ground as a crew quicker, what is meant by this is, to take opportunities where we have a spare few minutes to quickly capture some B-roll of behind the scenes of that particular event as, any footage can help the final edit as, it allows more variety and allows the edit to also be more spaced out instead of just having the same few clips cut differently.
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That being said the edits did come out well and our client seems happy with the work we produced, I am hoping our work gets used on there socials for next years event as, this will boost our companies in the future too. There are many areas we still need to work on as a crew but I am still happy with the final result.