Production Meeting 2: 14th February 2012

Today Natalia and I held our second production meeting.

Natalia's project has taken a new direction and is now focusing on the subject of death. Following her last project Natalia wants to combine still and moving images with an interview voice over. Natalia has been inspired by film 'Gallivant' by Andrew Cotting which follows a similar visual aesthetic to that which she is hoping to create. The next step in production for Natalia is to conduct interviews with several people who work with death on a day-to-day basis, depending on how successful and interesting this interview footage is, it will form the voice over for her finished project. Natalia feels she will be able to record the interviews alone as she is only using the sound, not any visual footage. In our next meeting I will help her by listening to the footage she has collected. For her previous film, Natalia initially had over forty minutes of interview footage which she had to condense down to less than fifteen, this was a hard task. Hopefully if I am listening to the footage too, I will be able to help by making suggestions as to which bits could be cut. The overall decision will be Natalia's but it may be useful to have a second set of ears! Natalia has asked if I can help her at the later stages of production when she will be filming - we haven't set any dates yet as at the moment the priority is gathering the interview material.

I talked Natalia through the progress I have made with my film, she was able to watch the majority of my footage last week while I was downloading it from my SD card. Natalia has suggested I experiment with two different cameras, my DSLR and the larger cameras provided by the university. My camera worked well on the crane due to it's light weight and small size, this also meant the shadows it created were minimal and easy to avoid. For this reason, I feel that the larger university camera will work better for static shots on a tripod or maybe on the track. I am hoping to hold a read through with my two actors in a weeks time. This is a rehearsal, but I will hire out the equipment as it would be good to get some more practise. I really need to work on steadying my camera work, making panning shots much more smooth and natural. I also need to get a feel for the type of shots I will need to capture when I come to capturing my real footage.

My next steps are to write up a script complete with detailed shot list and stage directions, and continue researching stereotypes in film.