i n s p i r a t i o n

For a long while now I’ve had a big interest in fashion, especially menswear. I’ve been blogging about it for a while, and I’ve strongly considered a career in the industry.

This semester I’ve been involved in a couple of projects in the fashion areea, including a campaign for Zara, made for the second year Marketing module of the Fashion and Textiles course at my university.

campaign video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThOhUGXenac

The frustration regarding the bad post-production of my university assignments made me develop a great interest in editing. I’ve always liked to work with creative software, as Adobe Photoshop has been a great love of mine for a while. Discovering editing software and the fact that I like to work with it doesen’t come as a big surprise. My skills at the moment are extremely basic, but I’m very interested in pursuing a possible career in this areea of the industry.

In the projects I’ve done so far, pre-production has been my favourite part of the process, and I would love to be very involved in it in my future career. The best skills I have and developed so far are my writing and research skills, so the part of coming with a concept, a story and a design for the film is the one that i love the most. 

Working with actors is the second thing I love the most, and by far my favourite part of production. Having education in theater methods I love rehearsing with actors and sitting down, talking to them about the construction of their characters, aswell as working with them on their performance.

Looking back at all our films, I think the post-production was the weakest side. The footage we got wasn’t very good for any of the films, but for each project I felt we could do much more with it than we did in post, and for our main film even more so. 

The first problem is that our editor didn’t come to any of the shoots for our main film, so as much as the rest of the team explained what we intended with the shoots, and as much as the script explained as well, she couldn’t get an ideea as good as if she was present on the shoot. The footage would’ve been probably much easier to work with if she was there to give her opinion on it, also.

The second problem is that we had 2 weeks for post-production and our editor only showed me a rough cut 2 days before the deadline, when as much as I wanted to be involved more in the process, I couldn’t do more than tell her some observations and ask for a finer cut at least the day before the deadline. In the end, like in the previous projects, my opinion wasn’t taken into consideration in the editing process, which shouldn’t happen in a professional production.

The third problem is that, like in the previous projects, we didn’t have any sort of color grading, so no matter how beautiful some of the footage our cinematographers managed to film, it wasn’t properly given value. 

Scheduling the shoot was hard, but with a couple of issues we managed to bring all the crew and actors needed for each of the 3 days of shooting. 

Considering all the scenes, with the exception of one that was filmed on the train, were outside shoots, it was inevitable to encounter some problems, which we did on the first day. It started raining too badly to continue filming, after only getting less than half of what was planned for that day, but we catched up on the third day. I had the opportunity to work more with actors, and regardless of how the film itself turned out to be, I think the actors delivered good performances and it’s all thanks to this day, when I had the opportunity to sit down with them, talk about the characters and what each scene means for them. This day made me miss the time i worked in theatre and wish for productions where I’ll have the chance to work with more actors for more complex roles.

The second day was by far the best one for the crew. It had the best creative vibe since we started filming and some of the footage might be the best we got as a team this semester, which happened thanks to the creative input from our cinematographers and the better communication within the team. It was a hard day but it was good.

On the third day most of the crew couldn’t make it, and due to problems with the equipment and actors schedule some conflicts appeard that seem to have killed the creative vibe that was just born the previous day. However, we carried on with the shoot and got a couple of nice shoots.

The biggest problem we had with all the shoots was that our editor couldn’t come to any of them, which I think is one of the main reasons we encountered so many problems in post-production.