#multicameraproduction

Over the course of filming Stalingrad I was given the role of Production Manager. I did not enjoy this role and found my job very boring. I attended all rehearsals I was told to prior to filming, and attended all days of filming. Without fail, every morning, I stuck up the call sheets for the day ahead and informed the cast needed within plenty of time of needing them on set. I was also extremely apologetic to the cast, throughout the four days of filming, when schedules overran and they had to wait longer for their scene. Once all cast were on set my job became very pointless. I didn't feel very included as part of the crew as my job role involved no practical work. However, I did very much enjoy day three of filming as I was given the role of video logger due to a limited crew. I really enjoyed being able to communicate with a lot more of my fellow crew members and felt like I had achieved a lot more by the end of the day.

For one of our units at college we had to create a corporate video which is a promotional video for a company, this needed to have two main elements which were interviews and cutaways/filmed footage. Me Bethany and Aimee were told we would be creating two videos for London Dance Academy. Bethany was made the director for this project, so she had to go London to meet the owners of the company to have a meeting about how they wanted the video to look and what they wanted to include.

The following week Bethany told us the outcome of the meeting. We found out the owners didn’t really have anything particular in mind so we were allowed to have full creative control of how the end product will look.

On the 30th of September me, Bethany and Aimee went up to London to film some test shots. This was to allow the rest of the group who did not go to the meeting have a look around and see the space we had to film in and have a rough idea of what we will be filming. When we first arrived we got to met and speak to the co-owner who Bethany had the meeting with. Shortly after this we still had a bit of spare time before the classes started so we had a quick look around the three studios in the academy and took pictures of each, this would then help us when we are back at college to decided what equipment we would defiantly need to take with us when we do the actual film shoot and what risks we might have to watch out for.

Looking at the pictures and footage back at college we had some decent shots but most were really dark as the lighting in the studios was very poor we decided at that moment we would use flo lights as these looked more natural as the dedo lights would have been too yellow. We also noticed that we would have to be care when filming in one studio as there are mirrors on majority of the walls so when we have lighting set up we would have to make sure we don’t get that in shot or the other camera.

We started to get to work on schedules as we needed to know when we could go back up to film, this started numerous emails between Bethany and Alexe to sort out dates. We needed some time to prepare and they needed time to let their students know about the filming as on the day of our test shots we had problems with people not wanting to be filmed and teachers not being too happy with us filming their classes. Not long after the dates were set for the following week to which we would end up filming for 4 days straight.

On the 7th October we went up to London to start our 4 day shoot. On each day Alexe told us what interviews she wanted to film, we had interviews with mostly teachers at the academy who all teach a variety of classes from pole dancing to extreme stretching. We even had interviews with Alexe herself just talking about the academy in general. Each interview was filmed differently with something to resemble the class in shot. Overall id say all the interviews went really well and we didn’t have any major problems with any of them.

Throughout the hectic week we filmed a variety of different classes from taster pole class to acrobatics. Depending on what studio we were filming in depended on the layout we had the equipment set up. No major issues came up with filming classes only a few small problems which included some people still not wanting to be filmed and batteries running low in some of the later sessions.

I believe that I did the best job I could while out on shoot. I didn’t have a specific job role. As there were only three people in the crew, as we were not allowed to have any boys on crew and no other girls were available to help out, this meant that we all had to pitch in as much as we could to make up for the lack of crew members. We all took it in turns to do some camera work as we took two cameras up London with us, we all helped to set up lighting and we all helped to set an interview up.

Even though I would say I was mainly in charge of sound for the whole production as on one else did this job as they didn’t know how to work the equipment, but I believe I did a good job on this as sound for nearly all interview came out to a good standard only one interview didn’t because I was rushed for time and had to attach the microphone to the interviewee quickly to which I didn’t attach it tight enough so it fell loose when they did tricks making the interview sound muffled and unusable.

Towards the end of our first year of our course we got told by the lectures that when we came back in September we would be filming one of the Miskin shows, one afternoon we had to go into the Miskin auditorium to watch for the first time the play. The play was called STALINGRAD and is based on the war between Germany and Russia.

Once we had returned from our summer break we had a meeting with Tim and Andrea to discuss job roles on this production. I was given the role of production manager. For this role my main responsibilities were for scheduling the production so that the crew and actors knew what scenes were being  filmed on each day, this enabled them to know if they would be needed on set or not. I was also responsible for noting any changes in the schedule and for keeping the crew and cast updated on these changes. While on set I was responsible for looking after the actors and making sure I answered any questions that they had.

To start off the whole process all the people selected to be director, producer, production mangers, d.o.p, first AD and head of sound got told that we would have the say on how the production is going to run. We were the ones who had to pick which scenes to d , as we were told we had to pick 10 scenes to film over 5 days and make them into a short film (not an easy task). This meant numerous trips down to the Miskin to watch rehearsals after rehearsals. While down in Miskin I took numerous notes while watching the rehearsals as we would constantly talk about ideas for the scenes. Whenever the actors had their breaks this always enabled us to explain our ideas more clearly as we could get onto the set at this point.

After a few weeks of watching rehearsals we had our 10 scenes picked, it was then just a matter of watching the scenes over and over to think about how we were going to light the scene and camera shots/angles. What helped a lot throughout the process was we were working closely with Gavin who is one of the directors down at the Miskin and he was allowing us to walk In and out of the rehearsals and was happy to help us out in any way to get the best end product possible especially as it came to getting our paperwork sorted for filming. He also was a big help on set as he would constantly talk to the actors to get them into their character, give them tip to improve their performance and  make them work around us than us work around them, this made our job easier as we could direct them ourselves if we needed to. This meant we got the best performance out of them that we possibly could.

last day: London Dance Academy

Today is our last ever time of filming at the London Dance academy, to end off a long week we had an evening crammed with classes and interviews to film. we were given a schedule at the start of the week by Alexe so we knew what we were filming each day before we turned up, which overall did make things a lot easier but Alexe decided to add many more extras onto tonight's one as she wanted to make the most of us being there and give us more opportunists to get the shots we needed. As aimee could not make it up to London with us tonight Jess stepped in to help us out which we were grateful for as we would have been able to do it just the two of us.

To start off we interviewed Melissa in studio two. She posed in a hoop for her interview, she was just explaining about studio hire and the type of classes they would be suitable for, she also talked about private lessons that they do and where they do them and the type of classes that she personally teaches at the academy. For this interview Bethany wanted to use the same lighting as we had done to film the solo pole routine by Hannah, which i believe did work well and looked nice. I was put in charge of sound for the interview as i had done the sound for all the interviews we had done throughout the week and bethany was happy with the way each interview sounded so left me to continue with that job. 

After this we did a walk through of the whole academy from reception into all of the studios. while Bethany got a camera ready and walked out the main entrance door to film  me and Jess quickly put up some lights in one of the rooms as the lighting was really poor. we did get in the way at one point but we managed to solve the problem in the edit but we were lucky no one else got in the way otherwise the whole shot would have had to have been scraped 

After the walk through we had an interview to do with one of the very few male pole dance teachers they have at the Academy, he spoke about how he got into pole dancing, where he has competed and the positives about pole dancing on the whole. i was left to do the job of recording sound for this interview, i was really worried about this as we filmed in the main reception and i could hear the music from the pole class in the room next to us and people talking as they came in. I thought this would have been unusable but playing it back afterwards all the background noise we could barely hear and it sounded ok which i was relieved about. 

 After this it was straight into filming a class, this was extreme stretching for this we were in studio 2 which meant we were limited on shots as the room is quiet dark and we couldn't really take our own lighting in so we had to use what we had and could not zoom in closely on anything. we were even more limited when a few members of the class said that they did not want to be film at all which was a pain. We only filmed this for a few minutes until we believed we had all the shots we were going to get and we used the rest of the time to recharge the camera batteries as they were going flat and we had yet more classes and interviews to film.

 The last two things to film were an interview with Astra who was introducing her class to aerial hoop and performed a few tricks of what you would learn in the first few week of the course.We only had one problem with this interview and it was the fact that i didn't secure the microphone enough so we she did the tricks the sound was muffled which meant the shots might be used but the sound wont be. Once the interview was over we began to film the class getting mostly close ups of peoples face as they we be hanging upside down, This was a fun class and a great way to end our filming week.

day 3: London Dance Academy 

Today while filming at London Dance Academy we had only three classes to film. We started off by filming Sexy pole routine class to which we had one camera placed at the back of the room getting the wide shot and the second camera at the front getting close ups.

This class was mainly filled with advanced dancers and some were even teachers of the lower level pole classes. Some of them had been filmed previously so were not worried about being filmed again. we kept the same set up with the lighting as we knew it would be the only way it would work with getting our shots and not our lighting in it. plus we knew that this way it lit the room up nicely to the way we wanted. 

The second class we had to film was Arial conditioning, once again we had to move into the studio in the next room. For filming this class we had to make sure we didn't zoom right in on the camera as the lighting in the room was very poor and the shot went really dark once we zoomed in  but being in a different studio we didn't have a problem with the mirrors. During this class our camera batteries kept running low which meant we had to keep swapping over from the ones that were on charge. In the end we put all the batteries on charge we had enough shots and got them ready for the following class.