Day One: Filming Group Project at Bath Spa 27/05/08

It was Tuesday and the deadline for our Group Project was Thursday. We had already interviewed our lecturer Mike Johnston and the shoot went really well, although the shotgun mic is obviously in shot in the interview!

We finally got permission from David Jones to interview him and wanted to film Balve’s introduction scene outside the SU.

We picked up the equipment for the shoot, which was two Panasonic DV cameras, a Marantz Audio recorder with a directional mic. We spent about an hour trying to figure out how to make the marantz work before going to rich the gatehouse technician for help.


We decided that Lance would be the cameraman while I acted as sound recordist and Balve would be the presenter and finally got to interview David even though the mic sound I was getting was horrendous and kept cutting out. After this we filmed Balve walking up the stairs and through the SU office on the way to speak to David. I wanted the interview to be conducted using one camera as most fly on the wall documentaries uses just one camera.


We proceeded to film Balve’s introduction scene, and eventually concluded that we should start it with Balve waiting for us to get the equipment ready as opposed to a more clean introduction we wanted to embrace the fact that we were first year media students and start off with the crew fumbling around.


Through pre-production I had asserted in all production meetings that I wanted to take a producer/director role as a lot of the vision and the original concept were mine. However when it came to shooting I was happy to see Balve and Lance interjecting their own ideas when it came to shots and even the content, as it was Balves idea for him to fix his hair using the camera! I was totally comfortable with letting them have their own say and this resulted in almost no conflict between the crew during filming.