Production Diary

 

January 2022

The first time I filmed for my project, I was filming interviews with students from Durham Sixth Form.  The Durham Sixth Form students are a part of the Pride society at their sixth form, I wanted to ask them about their experiences with being LGBT in the North East and if they have had any support from their sixth form.

Before I was allowed to film with them, I had to set up permissions. Originally,  I wanted to go to their sixth form, to sit in on their group meeting before pulling some students aside to film their interviews. However, when talking to their head of year, I found out I was unable to go into their sixth form so instead, I had to arrange for them to come to my college.

I then had to get their permission forms, stating they were consenting to be filmed and used in my documentary.

When setting up for the interviews, I wanted the lighting to be very brightly focused on the interviewee. I had switched off the main overhead lights of the studio and instead set up 3 studio lights so that they were all shining on the chair where the interviewee would sit.

lighting on camera

Lighting on graphic

Things that went well with filming

• The interviewees were all eager to answer the questions and also answered them with a lot of detail. We did not have to retake many shots as they were all very calm and didn't seem to get too nervous when being filmed.
• The lighting worked well, I think the lighting was really how I wanted it to look when looking back at the footage, It really lit the interviewees well and allowed all the focus to be on them which is exactly what I wanted.

Things I feel like could've been improved.

• The time, When filming. The college was close to shutting which did not give us a lot of time for retakes. If I was to retake the interviews, I would make sure that we had more time in case people would request to retake their interviews.
• The questions, when rewatching the footage. I feel like I could've improved and streamlined the questions and also add more on, as when editing, I wanted more questions to add to my documentary.

March-April 2022

During March and April, I had a lot of narration scenes to film.

First filming session

Part of the script that was being filmed

Test footage/Run through of the scene

Second filming session

For this filming, I was recording VoiceOver/ narration footage. However, Most of the footage that I filmed was unusable as I kept getting interrupted making me seem really distracted throughout the videos.

I decided to get to angles of this, one was with the canon camera and the other was with my Mac book web camera. 

The scene in Script format

Second Interview session

For these interviews, I wanted to get some general opinions on LGBT issues and topics, so I decided to ask a few members of my class to come in for a short interview. 

I used the same lighting as I did in my first interview, however, it came out a lot more moody during filming.

To film, I used a Canon camera and 3 studio lights, I knew the mic would be able to pick up the interviewees talking so I did not need to worry about an external one.