Week 7 - When Production Challenges Hit

This week was a busy week for all of us involved in this project as a large amount of planning was made in the short time that we had available. At the start of this week, we held a pre-production meeting to develop the schedule and build the first set of interview questions we wanted to ask the staff. We had a weakness to our idea, however, as the staff were not the owners, who we had wanted to originally interview. We were advised that we could send the questions about the history of the business to the owners, and they could provide the answers for the staff who were going to be interviewed, which we agreed to do. However, we also decided to produce personal questions intended for the interviewee to make the interview feel less scripted and awkward.

On Wednesday, Ellie and I had a phone call with Craige, the owner of the store, to answer questions he had about our production and to ask him questions to help us with the logistics of the production. I was scared going into this phone call as I was worried that he was going to postpone or cancel the shoot, however we talked about our idea, and he was happy to proceed as normal. Following this phone call, I prepared the risk assessment following my in-person trip the week before and booked the equipment that the team requested for the shoot.

Naturally, any production has threats to it, and this one was no exception. This weekend, when we planned to shoot the documentary, unfortunately coincided with a storm that was slowly passing over the area. Regardless, we were still allowed to film as normal, however it did mean that we had little to no customers for the film. As I had suggested originally, I advised the director that the film should focus on the shop itself, so footage was filmed to try and avoid the empty feeling of the shop. The weather threat also meant that our plans to film aerial footage with a drone were out of the question. Oliver, the manager that we had spoken to the week before, was unavailable for his interview and it meant that we had to rearrange and choose another staff member. Luckily, Heni, a shop assistant, was available to step in for our second filming day, however we worried that the quality of the answers was not sufficient for our documentary. I also stepped in during the interviews to suggest additional questions to the director as some answers were either not relevant or not usable for sound bites. Communication issues also caused problems, as I had failed to update the team with enough notice that we would be filming on both Saturday and Sunday. This meant that Dan, on audio, was unable to make it to the interview shoot, so I asked Jakub to step in. Our two filming sessions left the team conflicted – some were happy with what we had filmed, and some felt that more filming would be needed later.