TASK 1B
As I mentioned before in Ufilms we have had different project managers for different projects. I had the duty of project managing our social action campaign titled 'Educating Granddad.' The aim of this campaign was to change attitudes, challenge dominant representations and educate people on British values. As Project Manager I was in charge of putting a team together to help make the social action campaign. For campaign we decided to make a video that could be used online and be shown by the college to help educate people on sensitive subjects such as discrimination, immigration and British values. After I got the team together we all began researching the topics we would be talking about, in this case research was vital as if we said the wrong thing we could risk upsetting someone, we were talking about lots of sensitive topics and we couldn't come across like we didn't know what we were talking about. The pre production team consisted of the majority of the class. For the video we decided we would create a piece with lots dialogue so that we could get as much information into the video as possible, we needed a concept to get this information into the video though and we came up with the idea of a family playing a board game around a table with the granddad being occasionally politically incorrect and the other members of the family would correct him on this. I put together the team of Kane, Matty and Chloe to work on the script and after quite a few drafts we finally came up with a script that we thought could help educate the viewers on some of the social issue in todays British society. After the script was completed we had to cast actors for roles, we wanted at least one racial diverse character to be in our film so that we could get their view on the situation. We cast Beatrice from the acting course in this role as she is racial diverse and had the characteristics we needed. As well as this we cast Ellie and Dylan from the acting course and then Ellies mum as the mother characters and Jess's Dad as the Granddad Character. One of our biggest issues was casting as at first we really struggled to find a racial diverse cast, we had originally cast Maria but we were not told that she wasn't available up until the very last minute as Adam who was helping with pre production and liaising with actors had failed to tell us an Exam was taking place that would keep Maria from filming with us. We realised that Jess's dad would not look that much older than Ellies mum and as he was suppose to be playing her father we needed to do something about this, so we enlisted the help of MUA student Shauna. She told us that she could make Jess's dad look older using special effects make up. Luckily we were able to sort a location for shooting quite quickly, Adam was kind enough to offer up his girlfriends home for us to shoot in. It was a good location for us to use as the house was large and had a great dining room area we could use to shoot in. The location was in Hartlepool so we needed a way to get there, fortunately me and Matty could provide transport to the cast and crew. After we sorted all of the pre production we put together a team, I decided as project manager I wanted to direct the piece, I asked Matty to be camera operator and Jess to be Assistant Director. As well as this Ben was on the boom.
On the 31st of January we got our team together and headed down to Hartlepool. We started earlier and shooting only took a couple hours. When we got there we got Andy into make up straight away as we knew it would take a while to do, while this was happening we got the other actors to run lines and we set up the camera equipment. We decided to take the crane as we hadn't used it many times before and wanted to add some interesting shots into the video. In the end we decided to open with a crane shot panning up the family as they sat at the table, this was a nice cinematic opening to the video and something that I think made it look very professional. The filming process ran over a little and took longer than I think we all expected, this is because we had to capture everyone's dialogue from a few angles to give us lots of options in the editing room. The process may have seemed tedious but it was completely necessary in order to make a good video, I think part of the reason it took longer than expected to film was because of how dialogue heavy the script was, it took a few takes for people to nail there lines but everyone did a great job in terms of performance. We wrapped filming that afternoon and headed back to base. The next day I came in to edit the project so that it was ready for the equality and diversity competition. As project manager and director I was in charge of organising the shoot as well as giving direction to the actors and working closely with Matty to decide on shots and angles.
We entered the video into the competition with the intention of winning the £150 prize and that's exactly what we did. We came in first place and the college were really impressed with the quality of our video, since then we have been invited to present the video at Teesside University as part of the equality and diversity programme. Myself and the team where very proud to have won the competition as it meant all of the hard work we had put in on the video was rewarded.
No comments:
Post a Comment