YMCA Update ...National Conference Speech

Just checked my e-mails and I have recieved an audio recording of our film screening at the YMCA National Conference, from one of the organisers of the event. I have asked for the video recording of this also.

YMCA Update

Met up with Jill Robinson today from the YMCA Insync Standards to discuss how we are going to take the project on further. We discussed some extra clips to post up on the YMCA website. We have also been asked to put the final film onto DVD and make about 25+ copies to give to all the participants and other YMCA's across the county who want to make use of it.

I suggested we make a DVD label and also a DVD menu to go with it (put our practice to the test!) as it being a real client, and this will also be good practice. A few YMCA's have requested the film also.

However, we will do this after 2 weeks, when all our university deadlines are over and we agreed to meet up again then.

Jill also agreed to write us up a reference for the work we have done.

YMCA England Project Update

Well, we have had a little break after our film screening at the YMCA National Conference. We are now going to meet up with Jill this Monday at 12.00pm to wrap up and discuss what we are going to do further with the project now that the film has been completed. We have now been asked to produce short clips to take from our completed film and make them for the YMCA England website.

Fashion Shoot Day 3 complete... and further progress

We have filmed our final day of interviews for the fashion exhibition last week and it was a long day. We have also captured all the tapes from both cameras (yes all 15 and took 3 days) and it is now ready to be edited.

We have spoken to the three fashion students we are working with and have discussed the way in which they want us to make certain aspects of the film. They will come along when the edit, as they want to gain a little experience in editing.

Today, I will start editing the film and will have a draft version done by next week.

Collaboration with Fashion Students... End of Year Fashion Exhibition...Day.2

Just finished day two of our filming for the Nottingham Trent University Fashion Exhibition. We interviewed a lot of people again today and did a similar thing to the last time. There were no problems, besides one of the lights not working. In all, a good day of shooting and we got some good footage, from both cameras. The third year fashion students end of year exhibition is coming soon, and we have another day of filming this Monday.
Here are some stills from today:

The YMCA National Conference

Maybe, I forgot to mention this earlier on, but when we finished our YMCA Project, they wanted us to screen it at the annual YMCA National Conference (now thats a big deal!). All the editing for this has now been done, and tomorrow is the big day. The conference which is held every year by YMCA England, will take place at the East Midlands Conference Centre (EMCC), at the University of Nottingham.
There will be a few hundred people present at the screening, and yes we have to make a small speech about our film. After a unanimous decision (of course) its me who is going to do the speech. I'm writing up my speech right now, even though I was told something brief, it is rather long.
We will be recording the conference and screening for our portfolio's, so make sure to watch here for the video.

Collaboration with Fashion Students...

Accepted an offer a few weeks ago from fashion students at NTU to help them with a project for their course. We filmed and interviewed about 30 fashion students, using two cameras. We were fortunate as we filmed in a studio where photo shoots take place, therefore most of the lighting was already in place and we were given various backdrops. We have a few more dates set to film some more things. This is all for their end of year fashion exhibition.

Feedback for Notts County Film

So today we showed our films and I believe we got good feedback. Feedback received was that it was a lot better than the previous draft, the interviews interlinked well, the sound worked well where it was used, however could have done without at some points, and the titles sequence and voice-over worked really well.



I believe this was well-deserved feedback, as I spend A LOT of time changing/editing (not being big headed), so getting the good feedback felt good. A group that worked well to achieve a good result.

Meeting for YMCA Proj

Met today with Jill from the YMCA to discuss how we are going to go about editing. We discussed the length and we were also asked to produce short clips (taken from the documentary) that would be put up on the YMCA website (and potential payment may be in place for us to complete this task). Editing will now go on it's way, should be done in a few weeks!!

YMCA Project Video Blog (Liverpool) - 10/02

Video blog for the first part of a project we have done for YMCA England. This took place in the YMCA in Liverpool on the 10th of February 2010.

Link for it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6h6BmsjWs

Notts County Doc update... SVEN RESIGNS (and makes our doc even more interesting!)

Went down to Notts County ground today for some GV shots and footage that could be used as b-roll. Oh yeh, between today and yesterdays interview with John Staplton, Sven Goran Eriksson has resigned as manager from Notts County!

At first we thought that this will make our documentary harder to film, due to all the media attention, and we also had good comments from John about Sven's arrival and how it will serve Notts County well in he future. However, we could incorporate this into our documentary and link this in with the issues of why fans have decreased and the how the change of so many managers over the years have affected the club.

As we were not given permission to film anything within the ground, we got alot of GV shots from all around the ground. As well as this, we got gained alot of good stills also.

Given that there was loads of media attention at the football ground today, we were lucky in gaining an extra interview. We met someone who worked as an accountant for Notts County. Due to all the problems etc the team have been facing recently, he refused wanting to be interviewed. But after a bit of persuasion, he agreed to do a short interview for us, but NOT mentioning anything about the issues of finance and just talking about the club in general. We did get some VERY interesting stories about Notts County from him, but it was a shame we couldn't get them on film as he didn't want to disclose anything on camera.

Whilst filming all around the ground, we also met a VJ (video journalist), who was also there to film the ground, who gave us a good few tips. Me and Chris, asked the reception if we could film in the ground (again, just in case), however we were told by the receptionist that it would be really difficult, as there was alot of media around. He did, however, tell us to come back next week and we may be able to do it.

Notts County Doc update... Interview with John

Today we have filmed an interview with John Staplton, who has been a Notts County fan all of his life. I believe we got alot of footage that will give ease in the editing phase. Ben, our director, wrote down a set of questions, and I believe from them, we got good detailed responses.

Tomorrow, we will be visiting the Notts County stadium to film some GV shots (and obviously much more), the more the better i.e. what I said in my earlier blog that because we will have limited time given by Notts County, and all the group will be coming along, we will use all the equipment we have to get more footage completed.

YMCA Liverpool... Shooting complete

Its 09.15pm and we have just got back from Liverpool.

Two and a half hours on the train damn! Really tired now, but it was a great day. We got alot of footage and some really interesting and very moving interviews. We interviewed four people in total. The interesting thing was that each person had a different story to tell and where they have come from, to how they have bettered themselves by being part of the YMCA organisation. We chose to do the interviews in two separate loacations. We also got some GV shots of the surrounding area of Liverpool YMCA. I was very pleased with the support we got from Jill and Darren from the YMCA.

I have also filmed a video diary for this project, and I will be continuing this for London and Nottingham. Keep an eye out!


Next stop is the London YMCA this Monday the 15th. Looking forward to it, should be good.

YMCA doc update...

All arrangments have been sorted for the days. Both sets of train tickets to Liverpool and London have been recieved to myself. We had a meeting on Wednesday, with Jill, Deborah and the whole group and discussed everything and made final arrangements to be set for filming on the 10th February. Alan just needs to have a look at the pictures Jill has sent and complete risk assessments. We are going to have another meeting to complete the shot list, shot schedule, and other things prior to our filming day. I have contacted Jill for some archive footage that we can include, however she is still in the process of getting hold of that. We will also, after the next meeting, meet John and re-check all the equipment and check that the tie mics are working as they were not previously.

The roles of group members are:

Abdul Seedat - Director and editing and camera assistant
Umar Hussain - Producer, and Sound recording and post production music/effects
Duncan Leigh - Camera/Lighting, and post production visual effects
Alan Vickerstaff - Locations Manager, titles designer, photographer

Notts County Doc update...

We have found a person who will be the key person who drives our story (Pete IronMonger - a relative of the IronMonger, a goalkeeper who played for Notts County in the early 1900's). This person has been a Notts County for a very long time, therefore we will be able investigate Notts County through time in a good way. This is what the theme will be for the documentary - Notts County through the eyes of a long term and dedicated fan. We will show Notts County through the years and how it has development/changed and how this has had an effect on other things like the number of fans and why their popularity has changed and the causes of this. In the meeting today we discussed all of this and identified five points that we will include to make it an interesting narrative.

Trips have been made to the BBC nottingham to get in touch with Colin Slater (Notts County commentator), and the the evening post to get a copyright for some images we want to include in our film. Finally to the Notts County ground to talk to the head of the supporters group. We have now got someone (Iris - Head of the fan club/supporters group) who is now helping us to get interviews with some real dedicated fans who will hopefully, have many stories and views on how the club has changed over the years.

Bogdan: a week on

So, reflecting on our shooting last week, i think it went really well and we all worked great together as a group. I think in accordance to the 'shooting schedule', we did not follow keep up with it at all. I mean right from the start for our first shot, we were behind with our time. But, as we got on we progressed good and finished on time with all the shots we wanted. I think the good aspect we included througout was communication between the crew and knowing what each member of the group expects, as well as a great relationship with the cast. We got good feedback from the actors, and i believe this is a good way to develop ourselves as practitioners. I think it was good getting good and bad feedback from people who are already in the industry and have experiece, as this gives us a more in-depth understanding of real on-set work and how much work is involved.

We are now in the editing stage, and we have made a good start on it already. We have 6 days left for hand-in, and i believe we will have a good finished edit for then.

Long awaited update... presenting BOGDAN!

Okay, so as you can see i haven't updated my blog for like 2 weeks! Its been so damn busy these few weeks. 1st with our assignments and then our productions. Be prepared as theres alot im gonna go through so brace yourselves! So yeh, we've got another film to shoot and this one isn't a practice. We've been given scripts from Jools, which we've re-written in the way in which we want to percieve the story. Well, its been re-written like 3 or 4 times to what we've got it to now. Our story is called 'Bogdan', and is about a Romanian man who is an immigrant to the country and the story basically outlines his struggle with having to deal with the seperation with his family and how he tries to bring them over to the U.K and what issues he faces in the process.

So, last week we got our scripts (through a random dip) and our group was glad to have got the Bogdan script, as we all were more drawn to that script on first impression anyway. The day after, we had a group meeting, discussed through the script, and the group shared ideas on what they thought could be useful in the process of getting a meaning to the script and ideas on how we might approach telling this story in the most effective way possible. Luckily, we have Diana in our group, who is from a Romanian background, so we were given a head start in the background knowledge and how our character Bogdan may appear and what his characteristics may be like. Diana has done a character study on our character 'Bogdan', in which she outlines what our character will be like and what type of clothing would be suitable and what props may be effective with our Romanian character (http://duckieontrent.blogspot.com/2009/11/bogdan-capitan-de-plai.html).

We then discussed everyones roles. The main idea we had was for everyone to try out a different role from the one we had in our previous film. This is turn, would help each of us to understand the other roles more and, in essence, this would be better practice for ourselves in learning new skills. I myself was incharge of all the camera-work in the previous film, however in this film i think i want to discover more of the sound side, as i believe this is my weaker side. Therefore, i have chosen to be incharge of the sound design for Bogdan. As well as this i am the assistant director and assistant producer. I have been reading a book called 'Sound for Film & Telivision' by Tomlinson Holman:

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wBlRtAlKPFsC&dq='Sound+for+Film+%26+Television'+by+Tomlinson+Holman&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=HhMLS83eHZT54AbI3OS3Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false).

This book has helped me develop many interesting ideas, which were are fairly new to me. In the book i learnt about ''Hyper-REAL'' sound and the way in which this works and how sound recorded as natural may not sound 'real' when recorded (in the viewers perspective). Therefore, the technique relies with the sound being exxegarated a little during post-production. We see this in nearly all films, yet it goes un-noticed. This exxageration of sound adds so much effect to what is happening visually. Watch a film next time, and realise how the foley sound effects (e.g. footsteps) are alot louder than they would be in reality (exxageration of reality). I believe sound plays a massive part in a film, yet is is the thing that goes un-noticed the most. I think sound is VERY crucial, as it works with the audience unconsciously (as it can't be seen) yet has a MASSIVE effect with how a story is told. An identical scene played back with different music, can have a completely different meaning and message to an audience.















This is me collecting Foley sounds to include in post-production. In this specific picture i was collecting a sound for footsteps. I was completely caught off-guard :D

An example is in the film Citizen Kane, a scene where the sound can be contrasted with that in the next scene of Kane and his girlfriend in the back seat of his car. In the first scene, the sound is emphasising the seperation of the characters, Whereas, in the second, the sound is very intimate, emphasising the change of scene and moment or even change of emotion between the characters. All in all, i believe sound plays a massive part in directing the viewers attention and witl all the things i have learnt about so far, i am intending to incorporate all these ideas into our next film Bogdan as head of sound. I have written down a long list of sounds for what will be taking place in each of the scenes and i intend to collect these sounds seperately also to 'hype' up in post-production. This will all help me in the process of me learning new ideas and skills.

We then as a group decided on some location for the scenes in the script. We had 2 exterior and 2 interior shots. We had some discussion, and changed our locations around a few times and finally came up with the locations. We will have an exterior shot at behind the university DICe building, an exterior shot at the Forest tram stop, an interior shot in an office, and an interior shot of a house. We went to all the locations with the all equipment and had trial runs, just so we known and are confident that everything is right for the shoot. If any problems occured, we could then solve them on the trial run ready for the shoot. Here are some of the pictures of the locations:

















Oh yeh, and we met the actors we have been given for our film today too. It was a great opportunity go through everything with them and understand their professional perpective on what they thought. We also ran through the script and went through any problems they had and rehearsed each scene until we felt it was ready for us. Both of our actors come mainly from a Drama and theatre background. For example our female actor has been in Heartbeat, Doctors, Casualty, Holby City, Children Of The Crown (Nottingham Playhouse), and has also been in some feature films. Our male actor has been in The Execution Of Damiens, Coronation Street, Holby City, Coke Zero Advert. These are just a small few from a big list of things the actors have done.

We have also got a list written up of all the props that will be included in each scene, but i'll just include that in a seperate post as iv'e written sooo much already! Well i guess thats due to the fact so much has been going on the past 2 weeks. Neway, we are going to film tomorrow, so lets hope all goes well!

Film Production : MALac

So, today we completed filming our MALac storyline. After a veeeeeery long day we finalised and were happy with what we had. The only complications we had were that the actors we got tunred up quiter late. Given the fact we had to rely on them, we didn't really have a choice except chase them up. This consequently affected the lighting we had set up because we already had our lighting up and ready. However, by the time our actors came it got a little dark, therefore we could not go ahead with the lighting we had set-up initially. We then had to re-set the lighting to how we needed, which took up more time than expected. Besides this, our filming went all according to plan. Every memeber of the group did their roles as expected and altogether I think we worked very well as a group. The things we would do different next time is make sure the actors turn up on time and also take out equipment a good few days before to the actual location we are filming and practice and get ideas of how we can any overcome problems that may occur. This will, in result, help us work more quicker and efficiently when we film.

Here are a few photos on the day of filming:



Actors learning the script



Filming the house we had for our establishing shot



Sound guy checking sound levels



In action.. take 2!



Alan taking care of all health and safety measures



A few extras added by the director to add realism



A bit of dirt won't do any harm!











<< And finally, our cover images, but which one to pick? >>

Film Production: Practice Day: MALac

Today, we hired out all equipment that in going to be needed for our actual film. We went to our location and we set them up however we wanted to be set for our set. Here are some pictures showing what we did:



Camera Practice



Setting up lights




Picture of our location



Our cellar location for MALac scene









Minutes for the day:

-Final draft of the script, discussed and agreed upon.

-Studio light and camera rehearsal

-Booking equipment for Tuesday (on location rehearsal) and Wednesday (shoot)

-Health & Safety, Recce sheet completed

Overview - MALac Meeting

Today we were given the groups for our production of the film MALac. We then assigned each member of the group with a role, which they were comfortable with and then had a group vote. I chose to lead camera and assist lighting. After choosing the roles we had a meeting after our seminar and planned how we were going to go about everything to help us be more time-managable and meet all targets, as well as gather ideas from each member of the group.















Minutes for the day:


• A new member has joined the group, who will take up the role of sound recording

• We have got interested actors and actresses who have e-mailed back to take part in our film

• We have sent details and asked the actors to call back

• Completed a schedule for the filming and practice for all roles

• Tuesday at 2pm after lecture we will do a set rehearsal

• Wednesday at 9am we will do a dress rehearsal

• Monday at 9am, lighting and camera practice will be done before filming on Wednesday, by people undertaking these roles

• Script will be finalised on Monday (all changes)

• The risk assessment has been scheduled to be done on Monday as well

• We have had another discussion regarding our location, after having a sound lecture. We then decided a bedroom, but have now gone back to our original idea of the cellar due to sound and lighting purposes

• For all filming we have got permission from the technician to borrow equipment (e.g. camera, lights, mic etc) on specific days, when needed, whether for practice of actual filming