So, we shot our pilot episode and it was an interesting experience to say the least. I was in the role of being a co-director with Ben, but I feel that I didn’t end up doing much directing. The entire process was rushed and convoluted; an example of when varying levels of experience are thrown together and everyone wanting to act as the director. But let’s go back to the beginning in order to show how I’ve come to that conclusion.

The shoot was thrown together incredibly quickly, ideally I would’ve liked to have had at least a week of pre-production, but we didn’t get anywhere near that amount of time for preparation. It came down to the fact that we had mid-semester break on the horizon and we had to rush to be finished in time for the studio presentation. So, we were sort of set up for disappointment, because no one particularly wanted to film during their mid-semester break. So unlike the other group, who had a week of planning and blocking out their pilot, we threw ourselves in. I was unable to attend the class where this decision was made (as I have gotten the flu four times this year now, because I live with someone who works in a germy pharmacy) and if I was I would’ve urged the group to film during the break, which we ended up having to do anyway. But, that’s neither here nor there, instead I was tasked to write a shot list despite the fact that we had no location, so the shot list was redundant as it couldn’t possibly account for the nuances of every location. Despite this I made one, I wanted to capitalise on the back and fourth witty dialogue that Anthony’s script contains by having a lot of mid-shot and close-up cuts between characters.

We arrived in building 9 on the day of filming, where we thought might have a good location to shoot at and the location suggested just was not ideal at all, it wasn’t what I had in mind while writing the shot list and the tables and chairs and general layout didn’t feel like an office. The lighting was very bright and overbearing and there was noise humming throughout the room. That’s not even getting to the fact that the room had no door and so noise from people talking in the hallways disrupted filming considerably. We quickly blocked the scene and set up, but we struggled with people arriving late so we were not as time efficient as I would have liked.

During the shoot I felt very unorganised, because it felt like everything I had planned was turned upside down, and because Ben had to act as well as direct most of the responsibility fell on me. Part of my difficulty was that everyone wasn’t sticking to their assigned roles so some people were trying to change the camera shots and blocking that was pre-planned or just not doing their roles. So, I found that I had to do a lot of the camera work when others weren’t doing it despite being assigned to it. Because people were constantly suggesting different ways of filming the scene it made it feel like it wasn’t Ben or my own vision, so I got frustrated and ended up asking their opinion on things and they would respond by saying that it’s my vision, despite the fact that they were trying to tell me how to do everything previously. We eventually just had to split the filming into two days and come back during the mid-semester break. The benefit of this was that we were doing the meeting room scene, so we changed locations and less people were able to attend so the set wasn’t as chaotic. Ben and I blocked the scene in the room we planned to shoot in, but our group was unable to get the trolley down to that room, so we had to move to another room. In this we see the biggest problem with this shoot – the lack of an organised location, which was detrimental to the rest of the shoot and is our primary goal to fix for the rest of our web series going forward.

I was the only one who brought a hard-drive to copy the footage onto and because I was going away for part of the mid-semester break, I was unable to get the footage to everyone, despite trying to upload it at home and coming into RMIT well, the footage was just too large for the internet connection. This disrupted editing and I’ve urged others to bring a storage device to future shoots. Especially those who are assigned as the editors as it’s their priority to get the footage as soon as possible. Eventually the editors were able to put the footage together, but there were missing audio clips where we had forgotten to record sound or it was corrupted. This just shows the importance of keeping camera and audio logs for the editors so we are not in this position again and also marking the takes as opposed to just clapping.

Despite what my group said in the presentation, I don’t think the finished product was as bad as they said. It was well acted and I thought I worked well instructing the actors in how they should act and while there are some issues with eye line and lighting, these things will be fixed if we organise the shoot better and leave longer amounts of time for set up and not rush through essential aspects like lighting setups and shot composition. I think we have a good group of people and now that we’ve assigned roles we know what we have to stick to. I think one of the most integral messages I have learned and would pass on through reflecting on filming the pilot, is that everyone needs to stay in their lanes and not try to do other peoples role, because if you are doing your job to 100% capacity then you shouldn’t have time to do someone else’s.

The following is a link to our pilot, the sound is bad, the camera angles have issues and the lighting is janky, but I’m proud that we were able to pull anything together with only three days of prep and actors who were actually just media students. It’s not a bad example of student work and I think it’s actually decent content when you look past the production quality. So feast your eyes on this (some would say really) bad boy.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxtoyZn7uOtrbFAta1c4UUxvMEU