I can definitely say that – on the whole – PB3 was a lot stronger than PB2 for me. I think I can attribute this to several things – namely allowing myself more time to get this done; better resources at hand; and having a longer runtime to work with. You can convey so much more about a person in three minutes than you can in one minute.

I would say the most successful aspect of my film is perhaps the ability I have to draw deep conversation out of my mother, Christine. While she is quite an open and honest person in general, she and I have a very close bond; so I think I made a good choice in selecting her as my subject, as I felt like I could ask revealing questions without the fear of coming across as intrusive. The flip side of this was that it was hard to watch her become emotional when talking about her father – obviously the first instinct is to go and comfort her – so to just sit there and let her continue on was probably more difficult than it would have been with someone I didn’t know as well.

Another difficulty I found with the shooting of my film was the sound. Foolishly, I decided against hiring a Zoom microphone; and didn’t utilise the lapel mic with the HC50 cameras, instead opting to rely solely on the mounted shotgun mic. While this picked up a lot of sound, I had to go back into Audition with the sound file and try to regulate the sound level throughout. This left me with large amounts of noise, which I tried to reduce with the DeNoiser effect in Premiere. While this removed some noise from the piece, it failed to remove noise at other parts, which left me with fairly uneven sounding interview clips.

In terms of key discoveries I made in terms of creative possibilities, I found that setting up a second camera to shoot the interview from afar actually really helped me in several regards. First of all, it gives an interesting second framing on the subject, which can break up the monotony of a single angle. It also helps when cutting together sections of interview, as the ‘cut’ is not as obvious when one moves between the two angles at the cut. I also found it was really good to just ask Christine about her day-to-day life – I found at this point she started giving more information that could be used to paint a portrait of her, and this actually set up the second day of shooting at her farm; which I had not considered including pre-interview.

As a result, what I learnt overall is that one should be prepared for new ideas to come halfway through projects, and so it helps to set aside more time than believed “necessary” for shooting, just in case new ideas create a need to shoot more footage that “fleshes out” the new angle.