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Shooting with Elizabeth

Today we shot with Elizabeth, which meant that at 4am I woke up and went to meet Alice, Bradley, and Izzie (Zitni couldn’t make it) to shoot the first interview for our documentary: SHE DRIVES.

After reviewing the questions on the train there, and checking my camera settings, I went to check the settings on Zitni’s camera, which Izzie would be operating for the day, to ensure that all the camera settings could be set to be the same. This proved to be an issue, as the camera was a different brand and functioned completely differently to my dslr. As such, we struggled to find all the settings to make the two cameras completely the same, and eventually just adjusted the setting to make as close as possible, before giving up and using Izzie’s camera for secondary footage. The original plan was to shoot a close up and mid shot using the two cameras, however, we had functionality issues with Izzie’s camera, which meant the interview had to be shot on my camera alone. Reviewing the footage, this worked out just fine and indeed saves annoying colour correction issues later.

On the way there, we set up Rohan’s camera mount, sticking it to the side of train, and got some stunning shots of the countryside.

Throughout the interview, Bradley handled sound recording, Alice was key interviewer (with me, and sometimes Bradley, chiming in when we felt certain answers needed to be explored further), and I was handling the camera. This seemed to be a good setup. We had to stop the interview mid-way through the shoot b-roll as we only had the taxi for a limited time, but this worked out well as Alice and I we were able to confer on which questions and topics to push further and revisit for the second part of the interview before going back in and finishing.

As we only had the one taxi, and contrary to what we expected, the taxi rank was more like a house, the shots we were able to get were limited, however I believe we covered the necessary amount of ground with shots of the building, the town, Elizabeth herself, and both exterior and interior shots of the car in motion.

We finished the day with a pie and a slushy after being driven back to the train station by Elizabeth, all in all a very successful trip.

Now its time for me to edit the footage into a rough cut of the first interview!