Today we presented our rough cut of She Drives to the class, and overall I’m pretty happy with how it went. Here are the notes I (shoddily) jotted down from our feedback session:

• topic is topical — female centric stories in the workplace, tick
• shot beautifully — shows the world she lives in
• include more of her active day to day problems, how she deals with things?
• more anecdotal specific stories of how things have changed in the last 30 years?
• needs a hook — part where she says a taxi driver is a psychologist, doctor etc. should go at the front, then move into chronological beginning of the story

This is the first studio of my entire degree where the rough cut feedback we received is detailed, specific and extremely useful. Identifying structural issues (and proposing fixes for them) is so valuable, and I’m really glad that we were able to get the feedback we did because the final result will be much better for it. Once we have our second interview we’ll hopefully be able to slot everything together pretty quickly based on the above.

We still have a lot of work to do from here, because Shebah aren’t really cooperating as we hoped they would. We’re currently discussing whether we should just scrap that part of the story and just go with the taxi and Uber drivers, which will necessitate a big shift in the central question of our film, but I think in the interest of delivering a cohesive final product it will save us a lot of time and effort not to have to worry about wrangling a Shebah driver.