The list of questions I have suggested.

How did you get started?
– What path did you take from there?

When starting out in the field, did you have mentors or did just, figuratively speaking, learnt to swim on the job?

When you have an idea, or a lead for a doco, what’s the process to see it happen?

Most difficult part of your job

Most exciting part of your job

Do you struggle to tell an unbiased story / is there such thing as a truly unbiased documentary?

• Richard with Ecco Homo about your friend and interviewing friends

 

When creating a documentary, is being passionate about the topic / subject important?
– Is there a struggle between creating documentaries that you are passionate about and what there is economical and corporate pressure for you to make?
– Examples of both / either

 

 

What is one thing you shouldn’t do when creating a documentary.

 

If you could give one piece of advise to someone wanted to get into documentary what would it be?

 

What piece of work are most proud of?

• Why?

 

Do you go out and find topic and projects to work on, or do you get people approaching you saying ‘I have this idea, help me make it.’

The TV seminar was much more inline with how we want to our seminar to run. It was a very coherent seminar that was quite on the mark with what the audience wanted to hear about the industry. The major thing that stood out to us was the lack of female representation in the seminar. We found it extremely interesting that all of the guests were male and so was the host. Christina pointed out to us, after the seminar in our tute, that if we end up having an all male panel, we should at least have a female host, which we are planning on having. I have passed on the names of some potential female guests that Christina suggested to Tom for him to contact. I made a list of things that MUST get done over the next week and posted it on the group. This was the list:

 

– finalise guests
– make a social media event
– finalise food and drinks
– promo ad
– poster
– draw up a stage set up
– research guests
– write questions

 

My job on this list is to finalise the questions, I will post the questions I have written on the Facebook page later today for feedback and suggestions.

 

One of the other major things we took from the TV seminar is making sure that the audience have an opportunity to ask questions, this is why we thought of including a roaming mic to allow the audience to ask questions at any time. So far the only guest we have confirmed is Richard Lowenstein, and I have begun to research him to be able to write specific questions for him, however, we still don’t have the other guests confirmed so I am finding it hard to write any more specific questions.

The social media seminar was interesting today! I was good to get an idea of how things are going to run and also was good to get an idea of what works well and what does not. When we met after the seminar, I ran the group meeting and we decided a few things. For example we thought the way that the social media seminar was run was a bit disjointed and off topic. We want our seminar to be run in as an open forum discussion with the questions based more around the theme of documentary and what it is actually like working in the industry than the guests personal lives. This seminar has given a lot to go off to start writing the questions for the seminar and figuring out to run the seminar and get the best out of our guests. In our meeting I took minutes of what was said and what everyone said they would do in order to be able to post on the Facebook group and make sure everyone knows what needs to be done and by when. I posted on the group a list of things that needs to be done by next week, this consisting of making a plan for the promo, making a plan for the video promo, making a list of ideas for the food and actual set up of the seminar. The thing that I need to get onto is begin to make a plan of how the seminar is going to run and what questions we are going to ask. The major thing we are focusing on now is getting the guests on board with the seminar. We have given Tom, who is contacting the potential guests; a list of people to contact who we think would be great to have on the panel. We think it would be great to have a mixture of the people on the panel, for example we do not want 3 directors.

After deciding on the title ‘The Wolf, the Crossroads, and Reaching Grandma’s House,’ I sent it into the steering committee last week. However this week in the lecture, the steering committee told us that it didn’t make enough sense and that we had to change it. So in our tute time with Christina we brainstormed other names and came up with the theme, ‘Fear and Loathing in Documentary.’ We thought that this was a theme that is both in line with the epic adventure theme as well as being a great theme for our overall seminar set up and publicity. I have sent the new name into the steering committee and hopefully this time they will like it!! In this week’s tute we also decided on specific roles we would all do to get the organization for the seminar started. We split up into groups for the poster, video promo and filming the seminar, set up and food, contacting and sourcing the guests and social media. My specific roles are to be the group leader, make sure everything is on track and keep in contact with the steering committee, and to be the MC of the actual seminar interviewing the guests and mediating the seminar, this also includes writing the questions and planning how the seminar will run. It will be interesting seeing the first seminar to get an idea of how they will run and to get a better idea of what the students actually want to find out from the seminars.