My research project took a rather windy path to end up where it is now. Of course as we had discussed in class, I had hoped to be interviewing a handful of filmmakers on their experiences with camera coverage – but in large part due to my own poor planning, I did fail to get a significant number of responses. I sent out my first messages a couple weeks ago now, but as I worked down the list quite a lot of those messages only ended up getting sent in the last week or so, which probably isn’t really enough time to get the kind of response I was hoping for.
Fortunately for me though, Roger Deakins was as forthcoming with his experiences and wisdom on the various topics we’ve looked at through the semester – so I did at least have some ‘original’ material to work with for the assignment. Of course we did discuss what I would do if this exact situation came about, so I was not unprepared for a lack of responses. In the end the fact that I researched each of my possible interviewees so thoroughly meant that even without a response from them, I had more than enough content to talk about. By the nature of the way I had conceived this project, it is quite scattered in the kinds of topics it covers – and honestly any single one of them would probably have been large enough of a scope to complete the entire research project on them alone. I did really get dragged in a lot of directions with every related quote I found from the filmmakers. I’d find them speaking about something related to our studio and then end up spending a day or more just looking at what other people had said about that specific thing. Honestly that part of this assignment was enough to justify all the work alone – I really did get a lot out of this process.
My only regret really is that some of the questions I came in with are still somewhat unanswered for me – I would have loved the opportunity to ask filmmakers about the very specific choices they’ve made in their films. Why that shot? Why place it there in the edit? These sorts of questions are hard to answer from strict research. But as I’ve written in the conclusion to the research component of this assignment, there’s every chance some of those questions that I only asked in the last couple of weeks will begin to get answered in the coming days and weeks.