We have a finished webisode! Or at least half a webisode, but a finished half. I didn’t help out with any of the editing so had no idea what it was going to look like, but I think they (editors) did a great job. Apparently, there were some issues that stemmed from problems in filing and one of the actors looking into the camera (whether intentional or unintentional, I don’t know). They managed to cover that all up though, as I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. So, on Tuesday in class, we got to show the writers. Overall, they liked it. I don’t recall an overwhelming response in either direction but I didn’t expect that it would illicit any extreme reaction because it was just our first go after all.
We got some feedback from them, mostly surrounding the actors. It wasn’t all coherent, some initially said they liked the casting but then later they said that they didn’t like the actor of Duncan, who wasn’t energetic enough. Maybe they meant the actors looked right but needed more direction in the acting. We also got some more trivial (but still important) criticism like needing to change Duncan’s costume/hair. They really liked Arabella.
We mostly agreed with their feedback. I think we’re still trying to settle the dynamic within our collaboration, and determine the extent to which the writers can give feedback that we have to take on board. After all, it is our interpretation of their script. Smaller details that weren’t even mentioned in the script don’t necessarily need to be followed.
As we have the half way point presentations this Friday, we started talking about how we are going to work going ahead (a necessary step regardless of the presentation). While I was under the impression that the whole class was going to split into three groups, i.e. we would have limited choice in the matter of becoming smaller groups, apparently this wasn’t the case. The other group was determined to remain as one group, which is fair enough, but it left us with the choice of whether we wanted to split into separate groups or just smaller production teams or not at all.
Prior to this class I had apprehension about separating our group (particular in relation to merging with the other group) but thought it would be ideal to work in smaller groups to ensure everyone had an opportunity to try out different roles, and no one was left with a small or short job. In the end, I think this will not be an issue, even though we are remaining as one large group. We are going to break the pre/production and post production apart, and so there will be fewer people present during production and more tasks per person. We are going to first shoot the remainder of the pilot script which we abridged, and then move onto the second episode. After learning a lot through the shooting of the first episode, we are going to aim to make the second episode as completely polished as possible.