I’m glad we did a shoot with everyone in the class having a unique role assigned to them. Before this we’d had only small groups of below 10, but having around 15 people made it a completely different experience. Even though I was a lowly extra, it was super informative to watch everyone work in their own roles – having people to focus on continuity, a 2nd AD, camera assistant, these were all roles we didn’t usually have the luxury of.

In a way I’m glad that I didn’t really have a pivotal role, because I was able to observe what was going on. I feel like if I was the AD or camera operator, I would have been too busy trying to do my role that I wouldn’t have been able to get a scope of how everyone was running. But, as it was, since I was pretty much irrelevant for most of the shoot, I busied myself with taking notes on the rushes we got and watching how the different departments interacted.

In our smaller crews, we’d always been essentially one team working together, but when you get departments of 3 or so people each the become separate sub-teams, so that you don’t have 6 people working together on one scene but 2 people working on sound, 3 on the camera, the director working with the actors and the AD trying to get them to all co-ordinate.

Mainly it was a very good insight. I trust Robin in his saying that the problems we faced were representative of the everyday problems on a real shoot. I was really glad to have his input on the shoot, because usually we’ll be left to our own devices and no one is experienced enough to deal with the issues that arise.