This week we visited the Living Museum of the West for the first time, which was definitely a cool experience. I think that I learnt more about the museum and its goals through the volunteers explaining it more so than actually looking through the museum. The amount of content that is stored in the museum is endless, the amount of stories that can be told was huge, which did make me feel quite overwhelmed, but also inspired.

This week on Friday we got into groups and did some camera exercises. I had used this camera before when studying screen and media production, so was relatively familiar, but also forgot where a lot of buttons were! One big mistake our group made, which I will not be making again, was in shot reverse shots. We filmed a shot of two people talking from the side, then an over the shoulder, then over the other persons shoulder. What we did wrong was place the person looking away from the camera on the same side each time. I’m pretty sure this is clear, but I’m going to use an example just to make sure! 

So instead of doing this, we accidentally placed the blurred shoulder on the right both times. Which wrecked the illusion of the two people talking to each other.

Last week in class, one of the girls presented something interesting that she had watched recently which was ‘Gringo: The Dangerous life of John McAfee’. I thought it sounded very interesting so I went home and watched it almost straight away. What was most interesting about it was first and foremost, the story. But technically what was very interesting about it was the fact that the main character of the story, John McAfee, was not part of the documentary, he had not been interviewed for this film, even though it was based around his life. The story relied a lot on emails the documentary maker had had with John and interviews with people that were involved in his life one way or another. So this included interview lots of different people from different phases in his life like, body guards, friends, policemen, people he employed and so on. The documentary also included quite a few clips of found footage and home footage of John, which made it a bit easier to create an image of what this man was actually like.

I think something I can take from this documentary into this class is the technique of creating a documentary without you having your own direct interview with the subject. The volunteers suggested to us to use interviews that they had on tape to create content. Which is similar to this documentary, in which you as the director isn’t directly in contact with the subject, but still has enough information to create a short film.