I hope our screenings engaged the audience using filmmaking techniques to entertain and draw in viewers, while also communicating concerns of the studio such as social issues, the impact of documentary films on peoples’ understanding of the world and promoting campaigns to the audience which they will hopefully be able to engage with. A key concern of the studio was using documentaries to create change, and our films promoted change in peoples’ behaviour and the way they think about a range of different social issues.
If we continued this project and made it into a full film I would obviously have liked to keep trying to get footage of different animals and not just pigeons/birds, with a larger budget and crew and more time to work with we could have travelled further and tried a lot more different techniques to combat weather and filming conditions. Another thing I would have liked to potentially change was the editing, as we were all happy with how it turned out but we didn’t have much time to play with different edits and be more creative with that side of the project- I personally would have liked to have been more involved with creative audio editing because my job was sound for the project, but in the end there were just too many time constraints.
My favourite of the films from our studio were ‘Where are all the queers’ and ‘Leftovers to landfill’ as they both provided really interesting insights into how small changes in our behaviour can make a positive change, but covering very different topics (Supporting queer venues VS fighting food waste). What I liked specifically is that without seeming too ‘preachy’ they communicated exactly what changes someone could make to help with the issues they discussed. I also think the other films our studio made were good at this but these two were the ones that I was most drawn to personally.
Another studio I have engaged with is the ‘and Scene’ media festival, I was really interested in this because last semester we organised our screenings in our studios ourselves and everyone collaboratively was given jobs to do. I enjoyed helping organise the screenings so was curious what a whole studio surrounding that would be like, and the examples of organisation and planning posted by students in this studio such as discord channels and run sheets were quite impressive and gave me ideas of how to better organise my own larger projects in the future. I think a key idea this studio communicated was the amount of work behind the scenes goes into running a big project such as this smoothly.