Week 12: Thursday’s Tutorial

After meeting skaters, Patience and Bella, during Monday’s film session, I reached out to both girls via Instagram direct message and organised to record an interview with them during today’s tutorial. We experienced many setbacks when trying to organise a time that accommodated for both the girls and my group’s schedules, wherein the girls would not arrive at all on the agreed meet-up times, or we would receive a cancellation last minute. Fast forward to today’s tutorial and we were finally able to go through with out interview in which the girls ended up being such co-operative and energetic subjects for our documentary. We did need to brief them on the kinds of questions we would be asking, telling them that we weren’t simply focusing on girl skaters in Melbourne, but also how  being a girl skater in Riverslide, in particular has, helped shape their identity and associations with the neighbourhood. This required guiding them on how to respond to questions such as telling them to structure their responses as full sentences, for example, “Hi, my name is X and I’m from Y”. When we explained this to the two girls, they were able to answer our questions without anymore direction or guidance from us.

After we had finished filming their interview we then used that time to record some footage for our b-roll collection. Patience had recently returned home from hospital after recovering from an extensive surgery to treat a bottle that had left her scalp split open. As you can imagine, this impacted her ability to skate as she was under doctor’s order to not engage in any physical activity that may be considered strenuous. With this in mind, we made sure to only have Patience cruising on the board – away from the skatepark – so as to decrease any risk of her getting hurt or flustered by the other skaters.