This week we were mindful to keep in mind what we discussed last week with Robin; so on Monday, after briefing Lydia, we went out to shoot. We shot a variety of different things, such as nature, the cars driving on swans ton street, people talking on the street etc. We did this because we want to intersperse our main footage with footage of mundane life. Life that just passes you by, things you don’t notice. In putting this in juxtaposition with the main footage of people living in the moment, it would intensify the message we are trying to get across to the audience. Whilst we were shooting we talked further about our project and what it meant to us. We discussed how living in the moment is something you acquire as you get older, how the social anxieties we face have made it tougher for us to live in the moment yet it is not a bad thing to make a conscious effort to live in the moment. Not only are the 3 of us massive talkers, I think it is necessary for us to talk about our project even as we go along with it, because it is such an intangible thing we are trying to capture, that the more we discuss it and get a better idea of what we are trying to say – the better the film will be.
The concept of living in the moment is extremely different for everyone, if you are an introvert it may consist of staying at home, reading a book or being by yourself when you feel the most in the moment. If you are an extrovert it might be in social situations like hanging out with your friends or a night out in the city. Lydia, Tim and my idea of living in the moment consists largely or forgetting about social anxieties and pressures and just being. We discussed how the times we’ve felt most ‘in the moment’ are when those worries melt away.
On Wednesday the rest of the class went with the normally scheduled routine, but we went to the edit suites to record some of our thoughts about the idea of ‘living in the moment’ that we could possibly use as voice over for our film. We sat down in a small circle with the mic in between us and we talked for around an hour – about everything and anything. We were all in a bit of an odd, depleted mood and we went extremely deep into our conversation. We stayed on track for the first half hour but then it turned into an odd therapy session for all of us by the end of it. We realised we’d gone off track and that that is what you run the risk of when you do a film like ours. It is harder to stay on track when the track lines aren’t necessarily one straight line. Robin told us that it is important to talk and hash out our ideas yet we really need to be conscious of staying on topic and staying focused. When we went back to check the audio we realised that we hadn’t even set up the mic properly and we hadn’t recorded a word of what we had said, even the usable parts. Which, we came to the conclusion, wasn’t that great anyway. We have rescheduled a different time in order to record our thoughts, and we have agreed that we’re going to do it with a different attitude, a more upbeat one was necessary.
Although we got slightly off track for a bit there, I still feel very good about the project, the idea and the group of people I’m making it with. I can’t rave enough about both Lydia and Tim as filmmakers, students, creators and as friends. I’m pretty lucky.
