On Monday of week 10, the entire class was booked into work in the editing suites, to consult their team members and go over the material they had already shot or were planning to shoot. At this point in the week, the only real footage we had acquired was Tims friend playing the bass and an audio interview with him. The three of us then had a lengthy chat about the place we thought our film was at and how the idea has evolved since week 8. In the beginning, we believed it was going to be an arthouse film which explored our idea of ‘living in the moment’ with a coherent flow and even a semblance of a plot. It has now evolved into more of a documentary, as we have interviewed many people talking about the concept of ‘living in the moment’. Robin consulted with us during the session to see how we’ve been faring throughout the last two weeks and to see the progress we’d made. He seemed happy with what we’d acquired but urged us to do more, so with that, I mind we all agreed we had to shoot at least one piece of film by the following Monday. Tim had already shot his friend, Lydia decided to shoot her friend and I had a key piece of film to shoot, which was of my baby cousins Nikita and Caprice. One of the key ideas we’re still keeping from the original idea we had was shooting young children just playing and being themselves, and using 1 and 3 and a half-year-olds to do this. The reasoning behind this is because people only really develop a conscious thought and perspective around the age of 4 and we wanted to shoot young children purely living in the moment because we believe that would make the film come full circle – with capturing the pure moment of living in the moment.
On Wednesday we didn’t have class but we decided to meet up anyway and record audio bites for the film. We had attempted to do this last week but we got off track for starters and more importantly, we had not even been recording during our session because we had messed up, though we all agreed it was for the best as the chat we had veered off topic from our film. The chat we had on Wednesday was much more on track and truly just felt better in every way. We delved into our views on living in the moment, the times we’ve felt most in the moment, how things like exercise and playing instruments help you to be in the moment creatively; and also how our social anxieties fade away when we’re with friends we enjoy being with. We were recording our discussion for around an hour, even though we only intended to record for 20 minutes, when we realised that our thought process is very similar and we get taken away with our discussions. This time, it stayed true to the theme, and although we will most likely only use a small percent of it in the final cut, there was definitely some great sound bites there – and general food for thought (Side note: Lydia, Tim and I have realised how much we enjoy dissecting topics and having in-depth discussions, and we are genuinely considering starting up a podcast).
On thursday I travelled an hour out by car to go visit my baby cousins and their parents. My mum agreed to take me (thank goodness) because it is 2 hours by public transport if not more, and lugging that camera equipment around is genuinely back breaking. I had a pretty simple task – just film the girls being themselves, playing with eachother, their mother, toys etc. We dont want it to be ontrived in anyway, we just wanted the girls being themselves. I found the entire process extremely fun and incrediby cute. I found that the younger of the two, Caprice, who is 1 year old, was more intruiging to film as Nikkita, 3, was more aware that I was filming her, or atleast paying her more attention than out of the ordinary. The footage that I got of Caprice was not only visually adorable and pleasing, it captured the moment we as a group wanted to capture; which was blissful ignorance to the world. The whole process took around an hour, so not a long time at all.
All in all I am pleased with how this week turned out, I see healthy progress in our film, which makes me happy.
