Week 15

This was the last week of for the FST 495 class, and today was our last meeting (until the final, of course). There is still so much work to be done. Emily Kaitlyn and I have both been so busy with the end of the semester and work that we have not met about crowdsourcing. I'm hoping to be able to actually launch that for our festival entry fees no later than next Monday, since we're already behind. Whatever we can't afford to submit to this season, we can always try next year. Then we can definitely submit to the earlybird deadlines.

I am really happy with our project. I think it came together really well, and it's a project I'll be proud to put in my portfolio. I've learned a lot this semester about so many things, from recording sound to making an organized, readable, detailed budget and schedule. I'll be able to take these skills with me in whatever I decide to pursue in the future. I can foresee myself making schedules and budgets quite a bit in the future.

Visions5 Response

Visions was probably one of the best things I could have ever done. I actually can't even believe I am writing a response to it, because it is over now and I never get to do it again.

The best part for me was mingling and networking with all the filmmakers and scholars. I got to know people that I would never have met otherwise, and I now know so many different people in so many different cities that it's hard to keep track. I enjoyed the films and presentations a lot; they were so insightful and innovative. We honestly had a lot of innovative films and ideas this year, I am so impressed by everyone.

I also learned so much about putting together a film festival in general. This is now something that I can look into for applying to future jobs that I would never have considered otherwise. I got to put my problem-solving skills and time management skills to the test, and I proved to myself and I think a lot of other people that I can handle stress and pressure.

I would never trade this experience for the world. I am so glad I got to be involved with this festival exactly when I did in my career as a student and filmmaker.

Week 14

Last Monday, we had our last interview and presented our Marketing and Distribution plan.

I think our presentation went pretty well. I am proud of a lot of the work I did. That is certainly not the end though, this is now time for me to go out and apply that in the real world for our film. I am working on crowdsourcing and the new website this week with Emily Kaitlyn. I would like the website and a trailer to be ready for our IndieGogo page. I think that will help market us and make people more interested in seeing a final product and help us.

This Monday, we presented our rough cut with image lock. I thought it looked pretty good, and I'm excited to see what happens with Emily Kaitlyn's next cut.

Week 13

This week I did the most work I have for this project to date. I put together most of the Marketing and Distribution plan. I slaved away at my schedule and budget for about five hours total, doing research and making everything look pretty. It was very difficult to do the website, so I trashed it and decided to start over. That's what I'll be working on next week.

We also have an interview for tomorrow. It will be our last one, which is exciting and also kind of strange. The project is wrapping up now.

I will be working on our crowdsourcing in the next week or two as well. I'm nervous for this week since it's Visions week, but I will try to get on all my projects as early as possible.

Week 12

This week was Easter so I didn't do a ton of work for this class. I did my group evaluations and coordinated some details of our last shoot, which will be next Monday, April 13. Otherwise, I had a lighter load.

I honestly enjoyed our rough cut today. It looked a lot like what I imagined it would, which made me excited because I knew for sure today that we are all on the same page. Before I felt 97% sure, and now I am 100% sure. There were obviously a lot of issues, but I was definitely pleased with it. I am excited to see the rest of it.

This week will be finalizing the marketing and distribution plan for me. I certainly have my work cut out for me!

Week 11

This week was very busy. Finally!

I had to coordinate equipment requests for Monday's shoot, then we shot for six hours Monday night. We got nervous for a bit because we originally planned on shooting four interviews, then two people cancelled on us. We squeezed one more person in at the last second, so we still got through three interviews. As we were filming, I could see the parts of each interview that would work perfectly as clips in our movie. It was also interesting doing that many in one night because every one of them was so wildly different from each other interview, and watching them back to back like we did was just really exciting. It does make me more nervous for editing, though. It is definitely going to be difficult to tie some of this together. But I love the style of interview we're doing; it is very unorthodox. More conversation amongst people, less formal. That's also what makes them all so different from each other.

I have already sent in an equipment request for what will hopefully be our last shoot, which is April 13. We will be operating without Aly for this one, but we pulled in a friend, Luqi, to help last night operate our second camera and she is such a superstar. She's going to operate camera for us on the 13th, so I'm not as nervous as I might have been if circumstances were any different.

Otherwise, I am continuing researching festivals and crowdsourcing options.

Week 10

This week we started to schedule a shoot, but when I put in the equipment request we ended up not getting the lights we wanted. Apparently, this is that time in the semester in which all the 495 classes are filming, so it was a little more tricky than it has been to coordinate between Emily Kaitlyn and Aaron, the current equipment room guy. We ended up rescheduling for another week, so now we are filming next Monday night. We are trying to film four people that night, which will hopefully be it for us and we can focus on editing.

We are confirmed to interview Lisa, a massage therapist Emily Kaitlyn and I work with; Ally Gold; Zack, a friend of Emily Kaitlyn's; and Aubrey, another of Emily Kaitlyn's friends.

I am working on looking up festivals on my own and I have been talking to Emily Kaitlyn about the one's she already knows about that she would like to submit to. I will be putting together a spreadsheet and putting it in the drive this week with all of my information for those.

I have also plugged in everything we will be doing into the calendar for the next two weeks, including equipment, editing, and the interviews.

We are also officially underway with a score and a poster! I'm loving how much this project is really coming together!

Week 9

To be completely honest, this week, I did no work for this class. I was out of town the whole week for spring break. We will pick up again with the interviews this week. I think we are looking at doing two or three interviews on Monday when we don't have class and maybe wrapping up the project and sending it all to post. But we haven't decided on that fully.

Week 8

This week I really didn't do much work for this project at all. We didn't have anyone to film this week, so Emily Kaitlyn and Aly spent time editing. That also means I did nothing about an equipment request.

The only real update is that we finally landed on a [possibly temporary] title for the film! Memoirs in Symphony. Emily Kaitlyn really likes it, and so do I.

My next project is to start researching film festivals we can submit our film to. I have begun the basics of basic searching, but once I actually start I will make a spreadsheet and upload it to the google drive.

But for now, happy spring break!

Week 7

This week, I didn't do very much work as producer since we didn't do any interviews. Emily Kaitlyn and Aly spent some time in the lab working on our sample clip. We have found a few other people to interview, so that will be most likely after spring break.

I thought the sample clip this week turned out really well. It felt raw and emotional, and I really thought it brought out more of the essence of what we're going to do with the project. I knew I had a reason to be excited about our last two interviews. Every week, I become more anxious to see the final product of our work. I think it's starting to come together quite nicely.

I also really enjoy the side effect of being in a small group that now I have one more skill I can add to my repertoire: if any of my friends ever ask around about someone to run sound for them on a shoot, I will feel confident enough in my abilities after this semester to say I could do it. I think its important to be able to do a lot of things on a set, especially in such a tight knit community like Wilmington.

Week 6

This week, we showed our sample clip in class and conducted two more interviews. At this point, even just one week later, I think our sample clip doesn't look much like what our final film is going to look like at all. But I expected the film to look different every time we presented anyway.

The interviews we filmed this morning were some of the best so far aesthetically. We have finally settled on a visual style for the film, so the interviews with Kristi (one of my friends) and Felix (Emily Kait's former boss) today were much easier to set up and get through. We had a lot of fun playing with getting different shots from different angles, and I know Emily Kait and Aly will have fun piecing them together in the editing lab. Not only did Aly move around the room with one camera, we also had a second static one set up. I'm feeling confident about today's shoot. The only down side is we requested a lot more equipment than we have before, and we are going to need all of what we had today from now on. We had a LOT of stuff.

With all of that said, we have decided we won't be able to use our first two interviews we conducted in a different location. From now on, we will just ask our subjects to come to Emily Kait's house. She likes that that gives her control over the space and the look, because 1) we know how to set up the lights and camera to look good, and 2) we can set up the equipment before the subjects even arrive, instead of invading their space and not knowing for sure if we're going to get what we're hoping for.

Week 5

This week was slow for me as a producer. We had plans to shoot a couple of interviews, but none of our shooting days worked out very well and we ended up canceling them. I put in an equipment request that I also ended up canceling in light of this, which was nice because I would have done all the physical work of carting equipment around for nothing. The only thing we had due in class was a sample clip, and I was not in the editing room for that. I would like to pop in every once in a while and offer suggestions, and we did discuss what we want for the next round of clips, but I did not this past week.

This coming week, we are trying to schedule an interview with my friend Kristi on Sunday evening and Emily Kaitlyn's manager Felix on Monday morning. After that, we have decided to try to get a few women in the film. Emily Kaitlyn is going to work on getting her friend's grandmother to be in it, and we will likely film at her house in Landfall if that works out and if we decide to go for shooting in people's homes. Otherwise, we are just going to shop around for people with interesting or meaningful stories to tell.

We decided Jonathan's was the most valuable interview so far because of the almost tangible emotion he displayed, so that's the kind of content we want to aim for from now on. That way, the emotional arc will be easy to achieve with the final cut. I know feel I know exactly what Emily Kaitlyn wants for the final cut, so I am going to work to find people that will fit her vision.

Week 4

This week, I actually spent quite a few hours doing work for this class. I worked out picking up equipment, I actually picked up equipment (which, this time, was quite a feat, so I decided it deserved it's own mention), and, mostly, I did a lot of the work for Assignment 3.

Even the schedule was difficult. I had to get full schedules from Emily Kaitlyn and Aly, type them into an excel sheet (to really satisfy my anal retentiveness), and plug as many times and events into the calendar as I could. Then I spent about four hours on the budget. I did research into different formats, found pieces of different budgets I like, and plugged them all into one google sheet. Then I reorganized and reorganized and reorganized again until I had it exactly how I wanted it, and since then I've fixed it probably six more times. It took me thirty minutes alone to decide on the colors of all the columns. I keep playing with numbers, trying to make everything as realistic as possible. But overall, I am satisfied with my work. I am going back in tonight or tomorrow morning to fix all the things we talked about in class.

The rest of this week will consist of scheduled interviews for this weekend and getting in the editing lab to prepare for next week.

Week 3

This week was also a little slower than usual, until last night when we finally got another interview scheduled. I organized the interview time with my friend Jonathan, checked out equipment, and got Emily Kait up to speed on his background that I knew of so she could successfully facilitate the interview with relevant questions.

The interview went very smoothly; he was definitely a talker. We covered all kinds of interesting, touching, deep subjects. He was actually the epitome of what we've been trying to cover with this project: he laughed through his funny anecdotes, nearly cried when he talked about his daughter, and was just brimming with charisma that definitely reads on camera. We're going to have great moments to pull from.

I am getting increasingly more excited about this project as we move forward. Every week between conducting interviews and talking about it during class, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me exactly what our final film will look like. I'm very excited about it, and that makes me even more motivated to do as much work as possible to get it done. Even though it is a little ambitious, as EK said during class, I'm feeling pretty confident we will be able to pull it off.

Expert Interview Questions

Jonathan: I have made friends with a guy that works at Trader Joe’s. He is a really interesting and charismatic person, so I thought he’d be a perfect person to get on camera. He is from New York, has been in the military, has a daughter, and is easy to converse with in general.

Questions:

1. Where did you live in New York and what did you do there?
2. Why did you leave?
3. What brought you to Wilmington?
4. Why and when did you start working at Trader Joe’s?
5. What are your short term goals?
6. What are your long term goals?
7. What is your pipe dream, if you have one?
8. What is your daughter (I think he has a daughter) like?
9. What has it been like raising her in today’s society?
10. What is your biggest fear?

Kristi Ray: I made friends with a girl doing a show downtown, and she always had amazing stories to tell about the places she’s lived and the people she’s met. She specifically asked me if she can talk about the cult she was once part of, so of course I said absolutely.

Questions:

1. Where were you when you joined the cult?
2. What was it all about, and what was it like to be part of?
3. How did you break away from it?
4. What was it like to live in Hawaii?
5. Tell me the story about swimming with the dolphins. What did that feel like?
6. What was your life in New York like?
7. What is the most interesting story you have from living in NY?
8. What is the best character you’ve ever played?
9. What is your favorite project, film or stage, you’ve been part of?
10. What is your biggest fear?

Week 2

This week's updates are a little scarce. We filmed last Monday (1/19), and we have begun scheduling our next round of interviews. Up next are: Aly's rugby teammates, Emily Kait's former boss Felix and former coworker Taylor. I will be in contact with them this week to set up those days. I have requested equipment, and I will be picking that up this Friday. We will film Aly's teammates after their match on Saturday afternoon. We will also schedule some interviews for next Monday evening and the next Sunday. After conferring with the next round of interviewees, we will lock down a schedule.

I am also planning on organizing the google drive once and for all this week. I will post all the interviews, equipment pick up and drop off times, etc on the google calendar as well so we can all have access to all the information.

Week 1

Today, we shot our first two interviews and some B-roll. So my work this week included finding a few subjects we could work with today, checking out equipment, and having them fill out forms.

When I produced a documentary last year for 302, it seemed like it took forever for us to even have a concept and an idea of what we wanted the film to look like, and even at the end of the semester the director was still unsure. This group, and being in a higher level class in general, is a breath of fresh air comparatively. I'm really glad to have Emily Kait as the director because she's excited about this project and ready to get to work immediately. She is also great at having conversations with her subjects. Watching her today was pretty inspiring.

Our shoot today went very smoothly. I'm hoping this is a good omen for the rest of the semester and not a false beginning. We also have three more people who have agreed to do interviews, so I will spend this week organizing those and finding the next round of people.

I will be recording sound on set, which is something I've never done before. Thank the Lord for Aly. She knows how to work all the equipment we had today, and she brought her own camera. It could have gone badly without her.

I'm really looking forward to working on this project.