I’m behind with blogging! A familiar sensation – if I don’t blog in the moment, the practice can drift.
So I’m picking up again, an hour or so before another meeting with Simon Haynes, my filmmaker and collaborator for this a-n professional development bursary. Our previous session wasn’t committed to ‘paper’ but I have a cunning plan. I’m going to sew two blog posts together. Aha!
I guess my lapse in recording the process from last week was in part due to the fact that we were filming again, in pretty much the same manner as my previous post describes. There’s a limit to how much anxiety over breakages, and the minutiae of filming tea cups you can get over without deviation, hesitation and repetition.
Suffice to say that our second trip to the conservatory for filming threw up the problems of working on a glass surface when there is intense yet intermittent sunlight. This time we worked on a list only basis for our shots, though we needed to be creative problem solvers – improvising fixes when our proposed shots didn’t quite work out in practice. Highlights included anointing Felicia Browne’s 1932 Berlin tea set with actual tea (brewed in a separate tea pot and cooled down to avoid the possibility of heat damage), while the definite low point was the failure of our steam shot. Shhh…though! I’m probably giving too much away.
…Several hours later…
What a fascinating experience looking over our shots proved to be. Although Simon explained that it can be tedious to do so, I can see exactly why it’s important to do this BEFORE getting stuck into the edit. So much of what worked and what didn’t can be gleaned – and it is possible to favourite clips, and even favourite excerpts of clips pre-edit.
Simon took notes while I clicked, to mark clips so that we can summon just favourited footage when it comes to the edit. We have a second round of clips to go through next week. I really get the sense of exactly how much work has to go into even a very short film.
At the moment I really can’t quite see how it will all come together. It was so very interesting (and surprising at times) to see how terrible some of our footage is. But equally how promising the glimmers of what’s good are. There are shots we’ll need to redo – but fortunately they’re not complicated.
Onwards – taking notes as we go.
