Proposal! Personal Project time

I propose to make a mini documentary about the lives of homeless people on the streets of Bath. I would follow the stories of one or two people, delving below the surface to show the real lives and emotions of people that most often go ignored or are scorned simply because of their circumstances. I would like to find a story of the reasons why a person can end up destitute and on the streets struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis, how they are treated and what they go through every day. The purpose of this would be to change perspectives on how we treat or view homeless people, contrasting vox pops of middle-class people saying how they view homeless people with the reality of how it is to be living on the streets.

I would also like to perhaps find another person with completely different reasons of why they are homeless and contrast their lives - one, a stereotypical 'bum' that has no reason for being homeless other than being a junkie and too lazy to get up and find a job, and the other one that has it together, is intelligent and can hold a conversation yet has had hard circumstances that have resulted in him being unable to live any other way. I want to do this to show that, although there are homeless people who live that way almost because are simply too lazy or addicted to drugs or alcohol to get a job and a place to live, there are also those who have stories and reasons that break the stereotypes of how we often view them, challenging the 'scum of society' stigma.

The purpose of this would be to create a challenging, thought-provoking piece that would follow the lives of two homeless people in order to show their emotions and feelings, focusing mainly on their personalities in order to show them as a real, normal person that perhaps has had harder circumstances than most. I would like this piece to show humour, reality and views on life that could challenge the norms of how we see the homeless.

The piece would be aimed at young, upper-to-middle-class adults that live in an urban environment and would come into contact with these realities every day. The tone would need to informative, yet I would like it to be more informal and down-to-earth, showing real life, that this is a reality that needs to be looked at differently. I would also try to make sure that the tone is not condescending or patronising in any way and not too heavy or depressing, but is frank, challenging and uplifting, carrying an ultimate message of hope that we can play a part in changing lives of those around us.

Cookery team filming day - 4 hours for a 3 minute instructional video

For this assignment, we were put into groups to make a 3 minute instructional video of how to do student-friendly cooking that is healthy, easy and cheap. Our group (Chloe, Mike, Tom and me) decided to do a healthy stir fry with peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce and lots of vegetables. We decided this because it contains 4 of the 5 a day, it's easy and cheap and we had the ingredients and appliances needed. We filmed in Mike's kitchen as he lives on campus and has a stellar wok from Ikea that worked perfectly for it.



Pre-Production

When we first arrived at 2:00 we started setting up Mike's kitchen for filming - cleaning, clearing space for the actual cooking, setting up lighting (we had to put up makeshift curtains to block the bright sunlight coming in from the side, as can be seen in the photo above) and making a living food sculpture to film the first shot of the ingredients, as shown.


We then had to set up the equipment, which included a Sony Z1, a Manfrotto 503HDV tripod and a Rycote pistol grip and gun mike.


After all the equipment was set up, we set up the white balance and focus, and then got the first shot of the ingredients over which we want to superimpose text saying how much of each ingredient is needed. We thought this would be the easiest to go with a voice over, which is how we want to present it. We then started the cooking, showing the chopping of the vegetables (with me and Chloe tag-teaming it) with the rest of our beautiful food sculpture in the background to make it a bit more interesting and less antiseptic-looking than just a plain white wall. While we're going to get the sound of the voice over later separately, we wanted to get the sound effects of the chopping and cooking to put in to make it realistic and to use these to support the visual.


So, after some chopping mishaps and falling veg and chicken but still getting a successful take of what we wanted, we went on to the stir-frying part of it. We fried the onions, making sure to get the sizzling sound effect, then added the chicken and vegetables. We were able to get some good birds-eye view shots by raising the tripod to its highest setting, as shown in the photo below!

After getting a wide range of shots of each step of the cooking, such as close ups, pans, wide shots, etc, we finished the cooking and all tried the final product, which turned out not too bad, if we say so ourselves! we were definitely all made hungry enough for it by missing lunch and waiting four hours longer than we thought we'd need to, but it was worth the wait.


A few things we would have done differently in retrospect might have been:

- Be more prepared, maybe make a storyboard and list of everything we would need. At first we did a shot of the cooking utensils we thought we'd need, but ended up using much more than we thought we would. This made the day longer than it needed to be because instead of being able to the shot of all the utensils before we started cooking like we wanted to do, we needed to wait for the food to be finished, eat the food, do all the washing up, dry everything and set everything up a second time with the added utensils we had forgotten about.

- Started earlier in the week. Trying to sort out all our schedules to figure out a time for us all to meet proved harder than we thought it would be, and it made us go behind schedule with editing. We also had problems logging and capturing it, which if we had given ourselves more time we might have been able to sort out before the lesson.

Overall though, we all enjoyed this project and it provided important experience in the technical aspects of filming, in recording sound using a boom microphone and knowing how much to prepare for pre-production. We gained knowledge and experience and we'll be beginning the editing process next week.