- Wells Cathedral - Life of a Chorister
- Quartet Community Foundation - 25 year anniversary promotional video
- Templar Books - book trailers for upcoming series Arcadia Awakening and book Whisper
- Freq Out - Chicago based comedy show, collaboration with Columbia College
- Illuminate Bath Festival
- Bath Film Festival
- From Page to Screen Festival
- Bath Lit Festival
- Flying Blind - Behind the Scenes EPK
- Wherever the Need - marketing campaign for new project 'Sanitation First'
The projects I have decided I would most like to be involved in are Quartet Community Foundation, Wherever the Need, Templar Books and Illuminate Bath Festival. We first split into teams to research and meet clients for each project. I volunteered to be one of the main contacts, along with Chloe, for Quartet Community Foundation. We researched the company and then we met with Megan Witty, a PR woman working for Quartet that had first approached Artswork to make a short promotional video promoting the funding organisation's 25th anniversary of giving to charities in the West Country.
Our first client meeting went well, as we had found some points of connection in our research of the company - Chloe had recently done a similar project for a different charity and I had produced a behind-the-scenes documentary on a film festival combating human trafficking, Unchosen, the year before that I found out Quartet had sponsored. We found from the meeting that they wanted a short, two minute promo video explaining who they are and what they do, as well as still photos for their website and press releases.
After the meeting we met as a class and decided on roles for the project. I became the producer and main stills photographer for the project and we began to book in filming dates to go to the different charities they sponsor.
Our main client contact was someone who had just joined the organisation after recently graduating from Bristol University, and it soon became clear that this would not be a typical professional client relationship as we had expected. We began having problems when she asked if she could get a lift to where we were filming on our first filming day and then failed to show up or answer her phone on the day. We waited in the car for as long as we could, trying to phone her with no response, until we tried calling the offices to see if she was in. They got in contact with her and she finally called back about twenty minutes after we were meant to leave, saying that she had accidentally overslept and wouldn't be coming in with us after all. This was the first of several examples of the client acting in an unprofessional way.
This gave us a difficult situation, as we knew we needed to maintain a client relationship but were unsure how to deal with the unprofessional approach she was taking. Paul Clarkson, business consultant and guest speaker at university speaking on 'How to Deal with Clients', said one of the things needed when dealing with difficult clients is to first identify the problem and then be able to confront them without severing the client relationship. We were able to do this, being firm on the day about the fact that we would have been late for our first filming session if we had waited any longer for her without being able to get in contact, yet we were able to maintain the client relationship by doing this in as professional a way as possible. She came to the next filming date, where it was just myself and a cameraman as the crew, apologising and acting in a much more professional way with us, leaving happy with how we were going about the project and with the client relationship intact.
Another problem we encountered was on our first filming day, when we finally arrived at the destination only to be told that the session we were going to film of a gardening group of adults with special needs had been canceled at the last minute because of the weather. We were unsure of what to do, since we had driven for an hour with all the equipment to film just the one session. We decided with the charity to wait and see if the rain would stop long enough to allow us to film some cutaways of the garden that we could use along with footage of the gardening group rescheduled for a later date. During this time, we decided that in order to salvage the day and still do some filming, we could get interviews with the main woman in charge of the garden and a care worker who had come, also unaware that it had been canceled. It took some talking, but as the women got to know us they became more comfortable with the idea of being interviewed. The rain eventually stopped and the sun came out, so we were able to go into the garden and get two great interviews that we will be able to use in the final project, as well as cutaways of the gardening project. In this way we encountered a problem but were able to get around it by getting useful footage that we can use in the final project.
