WB 10/11

Unusual week structurally. We had a holiday on Monday, in which I had three students to tutor in Maths. Then I took the rest of the week off work to direct a short film for an entry in a global competition...
Our field trip to a press screening was an interesting experience, though my thoughts on the film itself have been recorded elsewhere! We had lectures on TV Authorship (not rivetting but its good to think about something I hadn't considered before) and on the Etiquette of the Film Critic (much the same).
Academically, Friday was a brain stretching day. We looked at timecode regeneration, focus, backfocus, aperture and principles of recording. Then in the afternoon we had a rather twistedly fiendish exam on system settings and computer protocals. It seems that after a slow start, Technical is really rocketing forward in terms of progress. I can't help but think that if we had started earlier, we could have taken it a bit easier.

Either way, the highlight of this week has definately been shooting our first project: a 3 minute film which gives a value to water-bottles. We received the brief on Thursday, and after a brainstorming session that night, I wrote up the script, while Gavin did some trial animations. I also got the film cast (roughly speaking!) and our shoot timetabled. Friday night and Saturday day were our scheduled times for filming, and despite one or two minor hiccups, I'm delighted to be at the stage now of saying that the film has been fully shot, and the edit is semi-complete.

Including a mad prophet of doom, an army of rampaging water bottles, a gentleman called Richard Crumpet, and several bottles living wild in their natural habitat (up a tree), this film is as daft as everything else I've done. But the production values have been pleasingly high, and its been great fun.

This film has been great, not only for building relationships with some of the other folk in DFTV, but also with actors and TPA folk. I very much look forward to seeing the edit on Monday when we enter it in the competition.