Cutaway Time! (Photographs to be added!)

The next Wednesday (23rd April) had filmed some cutaways at the place I named in the previous blog post.

(Outside the stationary and book store, Eason's)

(Some of the healthy eating and vegetarian books in Eason's)

(More of the vegetable and healthy eating books in Eason's)

(Outside the book store, Waterstone's)

(Some healthy eating and books about vegetarianism in Waterstone's)

(More books about being vegetarian in Waterstone's)

(Outside the health food shop, Holland and Barrett)

(Outside one of my favourite stores, LUSH, where every single product is vegetarian)

(Outside The Nutmeg, another health food store, slightly
more under the radar than Holland and Barrett)

Scheduled Easter Meeting.

Caoimhe and I had scheduled to meet over Easter to film cutaways but unfortunately something had happened to the camera, so we were unable to do so. We still had our meeting, we just didn't get to film anything that day which I didn't mind too much anyway.

We sat down in a coffee shop to discuss more thoroughly what cutaways we wanted. We made out a list of shops we wanted to go to:

• Holland and Barrett.
• LUSH.
• Easons.
• Waterstones.
• Tesco/ASDA.
• Alley Cat.
• Restaurants in Victoria Square and St. Anne's Square.

We had a small number of concerns about these places. Firstly with Easons and Waterstones, it had been suggested to go into these book stores and look at their vegetarian book range but because of the internet, internet prices are much cheaper than in store places like both Easons and Waterstones. We didn't want anyone to see us in case they thought we were filming or taking pictures of the prices of books and going to buy them online instead. It sounds silly, but I feel like it is a huge concern for these shops and they could have thrown us out at anytime, even if we explain what we were doing.

The same type of thing we had concerns about for Tesco and ASDA. Obviously both these stores are much bigger than the book stores, so they have more security cameras and more people in store. Customers could report us or a member of staff could see us.

We were also worried about going around to restaurants and filming the menus. Again, the same price-comparison concerns were our worry, because I'm sure a lot of people go from restaurant to restaurant looking for the cheapest prices. 

The last production meeting for 'Dislocation' before Easter.

The same day (Thursday 10th April) I held a meeting for Andy's "Dislocation". Everyone was in that day so I took it as an opportunity to get together for the last time before we go off for Easter and the last 'real-life' production meeting before we shoot.

The meeting didn't go too well, I had asked everyone apart from Andy to have something prepared but the only person who had done this, was Pearse. I asked him to go through the script to look out for sound effects he would have to pick up on the day as well as music choices Andy had put in the script and if he had any suggestions for music choices, which he had done and had some great ideas!

I asked Conor to bring in his shot list so we could have a look at it, but he didn't have one done. Andy and Conor were meant to do the shot list together after the meeting but that didn't end up happening. Anya as our make-up artist, I asked her to tell us how she would prepare the gashes to put them on the actors faces (or on their bodies) and if she had any make-up ideas. The only thing she told me was that she had told me all this information in a meeting a few week's back. Over those weeks in between I had expected more ideas to have come up and if she wanted to suggest them to Andy, he would see if he would like them or not.

For this "Dislocation" film, we haven't had many meetings as a full team and I was slightly annoyed that I had asked almost everyone to prepare something and only one person had done it. With this happening, the meeting didn't last very long, so it was cut short.

The negatives and positives.

On Thursday 10th April, we had our weekly meeting with our tutor and I felt really silly if I'm being honest. She asked us how shooting went and I said it went well, the lighting wasn't great afterwards, but overall we were happy with how it went.

For this post, I'll post the negatives and positives of the meeting.

Negatives
She sat us down and told us that she thought it would be best if we didn't use the interview footage we had used. There's no doubt that the answers Lindsey gave us were very interesting and I was excited to explore them more throughout cutaways.

She listed her reasons and in the end, both Caoimhe and I agreed with her and why it would be best not to use it. One of the reasons was the lighting and we had tried out best to change it in the editing programme we were using, but after an hour, we weren't getting anywhere with it. I am very disappointed and I can understand why we can't use it, but I felt so optimistic about it all that even though I get the reasoning why, it's still a little disappointing.

Seeing that we were quite down about this conclusion, Sharon got in contact with her friend Julie who lives quite close to me, who is also a vegetarian. She seemed really up for being in our documentary so we got quite excited by it. Unfortunately we knew that she was very busy and it was coming up to Easter so we felt the dates she was available up to her and she never got back to us; and because of it, I didn't want to be on her back because she had a family and was generally very busy.

Positives
We still have Richard scheduled to let us interview him for Saturday 3rd May which we are very excited about because when we met with him for the first time, we was really looking forward to answering the questions because he'd never been able to have an outlet to talk about being a vegetarian.

We still plan to use Lindsey's interview but as research only. She gave us some fantastic answers and had a great story to tell, so we're hoping to look back on her interview as research for Richard's to help us improve in lighting techniques, camera angles as well as changes to questions.

Starting the editing process.

The next week I stayed in college after class to look over footage and to do a quick little edit on the smoothie and LUSH pot cutaways. But before doing that, I split up the interview to make it easier to edit later on. The lighting was a huge problem unfortunately and looking back on the day, I don't understand why I thought it would be a good idea to place her in front of the window. Maybe I just got over excited that I was finally starting the filming process for the documentary, but I tried to change it in Premiere Pro but it wasn't really working. The framing was just slightly off, I thought I had picked a tighter shot so when I seen the back door in shot, I was annoyed because on the camera on the day, I hadn't been able to see it at all.

I was really happy with the sequences I had filmed though, but whether or not I use them in the final film had yet to be decided.

Day Two: Smoothie and LUSH cutaways.

The next day I thought I would film myself making a smoothie to show that vegetarian food doesn't have to be boring. I know that a smoothie is very rarely unsuitable for vegetarians, but I thought it would be quite nice to film the process then speed it up to use possibly at the start or towards the end of the documentary.

Normally a smoothie takes me about ten minutes altogether to make but filming it, it took just under a hour because I had to make sure everything was in shot and I was cutting appropriately because most of the shots I had to do in one take, or else I would've been cutting up unnecessary fruit and wasting it.

After the smoothie, I thought I would take the good chunk of my LUSH pots and do a similar shoot. I would also speed this up in post-production and it would come out like a stop motion piece, which I'm very interested in. I had originally thought of doing a stop motion animation in the documentary but due to the large quantity of other work going on, I didn't feel like I would have enough time to do it, and do it properly. So doing this, it made me feel like I was still adding something different to the documentary, even if it doesn't get used in the final film. 

One of the main reasons I wanted to do the LUSH pots was because we had asked Lindsey a few questions about LUSH and she had talked it about it so we were thinking of putting this (sped up) in over her talking about it.

Day One: Lindsey's interview.

Filming day had arrived (Saturday 5th April) and both myself and Caoimhe were really excited. I picked them both up from Belfast and brought them up to my house.

It didn't take us too long to set up, and it was a really nice day outside so the sun was coming through the window nicely. Caoimhe was on sound, while I was on camera as well as asking the questions. We had originally planned to stop at every fourth question and change camera angles, and had fully intended to do this but we were too interested in her answers and it was just flowing like a real conversation, that we completely forgot to do so.

We then got her to cut up some buns that were vegan as well as gluten free, and I wanted these to be cutaways for when we were taking about desserts and buying food in general.

Caoimhe and I were really happy with how the day had gone, all three of us got on great and the answers that Lindsey gave us to our questions were great and quite eye opening.