BFI Film Academy - December 14th 2013

This day was part Documentary, and part Networking. 

Nikki Parrott, who was a producer on a number of documentaries, spoke to use about her career as a producer, how they made her documentaries, and the problems involved with them. One particularly high-profile documentary that she had worked on was "Alexis Arquette: She's My Brother," and Nikki told us about the problems with Alexis herself. She decided not to have the operation, and she breached her contract by appearing in a new reality TV show, after refusing to continue with the film. 

We then got split into groups, and had to pick a story from a newspaper and pitch a documentary about it. We got stuck with the Daily Star, not exactly the pinnacle of journalism, and so we struggled to find anything. We eventually decided on North Korea, and came up with a pretty interesting documentary! 

We went to cake-break, and when we came back we met Rob Speranza, film producer. He spoke to us about networking, and how important it is. He also set up the SYFN (Not on that day, a while before), and encouraged us to sign up to their newsletter. 

Edit: I actually made a short horror film with some friends outside of the Academy, and emailed it to Rob. He was really helpful, and gave me a full page of feedback. The main lesson I've learnt from the BFI Film Academy is that most people are really nice, and will often try to help you out if you ask them politely.

And that's it! No more Film Academy until 2014. Gutted.

BFI Film Academy - December 7th 2013

This day was dedicated to Animation, something that I'd never been that interested in (Spoiler: That had changed by the end of the day!). Firstly, all the films were shown. I still wasn't that happy with ours, though a few other people said they liked the idea, and I started to think it was maybe just me being overcritical. Then we were introduced to the techniques of pixillation and stop-motion, and shown a number of examples. This included the legendary surrealist Jan Svankmajer, who I became a bit of a fan of.

We were then split into groups, and tasked with creating our own short animation. We decided to go for a pixillated 'magic' film, which ended up really good! I was really happy with it. I helped out with both of the other groups' films too, as we finished quite early. Next was back to Sheffield Live to edit, and we decided to put the whole thing in black and white, with a film grain. We also put it in a different resolution, which was more similar to the first films. We tried to make it look like a Charlie Chaplin black and white film, complete with piano music (Debussy's "Golliwog's Cake Walk"), and it did come out really well.

There was an exhibition about Jan Svankmajer at The Showroom, and I went to it with a few others from the Academy because of this day. It was really interesting, and it was really good to be able to delve deeper into things that we'd learned at the academy, so easily. Though I'm not sure I liked Faust. I'm not sure I didn't like it either. I just straight-up have no idea what happened in that film.

Also, whilst watching the other group's films, one that really struck me was a much simpler film, that was just about a girl waiting for a date. It was really good, and was beautiful in it's simplicity. I was really inspired by it, and decided to use it as a stimulus. Not the same, I'm just going to focus on simplicity instead of high concept films.

BFI Film Academy - December 1st 2013

Editing day!

Today, our group was editing the footage from the day before. However, we were told how long we had to edit the films, and we were advised to split up - some of the group working on their blogs and some on the editing. I did sit in for a while on the editing, but today I focussed more on getting this blog sorted.

The blog was for the Silver Arts Award, the reason I've been doing the other posts. A woman came in called Becci, who helped us out and told us everything we needed to do in order to get the Silver Arts Award (Here's hoping!)

One of the things that we had to do was to decide upon a personal challenge. After a bit of a discussion, we decided on writing a different script of my own, and completing it!

We ended up running out of time, and only had a rough cut of our film. We were sort of disappointed with the end results, but I think with a bit more time editing we could have made it substantially better. For future projects, I would give myself more than a day to edit. Which I think most productions have.

BFI Film Academy - November 30th 2013 (SHOOTING DAY!)

In the week before the shoot, I had finished 2 more drafts of the script, and received a lot of feedback from Rebecca through email. I'd spent a lot of time, and I was thrilled with my script.

So, quite understandably in my opinion, it was a bit disheartening when I arrived on the shooting day to find that nobody in the group had got chance to read the last draft. There wasn't a printer either. But, thanks to the magic of the internet, everyone could get Google Drive up on their smartphone and read it. Technology, eh?

We planned out how we were going to do things, and then the cast arrived and they were ... Noticeably different from the script. In the script, the two main characters had been middle-aged, and the actors were in their mid-teens. So, the group quickly got together a plot that made sense with the actors that we had available, which sort of completely changed the point of the script, but also sort of worked too. It was a bit of a shame that the story I'd written ended being changed so much, so I'm going to hold onto the script and hopefully make it one day.

Will had made a very rough shot-list, and we decided to first film the scenes with the car. This was my first time as cinematographer, and I think I did quite well. We struggled with the radio microphones, but eventually worked them out. Once this was done, we went to the Element office, and set to work shooting the rest of the film. And, would you believe it, they'd just started decorating. It seemed like someone was intentionally making the shoot difficult! We worked round this though, and filmed some good shots. We did film a lot of shots though. Probably a few too many for one person to edit in a day.

I learnt a fair bit about both writing and cinematography from this shoot. I learnt about the beauty of lens flares (Which are my new favourite thing. I'll just have to try and not get to the level of JJ Abrams!), and I learnt a trick for getting a good shot of a moving car - film it reversing away from the camera, and then reverse the footage! About writing, I learned the hard lesson that your script will inevitably get altered during shooting. Which is a shame. In future, I will make sure to be more vocal with things that I want in the film, and to discuss the story with the director in detail.

Whilst I enjoyed using the camera, I think that my heart lies with writing. Despite the end product being so vastly different to my original story, I still got to help create a story from scratch. And that was a good feeling.

Filmmaking rules!

The 2nd Draft

Yesterday, I wrote about the first draft of a script that I'm working on for a short film for the BFI Film Academy. Today, I'm writing about the second draft that I wrote. With the second draft I attempted to cut out all of the confusing bits, or at least cut them down a little. I added in a structure that was a bit more interesting for the viewer, and I tried to give Dawn, the main character, a bit more of a personality.

You can read it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X9OdwznwGc05vDbB-Yf0QsOdXYSPDBc-C1vWH_AWh78/edit?usp=sharing

However, after a discussion with one of the professional writers that came in to the Academy, I decided it still wasn't up to scratch. And so, work on the third draft has begun. But I'll talk about that another time.

How I plan on improving my script

BFI Film Academy - November 23rd 2013

Today we met next door, in the Sheffield Live building. We met here because they had a room full of computers and it was The Day of Learning to Edit. Vanessa, who we knew from the previous days, spoke to us about editing, and taught us some of the principles of editing. These included editing in motion, and minor visual effects i.e. grading. We then started to try out editing with a partner, on some footage of Vanessa running for a bus. We decided to change the story through editing, and made it that Vanessa was running away from the bus, and the bus was running away from her. It was pretty deep.

After this, Rebecca sat down and went through all of the scripts with us, and gave us some feedback. This was my 2nd draft, which I was relatively happy with. I'm glad Rebecca went through them with us, because looking back, if this had been the finished version it would have been pretty poor. After she'd spoke to us about the scripts with us for a bit, we went to lunch. I sacrificed my lunch (And my weekly cake!), in order to improve my script as much as possible. I added a lot of annotations to the script so that I could go through it at home and make it better.

Towards the end of the day, the director Will and I went to look at the location that I'd got for us. It wasn't quite how I'd written it, so we had to quickly come up with a story that fit the location. It was, however, a pretty top notch location.

I learnt a lot about editing, but I don't think it was for me. It didn't hold my interest very much. I found the best part of the day was talking about the script and trying to make it better.

BFI Film Academy Sheffield

SO. It's been well over a year, I've changed the career that I'd like to pursue, and I've decided that I prefer The Dark Knight to The Dark Knight Rises.

So what else is new? I recently started at the BFI Film Academy in Sheffield, and I'm currently working towards my Silver Award, which involves creating a blog. This is that blog.

BFI Film Academy - November 16th 2013

Day 2, and this day was about shooting.

Firstly, we had a workshop with cinematographer Daren Eagles, who spoke to us about lighting, focussing, zooming, and a load of other cinematography-related things. He gave us a few tips too, such as using a big white board to reflect light. That turned out to be very handy! There were some incredibly interesting techniques that I'd never even considered before, such as moving the camera away from the subject and zooming in simultaneously. That created a really cool effect!

Each group then got given a camera, and were allowed to experiment. Our group ended up making a few things, including one particularly terrible video about an earthquake, which just involved me shaking the camera and the others looking slightly surprised. I was slowly getting to grips with the camera though!

Next, was a sound engineer who gave us a talk on recording sound. I hadn't really realised how important sound was in film before this (I can't stop noticing it now!), but he showed us a lot of examples. He also spoke to us about using a boom mic, foley sound, and getting a "room sound" as he called it for editing. 

They were both very interesting talks, and they gave us a lot of knowledge. I had finished a first draft by this of the script by this point, but I wasn't overly happy with it. The group gave me a hefty amount of feedback, which was really helpful, and I set to work on improving it that night. I continued to discuss the script with them through Facebook, as we'd created a group. It all helped me out a lot.

BFI Film Academy - November 9th 2013

This was our first proper day, and it was early. I bravely soldiered on through the train station however, and got there. Which was a good thing, because this was a particularly interesting day!

Firstly, there was a Sheffield Hallam Film Studies lecturer who gave us a talk about the history of cinema. I was a bit gutted that he didn't mention George Melies, but there we go. It was really interesting, and really emphasised how quickly and how far cinema has developed, and not just visually; in the earliest films we were shown, they hadn't even considered adding a plot!

We took a break, ate some cake, tried to shake ourselves awake (Did I mention how early it was?), and then went back to meet Rebecca Mark-Lawson, who was the former coordinator of the Virgin Media Shorts competition, as well as a producer and script editor. She showed us a film that had previously won the Virgin Media Shorts competition called 2:20 by Jason Wingard that we'd been given a script before. It was very interesting how different the final product was from the script.

Towards the end of the day Meabh took out the sheets that we'd previously filled in, and put us into groups based on our chosen areas. I was put into a group with Will (Director), Bright (Producer), Angela (Editor), and I was the writer and cinematographer. I somehow ended up with 2 roles! But they were two roles that I was very interested in. I was very happy with the group, and in one brainstorming session we ended up with a fairly decent idea! I just had to work it into a coherent story. I love writing, and I was really excited about writing a script. I was less sure about being the cinematographer on the project, however!

BFI Film Academy - November 6th 2013

It was the first day of the BFI Film Academy, and it was a Wednesday. I went on the train straight from Sixth Form to The Showroom in Sheffield, where I met the other 'students' and the Academy co-ordinators.

We went through what we would do with the Academy and making our short films, and a man from the NFTS (National Film & Television School), who spoke to us about a 2 week residential with them. It soon transpired that I'd missed the deadline for screenwriting, which was a bit of a downer, but it happens every year so I shall apply in 2015! We also spoke to the programmer for the Showroom, who chooses which films go on. She told us about her role, and what she has to do for it. She mentioned that she watches around 1000 films a year.

We also had to talk about ourselves, and discuss what we liked and disliked with the others. Then we had to write down what role we wanted to have when making the short film. I put down WRITING in big capital letters. And then added every other role in smaller letters, just in case.

At the end we were given free cinema tickets (Score!), which I plan on using for Gravity ASAP. Next meeting was the Saturday after.