For my senior project, I decided to use the projects from Comm 465 as both required a lot of my time and attention and could help me grow my skills.
At the beginning of the semester everyone in our group needed to submit ideas for either the documentary or the narrative film. We could do both if we had enough ideas. I had come up with an idea for the short film that was ultimately not chosen, but I was okay with that since the short film we ended up working on was a more fun idea that what I had planned.
With the subjects for the documentary and narrative chosen we needed to assign roles for the upcoming productions. The directors and producers decided who would take which roles based on previous experience/desire to do each role. I was assigned as the audio technician for the documentary and the unit production manager for the narrative.
As audio technician my role boiled down to: manage audio levels during production, gather appropriate back ground audio for use later, and make sure that any audio collected was of high quality. Despite our documentary being filmed entirely in Spanish (a language I do not speak a word of) I was able to complete my role to the satisfaction of the director.
For the narrative my role was a little larger. As unit production manager my responsibilities included maintaining shot continuity between takes, managing the shot list and making sure all shots were filmed, taking note of which takes were best to use, and managing the shooting schedule so filming days did not take more time than necessary. This role helped stretch me the most. While I am a more organized person by nature, this was another level of organizing that helped me appreciate how much help directors needed.
During our table read of the narrative script with our cast I was able to share the vision we had for the costumes of the characters, since making sure that actors had the props they needed also fell to my purview.
This is probably one of my favorite images taken of our behind the scenes process. I believe we had seven people at one point taking pictures of a person taking pictures etc, the first one was about documenting the process, but we added more and more people to make a fun and unique behind the scenes shot.
There were not a lot of behind the scenes shots taken during the filming of the documentary, and even fewer with me in them, but this video showcases my role as audio technician and shows me in the chair i had been in for almost an hour to help capture the interview audio.
For one of the shots we needed for the narrative simply holding the camera and walking backwards proved to be too unsteady for what our director wanted, so we improvised a dolly with a wheelchair to keep our cinematographer more steady.