My own skills and were could I have improved.

During this production I feel that I have used various skills. The skills i was forced to use the most was my organising skills, as I have experience in taking the initiative with organising youth work.

The reason I wanted to take on camera is because I enjoy it and the fact that I haven’t had the chance to work with a camera much this year. The skills that I acquired from  this multi camera shoot was knowing when there was a camera constantly recording I was able to focus on different shots with out worrying about missing a shot because we always had a master shot to cut back to.

As we experienced sound difficulties with the R 26’s I had to take the initiative and think on my feet for a solution for this problem but as I have had a bit of knowledge of sound I put the two 2 R 26’S at the opposite ends of the rooms this was to capture an even amount of sound in the bar and from the band.  We test recorded this during the sound test to see if the sound quality was up to the clients standard.

I feel that during this production I have improved on the skills that I already have. Something that I also have learnt is that you never know what outside skills that you can bring on to the production. 

What would you change.

In this production there was a lot of complications, to begin with there was a group decision on what role we would like to do in the production which was:

Aaron McDonald – Producer

Terry Garland – Director

Brendan Strong – Camera and sound

Ryan Forgoine – Camera

Ryan O’Neill – Camera and sound

I feel that the producer didn’t really do the job right he wasn’t  achieving his role to a professional standard as he wasn’t showing up to meetings, I myself was the only one who was in constant contact with the client. The producer asked me detailed plans of the shoot but by doing this I feel that I could of done a better a job as producer as I done everything from booking equipment to organising the actual night of the shoot. If I did go for the roll of producer I would of changed the groups rolls because due the multi camera shoot everyone had to be on camera but this should have been a secondary roll as we could of got a lot done if we had a primary roll for each member and there second roll as the camera.

During the pre-production there wasn’t much communication with in the group. If the group had of allocated time to do a recce we would of solved a lot of problems for example, our driver camera man number 2 Ryan Forgoine insisted that he knew where Ballyclare was we were in the opposite direction heading toward Bangor when some of the crew looked it up on their phone and we realised that we were in the wrong direction. After turning and heading back to Belfast we were in the right direction but we were an hour late to the shoot. As well as being an hour late it was our first time seeing the bar, we only had seen a small diagram the client drew on a bit of paper for us. Again we wasted more time at the beginning of shoot discussing were to set the cameras but luckily the band were still doing sound checks when we arrived but all of these problems would have been avoided if we had of organised a recce.

After shooting the gig for two and a half hours the thing I would changed most  would’ve been getting a proper set list of the songs and what order they would have been sung in. We had to recorded four specific songs out of twenty four I think it was a waste of time recording the whole set as we only needed four songs this was a poor lack of communication between the client and us, if we had of had a proper set list it would have been less stressful and it would have been less hassle for the editor.

After doing this client brief I believe that I have; learnt a lot and have took a lot from this. I will be able in future projects to produce and mange things more. 

How did we do it.

On first meeting our client Danny McQuillian we received his brief, which was three sheets, on the first sheet there was a bit about the band and a short summery of what he wanted in the video. On the second sheet was history of the Barry McGivern Band and the bands achievements and the third was a set list and what songs he would like us to record. Danny also wanted us to watch the 2007 Led Zeppelin gig, this is the style he wanted the video to be in.

Picture of Led Zeppelin

After watching the Led Zeppelin gig the group started to discuss what methods we could do to take up this challenge somethings I noticed when watching the Led Zeppelin gig was that it was a multi camera shoot but it was a large range of different cameras to get different effects to make it look fancy.

As there was five member which were Brendan Strong (me), Terry Garland, Aaron McDonald, Ryan Forgoine and Ryan O’Neill. As we didn’t have as much man power as the Led Zeppelin gig each person would be operating  a camera but as in the Led Zeppelin gig we aim to have the same video style that they did by having three different camera types which are:

Three Cannon fx100’s

Cannon DSLR 600D

Sony Z5

The FX 100’s were hand held cameras for close ups for each band member, the Z5 was a stand alone shot of the actual band from behind the crowd and the DLSR 6OOD was for all the nice artistic shots.

The main plan for the sound was to have two Roland R26’s one which would be plugged into the main sound desk to capture the sound of the instruments but as we didn’t get to see the equipment before hand we didn’t have the right XLR cable instead of a male female XLR cable we needed a female female XLR cable. the second Roland R26’s was to sit in the back corner beside the Z5 to record the atmos of the crowd and the band.

As we couldn’t record the band through the sound desk we had to think of a different strategy to record the band which was to put the two Roland R26’s at two different corners of the room and record but we didn’t just leave this to chance. We recorded the band during the sound test and listened to the playback and everything seemed to work out, we couldn’t just leave this to chance so we informed the client about this change and he seemed happy to go ahead. 

During the shooting of the gig we had to record four certain songs What’s Going on, Brute Force and Ignorance, Messin’ With the Kid and Bullfrog Blues but as we didn’t have a proper set list of the songs we had to record the whole set which was two and a half hours long.

As cannon FX 100 only has two flash disk drives that hold 40 minutes each we needed to find a solution to take the footage of the camera as the set was 2 and a half hours long. We did this by having a mac book pro and two external flash disc readers to take the footage of the flash discs and redistribute the flash discs back to the camera so the camera wasn’t left not recording the band.

Picture of Barry McGivern Band on the night of the gig.