COMMISSIONS UNIT: Location Workshop

Today we had a location workshop at the dockyard in Chatham. We divided ourselves into our documentary group, however, since Sonia was absent, myself, Alex and Jason were joined by Connor. Each group was given a different area of the dockyard to do their actuality / sequence on. We were given the rope factory.

Before we could film, we had to perform a risk assessment of our location - just as we would have to on our actual shoots. The main hazards that we found were trip hazards on the steps and the wooden floor. There were also some beams that we would have to be careful of. There were barriers separating the walkway from the ropes, this was also noted down as a hazard. We agreed that to avoid these hazards, we would block out any filming beforehand. Once we had filled out our risk assessment, we handed it in to Helen and Ferg and picked up the equipment.

We were then instructed to film sequences and actuality of our location and attempt to tell a story without any interviews - just through the shots.

We all took turns in operating the camera - initially this was tricky as we all had different ideas of shots we wanted to get, but it all worked out and we managed to take turns to capture footage. We filmed a lot of close up and wide shots (filming 3 close for every 1 wide). We filmed signs and ropes in order to establish the location and then focused in on equipment and more rope in order to establish what was occurring.

We were lucky enough to have a rope making demonstration occur - this gave us some great actuality footage! However, everything was so fast paced that it was hard to keep up with the action. We had to prioritise which shots to capture in order to get the best footage.

We then reviewed the footage we captured in our location workshop. Overall the feedback was pretty positive, we captured some good footage for our first time capturing sequences and actuality on location. We had some interesting pull focus shots and we also kept to the rule of shooting 3 close up shots for every 1 wide shot. One criticism was that we had too many panning shots that were also too long. Panning shots need to go from point A to point B quite quickly. Our pans were very slow and didn't really reach a point. Panning shots should be used to reveal things - ours didn't do this. Our establishing shots were good - people instantly got a feel for where we were shooting.

After reviewing the footage, we then had to edit it together. Jason and Alex did the edit for this. This helped us to get a feel for editing sequences and actuality which will be beneficial to us when it comes to editing together our documentary project.