This week’s post is inspired by Abdul Kassamali who is a video producer and shared some stories about film shoots he worked on that had major challenges, among other topics. We are being asked to share a time in this program when we’ve been forced to deal with pivoting on a project. This happened for me in the New Media videography module on the first project. For that project, the assignment was to create a video about characters stalking or following each other. We started with storyboarding, and because I have a 6-year-old child who loves creative projects and who I spend a ton of time with, I thought it might be fun to let her “star” in the video. I asked her if she wanted to, and she said yes, if she could wear her fairy wings. I storyboarded a whole concept about her hiding in the trees in the park and sprinkling fairy dust and working with a friend who isn’t sure if a fairy is watching her, then follows the sparkly trail until they meet. I thought it would be a super fun storyline and that my daughter would love looking like a fairy in a video. When it came time to shoot, however, she was NOT happy. She had a giant melt-down about having to wear fairy wings (which was her own idea), having to go to the park instead of a parking lot (whyyyy???) and not getting to make the story up herself. Then we needed snacks, and then it started to rain, so the whole project was shot. I realized it’s a really bad idea to plan on a young child doing anything that you actually want them to do on film. Great life lesson!
So I re-planned the whole thing. Luckily my friend was up for trying again on a different day. She’s a theater actor who does a lot of little sci-fi productions, so we decided to shoot a story about Luke Skywalker and BB-8 instead, in the graveyard near my house. This time, I knew that my talent would be up for doing my story, and she had some great ideas to contribute too. However, again, there were challenges that I didn’t anticipate. I’m not super experienced at shooting videos, so this was new for me, and one factor I didn’t really plan for was how the weather would impact the project plan. For example, to make the shots work, I had to make sure that the light was hitting from a reasonable angle so that there wasn’t too bright of a glare in my actor’s eyes, and I didn’t account for the changing light conditions as the sun got lower in the sky, so it was a bit of a challenge to make the shadows match up in some of the shots. There were also tech challenges. BB-8 was played by my husband’s app-driven robot, and you would think that this would make things very controlled and easy, but no. We were shooting in the graveyard, but BB-8 was unwilling to drive through the grass, and he fell over surpisingly easily. His head also fell off often. Finally, while we were shooting, I realized that my friend who was starring in the show was a theater actor-very used to doing large gestures and emotions to be seen from the audience on an in-person stage, but she had trouble with doing subtle facial emotion shifts for the close-up and extreme close-up shots that were a requirement of the project. I hadn’t anticipated this, and it really surprised me, so I did a combination of giving her a couple of suggestions like a director would and just going with the best footage I could get. We were also interrupted by a bystander who was convinced that we were shooting a Game of Thrones video despite our obvious Yoda backpack, and he followed us around and asked us a bunch of questions, which was awkward and took a lot of time. In the end, I took lots of shots, more than I had planned in my original storyboard, and even went back with my husband on another day to re-shoot some of the tricky BB-8 scenes so that he could help to drive the robot. Because of this, I spent a lot of time editing in Premiere afterwards and was pretty happy with what I was able to put together, even though it was a bit corny and definitely not at a marketable level! If I were to do a similar project again, I would definitely spend more time in the actual on-site location while storyboarding to get a better sense of what would be possible with the spatial layout and lighting and everything. I’d also do more prep ahead of time to be sure that I know how to work the robot confidently instead of spending so much time on that. Realizing that there were so many more factors to think about in terms of weather and lighting, camera angles, actors, and tech in even this simple project, I have even more respect for people who are able to pull off super professional video projects on a regular basis!