Liverpool Visit - A Summary

Instead of writing a detailed description of everything that happened, I'll summarise it with some trusty bullet points.

• We decided to film on George's DSLR because we know the quality will be so much better, but we took an A1 as a backup just in case (we'd booked the equipment a week before to make sure we had what we needed, and we chose the A1 because it was the smallest and lightest).
• The rest of our equipment included two tripods, marantz, rifle mic, tie-clip mic, boom pole, spare XLR lead, spare memory cards, spare batteries, a laptop and an external hard drive. You could say we were prepared for every eventuality.
• On the first day of our trip we concentrated on getting cutaways and atmos sound. We ended up with a lot of footage of the docks, as well as some superlambananas which we actually found by accident.
• The second day was an early start - we hadn't managed to get permission from the health food shop, but we had found a woman in the Tourist Information Centre, willing to be interviewed, who knew all about lambananas. We spent most of the morning filming lambananas and more cutaways, and then we went to our first interview.
• We had a few issues with the interview (personally I don't think there was enough communication between everyone, especially camera and sound), including background noise, missing parts of sound/video recording, bad lighting, and cables visible in shot.
• In our second interview with Sophie Green, the artist, we were much more comfortable in the interview situation. This time we expressly told Sophie to speak to only one member of the crew (so she is looking at one specific point whenever she is on camera), and we had the added bonus of no particular time limit, meaning we had more time to set up our shot.
• Later, we decided to try and interview people off the street, which was harder than we imagined: I think most people thought we were street canvassers. The more people we asked, though, the more confident we got, and the better we became at recognising who was more likely to agree to be interviewed! The camera didn't become such an intimidating problem, as it was so small; but everyone we interviewed was obviously a little freaked out by the microphone on the boom pole!

All in all I think we all learned a lot from the trip. I know it made me realise how much more confident this course has made me, right from my first class in which I had to interview a total stranger.