So aside from the final reflection for the studio, this will be my last regular post. I’ve had a chance to view our two episodes of Ghastly Solutions now, and to be honest I’m super proud of them. They’re not totally without flaw, but largely I think our group has managed to create a really strong pair of episodes.

What were my expectations for them though, having gone through the filming process? Well, given that filming had gone so smoothly and according to plan, I was hopeful that such smoothness would translate into the final product. I also didn’t expect an extreme amount of polish, as there was a much shorter period of time between shooting and submission of the episodes than we had hoped for – only about one week with all the footage to complete the final edits. I feel like an ideal scenario would have provided us with at least a week more for editing, but ultimately that wasn’t entirely possible. Given that, I would say overall, I had relatively high expectations, but that was informed largely out of the confidence that the rest of the production team had in the quality of what had been shot and recorded.

Upon viewing each of the episodes, I definitely felt like the aesthetic and feel we had aimed for as a group for Ghastly Solutions was largely achieved. We always wanted it to feel a little awkward and amateur, with lingering shots at certain points mimicking the mockumentary style of shows like The Office. I feel like this aesthetic was definitely hammered home really well in the final product. Also, I have to be honest, a lot of what made the final product so great in my opinion was the casting. Not only were they a joy to work with, but their performances were each brilliant and near perfect for the characters they were portraying – the essence of Arabella’s character especially was captured brilliantly. I kind of felt like this would be the case whilst observing their performances on set, but it was nice to know that this came out equally as clearly in the final product.

If I were to make any major criticisms of how the episodes turned out, it would probably be in the lack of polish in a couple of places. Like I said, I understand why this is necessary to have happened given the short editing period, but it’s definitely something as a group we potentially could have coordinated better. Even whilst going for this amateur aesthetic, a lack of focus in some locations as well as a couple of awkward cuts just felt a little jarring to view. Additionally, the credits potentially could be much more polished – maybe the font-type could have been changed to fit the aesthetic of the show a bit more closely. All these things are definitely just largely me nitpicking, but I guess I’m trying to make it clear that there are still things to improve on, even if we were largely happy with the final product. All in all though, I’m very proud of what we created.

It’s been a wild semester – I mean I feel like even that is an understatement. Looking back at my goals at the start of the semester, was I successful in ‘making a story come to life?’ The short answer is yes, I was – our group ultimately produced two episodes of the Ghastly Solutions script we were provided by the screenwriters. But that was just the most basic level of my goals. Let’s delve a little deeper.

In my expectations post, I suggested that this studio would provide me with the opportunity to develop a lot of skills that I could take forward and use on future media productions. Did I learn all the skills possible that are involved in producing a script? No, that would be frankly unrealistic. But I did get an opportunity to experience a variety of roles? Absolutely. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I became especially familiar with the trappings of the role of a producer/production manager – whilst I may not have directly undertaken every role that a production manager would in a professional media production, I was involved and observing those which I was not a part of, such as the communication with talent. That was one role that I became especially familiar with. I also got the opportunity to try my hand at continuity – something that was definitely unexpected and sudden but something that I now feel I would be more than comfortable undertaking in future productions. So whilst my primary role by the end of the semester was as a production manager, that isn’t to say I didn’t learn other production skills. I also learnt many of the tasks involved with being an assistant director (be it first or second) and whilst that wasn’t ultimately my on-set role to a large extent, those are skills that I definitely feel like I can use going forward.

That’s not to say there weren’t roles that I wish I had experimented with more. I think camera operation would definitely be one of those roles – learning those kinds of practical skills would give me something to apply to a variety of projects I might take on in the future. If there was one role I would have liked to have been more involved in, it’d probably be that one.

Looking at the rest of my initial expectations post, it mainly lends itself towards an evaluation of the studio experience as a whole. Did I enjoy it? Largely, yes. But I had my issues with it. Let’s touch on those issues, before I jump into the positives that came out of this studio for me. First, I felt the collaboration with the writers was not executed as well as it could have been. I’ve made it clear in earlier posts this semester that I was feeling like this, as well as my classmates. And whilst collaboration improved across the semester, the fact that we were ultimately two separate studios working towards entirely separate assessment goals made for difficult communication and collaboration. I largely enjoyed working with the writers our group ended up working with, to be honest – they were all lovely people and were generally willing to compromise on issues we had where possible. But ultimately, I personally feel there was always going to be conflict when it became clear that the two studios were seemingly working towards separate goals and outcomes.

On top of this, I really kind of feel like what we ultimately created didn’t really feel that much like a ‘webseries’. I actually know people within my group disagree with me on this point, so this isn’t as much of a consensus as my previous grievance, however my preconceived notion of what a ‘webseries’ was and is didn’t feel like it particularly translated too much to what we made in Ghastly Solutions. That’s not to say I’m not proud of the work we created – I am immensely proud of it. But to me, it felt far like it was structured far too heavily like a traditional TV ‘serial’. The idea of a webseries, to me, is one where the unique trappings of the Internet are utilised in a unique way to create something different, something potentially more abstract. I mean, I feel like this grievance is maybe more down to my preferred type of content that I consume on the Internet, but yeah, it felt to me like we weren’t really experimenting with the medium of the ‘web’ as much as we possibly could have been. There’s some cool stuff that can be done with it, I think. But I’m less sure on this issue, so I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

But it wasn’t all bad, now was it? One of the best things to come out of this for me was meeting a like-minded group of people that were and are all passionate about making media – a group of people I strongly hope that I can keep in contact and establish connections with going forward into any of my future media-making endeavours. I’m actually in a slightly unique position whereupon I’m taking the year off from my Media course next year, and was initially looking at starting a different course once the end of 2018 came around. However, working with this group of people reinvigorated my love of creating media. We worked extremely well as a unit once we finally got onto set in the final couple of weeks of semester, and I think the product we created shows that. It’s colourful, punchy and hits the right tones when it needs to. And from my perspective, it reflects some of the best aspects of each of our personalities, and those of the actors, in the final product. So for that, I feel extremely grateful and privileged.

Overall, this semester wasn’t without it’s challenges. Mistakes were made on my own and within the group as a whole, but I think what was most important was that we actually took those mistakes and delivered them into a final product that I’m exceedingly proud of.

As I’ve kind of made clear already, most of my role in the production on our webseries was centred around a pre-production role – that’s where a lot of my work came in. Once I got on set officially my role was to be a 2^nd assistant director, but ultimately, I ended up helping out in a variety of ways. Unfortunately for the first shoot day is was unwell and unable to come in, but I did manage to make it to each of the other three days.

Basically, across the three days, I was filling in all over the place. On the first day, I did continuity for the first half of the day, before running off to get lunch for the cast. Learning to do continuity was actually fun and interesting, more so than I had expected it would be. It very quickly became apparent that while a relatively simple role to undertake, it was also a vitally important one, and requires a great deal more communication than I would have imagined.

Across the other two days, my job mainly involved being a runner, as well as further filling in for continuity one more time. I did, however, help with sound on the second day I was in, holding the boom on occasion because of my height. Obviously, this wasn’t a very complicated job, but it still required communication between crew members, and gave me yet another on set experience that could prove useful in future productions.

The only other thing I did on set was on the final day. I was tasked with shooting behind-the-scenes footage for our presentation in Week 14, and whilst, yet again, it wasn’t the most difficult experience, it did provide me with two opportunities. It gave me a small amount of the camera operating experience, but it also gave me an opportunity to step back and appreciate the progress that had been made by our group as a production crew. Back when we first shot our pilot episode, we were disorganised and behind schedule, but by that final day, we were running extremely efficiently and effectively – it was like clockwork. It was awesome to be able to take that step back and reflect on this as I was shooting that bonus footage on the final day. It made me feel like we’d hit our stride right at the perfect time.

I’ve previously talked about my role in scheduling for our group, but one of my other key roles in the pre-production phase was sorting out locations and bookings. Similarly to scheduling, this was done largely within the group setting as well, but I thought I’d talk about what this process was like from my perspective, and what I’d change when doing so, going forward.

To be brutally honest, location scouting and organising was a nightmare. Unfortunately, as we were only receiving the scripts less than two weeks prior to rehearsals and shooting, we didn’t actually really have a chance to organise locations well enough in advance. This led to a cascade of events that only led to us finally securing a location on the day of the first shoot.

I guess somewhat annoyingly, we’d actually identified that location scouting was one of things that we did most poorly when shooting our pilot. When shooting that, as I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, we hadn’t properly scouted locations until our shoot days, which ultimately led to chaos and suboptimal preparation for that shoot. Although I’ve talked about the problems with the pilot at length, it’s still pretty relevant to our later shoots, as our goal was to be more polished in certain aspects, one of which was location scouting and booking.

As I’ve already mentioned, a lot of this came down to us having to wait for scripts from the writers to work out what locations were needed. However, I do think we could have been more proactive about the process, to hopefully secure locations earlier. Once we started to get scripts, our process was still a little slow in finding locations, when really that should have been one of the first priorities, lest it push back other pre-production tasks, such as storyboarding, shot lists and call sheets. Ultimately each of these were done at the last minute still, and whilst the final shoot ran rather smoothly we still seemed to be cutting things a bit fine timing wise.

Whilst ultimately, we were at the mercy of the course structure when it came to organising locations, in future if I was performing the same role, I’d definitely try and ensure that this process was done more efficiently and effectively – hopefully the experience I’ve gained doing this stuff will help me when organising future productions.

In a post-Assessment 3 landscape, our group quickly came to the realisation that now was the time to get deep into production. What did that mean for me? Well, my role moving in to production was to be the production manager, as well as a 2^nd assistant director when on set. But ultimately most of my production role was centred around pre-production, and as such both week 9 and 10 were pretty action packed for me. What I’m going to do for these next couple of posts, however, his split them into the two main areas I was focused on – scheduling and location organising.

So probably the largest part of this role for me was scheduling. We’d previously created a rough production schedule as a baseline for our presentation in week 7, however it was relatively rough and unrefined. I chose to create a more detailed one, a full week plan with times and extra space for the notes, hoping this would be something the group would be able to utilise, and allow people to more easily visualise when and where certain events would be happening.

The concept for this schedule started off kind of well, but as the weeks went on we utilised it less and less – I feel like this is something I could have done better. My intention in creating it was ensuring that it was extremely detailed and annotated, and whilst this was the case for week 9, it petered out as we got closer to shooting. In reality, the detail in the schedule probably should have increased as shooting grew closer, as there were more details that needed to be communicated across the entirety of the production crew. We utilised a Facebook group to do a lot of this communication, however I feel having it in the one centralised place might have made things a bit simpler and clearer for everyone.

A further part of the scheduling, and probably the most important part, was organising our actual shoot days, as well as rehearsal days. We ran into complications here as we had provided the actors with our initial rough production schedule, and the shoot days on that schedule did not actually properly correspond with our availabilities and our production progress. That initial schedule had originated from a time when as a group we were far less organised, so unfortunately things hadn’t been as clear as they had needed to be.

Ultimately, when we were scheduling the days, we had to make it so that we could fit the majority of the shoots into one week, as one of our primary cast members was only available before Week 12. This meant that we ended up having one intense week of shooting, rather than being able to spread it out over two weeks – something which ultimately made for a hectic week, but also gave us plenty of time for re-shoots if the need happened to arise. I made sure as production manager that we could communicate these dates to the actors as soon as possible, however if we had been able to give more advanced notice than simply one week, that would have been preferable.

Friday the 15th of September. The due date.

My group. What a wonderful bunch of people. So initially, we called ourselves the ‘Dream Team.’ But we quickly realised that maybe we jumped the gun with the name. ‘Meme Team’, however, perfectly represents these guys for me. No, they’re not memes themselves, nor do they pick out exceedingly good memes off the internet (or maybe they do, they seem like they have pretty good taste…), however they will always make you laugh – just like memes make me laugh (haha MEME TEAM geddit). And when you’re working with a bunch of people for a long period of time, something like that is gold dust. You don’t have to love who you work with, but boy does it make it so much easier. At least from a perspective of communication. It’s really easy to chat to these guys about stuff, and that’s awesome. Everyone is understanding of the varying skill levels within the group, which is so important in the nature of this studio. They’re fabulous.

But that doesn’t mean we’re without our problems as a group – something I think we’re all working towards to fix. Those problems were evident mainly when it came to production of the pilot, as I’ve discussed at length in my reflection on our pilot, so I won’t go into too much more detail here. The camaraderie and rapport built within the group definitely meant that the on-set attitude was potentially not as serious as it could have been, and while I think a little bit of a relaxed attitude won’t hurt a shoot, it has to be in great moderation, as we’re ultimately all there to get a job done, in a set amount of time. I think our group fell down over that hurdle a couple of times shooting the pilot, but I have faith that’s something we’re all looking at doing in the future.

Just like you can fix the issues with a meme, so can you fix the issues with a group. Yep…

(Ok, that one was a bit of a stretch. I’m sorry. I’ll make my own way out.)

Tuesday the 12th of September. Too much going on…

Unfortunately the reality of being someone with anxiety is that the stress as the semester goes on gets to you. I mean, it’ll get to anyone really. And that stress can be really, super invasive. So I thought it was fair enough that I post about it, as I’ll be honest, I’m pretty damn stressed at the moment. When you have multiple assignments simultaneously due, it’ll drive anyone crazy with stress, and on top of that I realise that making this webseries will require a pretty large time commitment from me. As a production manager, there’ll be a lot on my plate over the next couple of weeks, so how will I manage it?

Well, the best case scenario is that my stress will just reduce naturally, but frankly that’s just unrealistic. I’m only going to have more work to do over the coming weeks, so dealing with it will be a challenge. A big part of reducing that stress, particularly from a production management standpoint, will be locking in a production schedule for our group for the remainder of the semester. Whether we actually keep to that schedule is a separate issue entirely, however I know having one will definitely relieve my stress, and will also do so for the rest of my group. Hopefully, this will be done over this coming weekend, so we can make sure things are booked in time for the first shoot we have planned.

Beyond that, I’m going to have to carefully manage my time so that I’m giving adequate attention to each of my other subjects across the coming weeks, whilst still committing hard to producing this webseries. That’s easier said than done, however, I’m under absolutely no illusions that I could very easily fail at this. I’ve done so in the past, so maybe I’ll write another blog post in the future and we’ll see if I’m finally able to buck that trend.

Stress sucks.

Friday the 8th of September. When your pilot crashes.

It’s time to reflect on our pilot. Oh boy. Where to start. Well I guess I’ll chat a bit about pre-production first, then the actual shoots, then post-production, then round it out with some of the feedback we got from our presentation on Friday.

So, pre-production. Well the main issue was that there really wasn’t much of it at all. We loosely scheduled in a shoot for the Friday class of week 6, following us receiving the pilot script, and kind of just chucked our names into a document to get a rough idea of who’d do which roles. We didn’t actually location scout until the day of shooting, which is definitely something that needs to be done well in advance, so that shot lists can be properly written up and location specific, as well as to identify how you can optimise time management on the day with the location you are given. When you don’t location scout, you’re left in a situation where you get to the location you find and you’re scrambling to work out where cameras and lights can be placed and what can and can’t be in shot, and having to improvise way too much for what ultimately needs to be a highly organised, tight shoot. If I’d say there was one major mistake we made in the production phase, it was this. Location scouting is definitely something I think that we’ll have to do better going forward, otherwise the entirety of the rest of the production will suffer because of it. The importance of pre-production, at least I feel, can be too easily understated at times – definitely one of the biggest things I’ve learnt from this course so far is just how vitally important that actually is.

Now onto the shoots. I’ve already kind of gone over some stuff in previous posts. But there’s one thing in particular I want to focus on here, for this reflection. Roles. The way we organised roles for this shoot, unbeknownst to us until the actual day of the first shoot, was incredibly poor. Firstly, I don’t think some people properly knew how or what to do in their roles. I was actually a co-director on the day, but I had no clue as to how co-directing actually would work – I knew what a director does, but we’d kind of just gone with this idea of co-direction for the pilot without properly discussing it. Also, we had Media students playing characters in the pilot. We chose not to cast outside of our group for the pilot, and whilst I think the acting in the final product ended actually being of a pretty solid, if not high, quality, it definitely affected our ability to pull off the production as a group. It’s actually so much harder to both act and take on a production role at the same time than one may think. I was one of the actors, and it was incredibly difficult and I’m sure it was for the others as well. I never felt like I could properly help out with the production side of things, and it ultimately left the production crew short of people on both days.

And post-production. Well, again, I think similarly to pre-production, we didn’t plan this part out well enough. We had set editors, but no plan for deadlines nor the way in which it would actually be edited. Going forward, this period of time definitely needs to be far more planned out than it was. We ended up with audio sync issues because we edited the video footage first before syncing audio, and never had a legitimate deadline for when we wanted the video to be completed by, ending with us completing the edit on presentation day.

But, I mean, it wasn’t all negative. And in our presentation that was definitely some of the feedback we got. We had this almost complete doom and gloom, apocalyptic style presentation about all the things we did wrong, but in reality, we did stuff right too. There were some brilliantly framed shots mixed into the final cut (amidst the bad ones) and ultimately, even though the acting stressed us Media students out, there were some standout performances, and they indicated some awesome features about the characters that could definitely aid in casting.

Ultimately, I’ve been kind of pretty scathing in this reflection, as I’m sure many others in group were. But it’s so good I’ve had a chance to have these learning experiences now. I am still just a uni student and my first proper production by no means is supposed to be perfect in its execution – I mean, is anything ever perfect in its execution? I’d definitely challenge someone who suggested that was possible. So all these learning experiences are awesome, and it’ll be great to take them forward into the weeks of production ahead. As pilots go, not one of the best. But I’m sure there’s been worse. And we can only go up.

Tuesday the 5^th of September. A presentation beckons?

Back from semester break, and it appears soon we’ll be showing a cut of what we’ve been shooting over the past couple of weeks. But there’s something else I think I want to talk about today.

So I think it’s safe to say that many people’s perception of a webseries is one where it generally seems less professional and more informal than a traditional TV serial. This reality simply comes about because of the connotations centred around the word ‘web’, which nowadays champions informality with the integral presence of social networks.

While I would say that a webseries embraces some of these factors in a number of ways, I think this illusion also undermines the work and organisation that must go into creating a webseries. While the final product may (or may not) echo these ideas of informality, that doesn’t do justice to the process of creating it, as I am very quickly learning. Webseries require just as much professionalism and organisation to create as if you were working as part of any other production crew.

But how does this apply to my role in creating our own webseries? Well, I think I myself am guilty of falling into this false idea that working on a webseries requires ‘less effort’ from a production standpoint. Not all the time, but definitely on occasion. Reflecting on it makes such an assumption seem kind of nonsensical, as in reality other than the connotations previously mentioned there’s nothing explicit to indicate that this would be the case. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun producing the webseries – if you’re creating something you’re proud of, with people you like, then you can enjoy any creative endeavour, but when on set, professionalism is key if the production is every going to run smoothly and effectively. Ultimatley though, it’s something you have to learn by actually doing – if I’d never been part of creating a webseries I never would have realised this.

Friday the 25th of August (and the following Tuesday, actually). Finally, we’re shooting the webseries (well a pilot at least…)

So our two shoots were interesting, to put it one way. I said there’d probably be a lot to learn, and I’m not wrong.

Day 1 was on the Friday. We aimed to start shooting at 1pm, but people arrived sporadically before and after that time, to a point where we probably didn’t start properly shooting things until around 2pm. Therein lies an issue. Why did this happen? The organisation in this regard was definitely lacking, and people were probably not dedicated to getting there on time, which is something that we definitely need to improve on going forward. It was a bit better on Day 2, but there was still definitely room for improvement. I’d say the other biggest issue on the first day was the location. I mean, ultimately, aesthetically it wasn’t a terrible location – it kind of had the quirk we wanted for the webseries. But it was just so difficult to shoot in. It was cramped – definitely not big enough for an entire film crew – and we didn’t have a shot list planned out for the specific location. We only location scouted on the actual day, and so that shot list couldn’t be properly developed for it’s location. That’s a major issue and something for sure we need to do in advance going forward.

Day 2 was definitely smoother, but by no means perfect. Ironically, our location was better to shoot in, and far less cramped, but not as aesthetically pleasing. Harsh white light as well as a white and black colour palette just didn’t ultimately work for the shots we wanted to get. We could tell this on the day – it wasn’t even something that we needed an edit to confirm. Most of the shots just didn’t quite look right in that room, and some of it was down to framing, but some was also definitely down to the room’s colour and lighting. Everyone was definitely more confident with their roles on the second day though – I think progress was definitely made in that regard.

It did suck for me acting on both days though. I wish I could have played a greater role in the on-set production. In hindsight, I definitely think we could’ve afforded to cast actors and delay the shoot a little, however hindsight is 20-20, isn’t it. I don’t think we’ll have this issue going forward though, and I’m really looking forward to getting knee deep into some production roles.