Week Nine

21st September

 

Our official production began on Monday, it was a long but rewarding day. After collecting our equipment we headed over to the Footscray drill hall where we interviewed the Women’s Circus’ current artistic director, Penelope. In our interview with her she gave some really great insight into the reasons behind her choice to join the Women’s Circus, a decision she made only a year ago, and why it is so pivotal to our 2018 contemporary society to have an organisation for women run by women. After we interviewing Penelope, she introduced us to Devon Taylor, another worker as the women’s Circus, whom we then decided and asked to interview to give us greater insight into how the Women’s circus has changed and developed since it began in the early 90s. Devon articulated for us that the biggest changes for the circus was moving towards being more inclusive and extending the definition of “women” who can join the circus to anyone whom has identified as a women at some point of their lives. After wrapping our interviews and cut aways at the drill hall we headed over one of the circus training sessions at the Northcote town hall. We were warmly welcomed by the women and invited to join their warm up games, which was a great way to build confidence and trust between us all, which is something interesting tho think about and consider for future productions where you may be putting a camera in someones face and asking them to act natural, especially in documentary, having a comfortable and trusting environment between those infant and behind the camera can really transform the project. On Friday we were lucky enough to secure a really last minute interview with Donna Jackson, the founder of the Women’s circus, whose interview was real game changer. She was an amazing subject a revealed some really great stories and thoughts on the Women’s Circus. After meeting and hearing about all that Donna has done got us all very fired up and excited for not only our own project but maybe possible future projects where we all agreed it would be amazing to work with Donna again. The biggest learning point we took away from our production week was to always make sure you have all your equipment and to check, check, check. After we rented our camera we were told there would be a lapel mic in the bag but unfortunately when we arrived we discovered it had not been put in, our bad for not checking!! As this weeks reading highlighted “a directional shotgun microphone cannot work magic”, thus in post production working on the sound throughout our videos will definitely be one of the biggest challenges we will face.