final year client project

As part of my final year client project I am producing a film for a competition for aesthetica magazine. I am going to be be producing this film alongside Duncan leigh who will be producing the film.

The film in which we will be producing is called "how you spend it" (written by duncan leigh) which is a film about euthanasia. The main theme of the story is the connection between a father and daughter and the fathers struggle of the fathers terminal illness.

We aill also be producing a second film called bathroom mirror which we are producing as practice and preparation for our main production.

Bathroom mirror is a short film that is about a man who meets a girl and struggles to pursue her causing him to spike her drink. the reason in which the film is called bathroom mirror is because every scene is located within the bathroom of the mans apartment and it shows the film from the mirrors perspective apart from the end of the film which takes place in the mans bedroom.

title sequence

I have given this assignment alot of thought and have decided to do theres something about mary. The reason i am doing this is because i beleive that i know alot about the film which will spark a few ideas in which i want to do.

i have had a few ideas so far and wish to develop them further. the areas i want to cover are love and rivalry, i also want to reflect the opening scene so my first idea is to do a school like desk with a "mary" section of the desk with love notes etc and the credits to be written out in school like handwriting, whilst animations of the characters appear on the paper, below is a lay out of what i want it to look like:

yet another update (its been a while)

During the last month we have actually filmed our documentary and it has been a bumpy ride. However we did get some really good interviews and i hope some good establishing shots. It has been a rough time on all of the group as we have all been really busy i just hope as the producer i can help pull every one together so that we can create a successful edit.

More about the documentarty however, the interviews that we have had have all been different but just as powerful as eachother, here is a list of the interviews and why they were important to our documentary:

john stapleton: fan of notts county for 75 years
pete ironmonger: relative of player for notts county from 1910
iris smith: head of the notts county supporters group
colin slater: commentater for bbc radio nottingham (50 years at notts county)

we also had two other interviews with people out of the blue which i cant remember the names of but will have the names for the final edit.

overall i think that every member of the group has tried there best to contribute to the documentary itself and that everyone is going to get a good grade on the upcoming peer assessment

update on documentary

Its been a busy week of producing but i think i am finally getting somewhere after meeting and greeting a few people.

Me and ben the director went down to an interviewees house (pete ironmonger) and had a talk with him to see what sort of stuff he knew about notts county and to tell us some stories about his relative who played for the club in the early 1900's, this was very useful.

Later on in the week we had a trip to three places, bbc nottingham to get in touch with colin slater who has been commentating notts county for 40 years, the evening post to get copy right for images out of a book and finally down to notts county ground to talk to the head of supporters group. This visit to the ground was very useful as iris (the head of the fan club/supporters group) is helping us get interviews with some hardcore and longlasting fans who will have hopefully many stories and many views on how the club has changed over the years.

Development

Changes have been made to the ideas of the documentary, We as a group decided to change our approach on the subject of notts county as it was too cliche, so we have decided to look at the "unseen heros" of notts county to get their views on the club and what they do to contribute to the team, This will include interviews with people such as the club chaplain and the groundsman of the stadium and people who are actually unrelated to football.

I as the producer have been contacting the press officer to try and arrange the meetings with these people and to actually get permission to film. It has been tough but I think and hope that I will be able to pull it off or we might have to use our back up idea and do a documentary on the fans of notts county rather than the people who work there.

Further updates on the subject coming soon.

documentary

So we have had our first meeting as a group to decide on the roles for the documentary and what we want to base it on:
The documentary that our group is going to do is about the rivalry between notts county and nottingham forest this will include things like the history between the two clubs and why two football teams arose in nottingham, also we will be talking to the fans of both teams to see what their views are on the rivalry between the two teams and how they respond to how hooligans act etc.

Roles for Documentary

Alan Vickerstaff: Producer
Ben Thorpe: Director
Umar Hussain: Editor
Chris Swann: Sound
Ryan Carthy: Camera

back to work

Back to university after a olong but interesting holiday period.

So we have been assigned the groups for our documentary which i am happy with however the subject in matter of notts county football club i feel is going to be hard to work with without making it a cliche documentary, but hey lets see how it rolls.