WEEK 2

This has been a great week for me. This week my main task was to help out with the thriller style video shoot. This was organised to be a promotional tool for the event and was aimed to attract people to be part of the audience at the event as well and applying to be a part of it. We used a dance group from a local Swanage school that had choreographed and performed the dance themselves. The dance was inspired by the Michel Jackson thriller dance and was performed to this song. There were six girls that performed the dance dressed in ripped clothes with white painted faces. It created a great atmosphere in the town as everyone came to watch.
It was great fun and I really enjoyed my day working closely with Matt and Anneliese. They managed to give m an insight of their skills when handling a promotional event like this.

I turned up on the day of the shoot to find out that the road closure that was meant to happen, hadn’t! This was a slight set back and I found out that it was due to miss-communication between the council and the police. However we managed to find two other areas for the shoot which were just as good. It was a really sunny day which was perfect for us as local people and tourists were out and about by the beach and interested in what we were doing. One of my main jobs for the day was to get as many flyers out as possible to promote the event.

Before any filming was to take place I had to collect any outstanding permission slips from the girls who where taking part in the video to say that their parents where ok with them being filmed. For this I had to make sure their name, date and guardians signatures were correct before any filming commenced. Through working on a project like this I have already learned from Anneliese that you need to constantly think about child protection and legal aspects of this as it is so easy to accidentally breach them. Licensing and permissions from parents is a big aspect of this project and I find it very interesting. As Matt was the only named person on the consent forms to film the girls he was the only one able to do it.
We filmed the dance video in two locations with three or four takes in each. The two locations were both in public places attracting many passers by creating much attention for the event. We had many takes of the thriller dance which meant there would be a lot a material that could easily be edited together. I was also able to learn a lot from Matt about how to create an effective video with the angels and different views you can shoot the video from.
Overall this day was a great day and the girls who did the thriller dance were amazing!

This week I also visited the Mowlem Theatre with Matt which is where the event is going to be held. This was a chance for me to see the venue for the first time. The theatre is local in the Swanage town by the seaside and it can seat 350 people so is fairly small and it is a little out of date with its technical equipment. With Matt we went round the theatre as he explained to me the different equipment they had they and how they are used and what they are used for. This was extremely educational for me as I have never worked in a theatre before and the technical aspects where one of the things I wanted to learn about on this project. After we figured out what equipment the theatre was able to offer us we then sat down went through any external equipment that we will need to hire in to the theatre for the event. This at first was a big list but after talking to the rest of the team we realised that we may not need as much lighting equipment as we thought.
In our meeting we discussed the fact that all acts of the talent show should have the same lighting and sound equipment to make it fair to all contestants. As there will be many band and dance act our initial thought was to create a show and as for these acts there are many things you are able to do with lighting and with other acts such as stand up comedy you can’t. However this may affect what is considered as quality of the performance so we concluded that all acts will have the same standard sound and lighting.

After this discussion I was then able to go back to the list of external equipment we would need to hire and price up each item to go into the budget. This meant liasing with Matt to find out local equipment hire companies and working with him to find the best deals through people he has worked with in the past.