Agua

Taking on the roles: Director, Producer and Screenwriter, I had to organise the production of this project, find and communicate with actors, liaise with café’s, raise funds, manage a budget, direct actor’s actions, form a script and communicate my vision to the rest of the team etc.  Finding a dancer who could choreograph their own dance, act and was bi-lingual, proved to be one of my biggest challenges at the start. However, with guidance from my tutor I began reaching out to a variety of dance clubs and institutions, including “ Northern School of Contemporary Dance” which is where we found our dancer – Louis. This taught me the need to be persistent and brave enough to call places up to get immediate responses. As producer, I then applied these qualities to other tasks I undertook e.g. raising funds, searching for cafés and negotiating prices. As a  director, it was a challenge when communicating the vision in my head to members of my team because of this film’s a...

A blog post by: Kelsey Reid Sound design is also another important element to this film, being that much of the soundtrack is made up out of the diegetic sounds of the mind sequence. During pre-production, Dan, who took on the role of sound recordist, recorded various different Foley sounds e.g. head banging, chains clattering and being pulled tort and the sound of the leather jacket rustling. This was to give us an idea of the different diegetic sounds we had to play with later in post-production. One of the sounds we also intended to use to make up our soundtrack was the faint whisperings of the character Leonardo asking for a glass of water in Spanish. It’s stated that the sound of a voice can act “as another body in the film… acting as a feeling, a texture or even a nostalgic presence” (Guy, 2016). Similarly, the use of this sound adds another layer to our soundtrack, by symbolically giving context to Leonardo’s internal struggle. The decision to have the whisperings spoken...

A blog post by: Kelsey Reid It’s stated that “Video dance operates outside classic narrative structures” (Dodds, 2001) and similarly, our   film isn’t so much concerned with narrative as it is with meaning, feeling and emotion. We wanted the mind sequence to be edited in such a way that it evokes a sense of the character Leonardo’s internal struggle. Therefore, t he edit was one of the most important elements of this film. Bruce Conner’s “Breakaway” (1966) is a great example of how dance and editing can be beautifully married together, which is what we wanted to be able to achieve for our film. However, unlike  Breakaway , this screen dance film not only consists of scenes of the protagonist dancing, but of him banging his head, his foot being held back by a chain and the food colouring being dropped into jars of water. Therefore, all of the scenes needed to be interweaved with one another and edited in the same kind of way.  Editing is a choreographic process, aft...

A blog post by: Darleen Klug & Kelsey Reid Day 1 at Pump And Grind At the start of the shoot, much of our time was spent setting up the equipment, adjusting the lighting and going through rehearsals with the actors. This was extremely necessary to do because once all of this was in place we were able to go through the planned shots rather quickly, so much so we even had time to add a few more shots in before packing everything away.  The day's schedule  08:00 - Meeting to discuss plan for the day and shot list 09.30 - Kit pick up and travel to location 09.50 - Cafe opens 10:30 - We were ready to turn over around  12 -12:30 - Had a small coffee/food break around  13:00 - Back to filming at 13 14:15 - Atmos/room tone before we left  Day 2 at Prime 1 This filming day was spent focusing on our abstract scene. We were in prime studio 1 from about 10am until 4.30pm. We carried out a similar set up to the one we tried out during our ‘tester da...

A blog post by: Darleen Klug We decided to pay Pump and Grind a visit, to adjust shot list if needed, think of lighting, get familiar with the space and check the safety of electricity before the shooting dates. The staff was incredibly friendly and we felt quite lucky to be able to shoot in such a cosy, welcoming and pretty little cafe. Here are some pictures (taken on my iPhone S5) of the location that were reference to the shots we were planning to get for scene number five! And here is a picture of my Martindale Socket Tester plugged into the socket indicating that the electricity is safe to use. And underneath, find a picture that explains how you can identify wether the electricity is safe using this socket tester. Nearly ready to shoot, I completed the kit kist and booked out the equipment from FTU at Prime Studios in Leeds. Then we also completed the shot list and printed it in order to guide the shoot and make sure we were...

A blog post by: Kelsey Reid We held rehearsals on Wednesday 20 th March in one of the studios in the Electric Press. It was important for the whole team to meet the actors and our key dancer Louis so that we could all get to know one another and for our actors to feel comfortable around us. In addition, this was essential so that when it came to our filming day the actors already know what they are doing and we could go straight into filming. During the rehearsal we had our translator come in so that the actor playing the role of ‘Sasha’ could learn how to say her lines in Spanish. This was to save us valuable time on our filming day, especially with only having 4 hours to film our scene. Most of the rehearsal was spent going through the reality scene that was to take place at the café. In the clip seen below, the actor playing the role of the ‘café worker’ played quite an impatient character. There is a line where he tells ‘Leonardo’ the Non-native Spanish speaking boy to spe...