Darleen's Evaluation (Blog Post 17)

Agua has been a project close to me since the start. I remember when Kelsey first mentioned her idea to me about seeing inside someone's head who is struggling and then we discussed, with Leonor, the idea of that struggle being not being able to speak the language.

I relate to this very much as me and my parents had to learn Portuguese from scratch when we moved to Portugal years ago. This was a great challenge, specially for my parents, whom me and my sister taught the language by passing on what we learned in school.

Before we actually shot the film, I transformed my full understanding of the story into a shot list, worked on some rough lighting plans and booked out the kit for the shooting dates. After this was done I booked out some equipment to be tested around the set we were using. We blacked out all the set walls will big black cloths and tested dedo lights and some of the cameras. Later, we also played around with the food colouring to see how well it would actually work.

The whole process of this has been quite joyful, having had a great team, time to test set ups and kit. We flowed really well as a group and idea, although I would potentially shoot on a different camera if I was to go back. It has been brilliant to shoot on the Black Magic Pocket, as it was handy and easy, but the fact that we couldn't attach a monitor to it was slightly frustrating as some shots ended up not being 100% in focus or slightly more unstable than hoped.

With this being said, given the fact we only used three small dedo lights I was quite happy with the lighting apart from the sunlight that kept changing in the cafe scene, which was out of our control.

The cafe scene itself I believe could've been shot differently if I had taken more time to look back on the footage. I think the interactions between characters could've been shot slightly differently, I'm not entirely sure how I would reshoot this but I just feel it could be different.

Overall I think we achieved something quite beautiful as a group. As a quite unique dance film, I am very proud of the people I have been able to work with and I hope people take it to heart and think about the topic we have chosen to bring to life.