I think it really helped that Sarah and I previously visited the store last week to take recce images and see what the space available to us was like, as this became clearer when we were setting up in such a small room. As we had already planned ahead for this and had a good idea of the possible issues we may face in advance, this meant that it became much easier to organise ourselves and the positioning of the equipment and interview set up, and took a lot less time to do so.
The interviewee, Lucy Jo, is one of two of the store's owners and agreed to be interviewed when we visited the store initially two weeks ago. Whilst the interview was not at all rushed, we did agree to only take up about half an hour of her time yesterday as the store front needed to be manned by her whenever possible and we did not want to interfere with the needs of the business. She is happy for us to come back next week to gain any more footage and audio we need and told us we could just come in with our camera at any point during the week as well. I think another aspect that is going well for us is this working relationship that we have established early on with our contributors. We are working with them to discuss the best ways to overcome the issues with the location that we had whilst filming and working around their schedules so as not to interrupt with their daily business. We have recognised that they are currently getting a lot of press coming in who are interested in the story, and so we are working as a group to problem solve in getting the right balance between not being too intrusive but also not wasting any free time that we have to film as much content as possible.
Test shot for the interview set up
The interview itself went very well and we learnt a lot from the responses that we did not previously know or even expect to capture. We kept the camera rolling all the way through instead of cutting after asking each individual question, and after reviewing the footage I think this was a very advantageous choice as we have captured small details that we would not have got if we had cut in between questions. The interviewee was very passionate about the story which helped to drive the narrative of our film, and it is clear it was an emotional topic. The questions that we asked were quite open ended, and we also asked one about what their message would be to the people behind the plans, but maybe something that they might not necessarily already know. From this, we captured that the store itself was not directly told about the demolition threat plans initially, but instead found out via social media, which shocked us all.
One thing that didn't go so well in our interview was the eyeline between myself and Lucy. Because the room was quite small and the equipment had to be set up close to her, it felt like it was quite a nerve-wracking interview and so there were times during the filming in which she would look down or away. As Producer, I feel this was my responsibility to ensure the eyeline stayed focused and I think I could have maybe tried to put her at ease a bit more whilst the camera was being set up which could have made this less of an issue during the filming process. However, I have now learnt from this and as a group we know that we arranged our interview for very early on in the semester and that now we have had the experience of filming one, we have a stronger understanding of the logistics of an interview set up and will employ this in our next and upcoming interviews. Luckily, we did manage to get some good quality interview footage where the eyeline is kept focused and which will be useable, and overall we do share a generally positive perspective on how today went and the information that we managed to capture on both film and audio out of the interview.
Production issues
After the interview, we spent some time around the Devonshire Street/larger Devonshire Green area to try and collect some sound bites from the public about their views on the area. This did prove to be quite problematic as there weren't many people around the area at the time and many of them said that they weren't from Sheffield and didn't know the area. Although we spent some further time there and did gain one or two interesting responses, we decided that the best option would be to return to the store next week and whilst there, try to gather some possible customer contributors. That way, they will definitely know the store and hopefully be willing to give us an insight into the perspective of the customers themselves, which will add to our film as we want to capture a variety of views surrounding a wider community issue.
Another issue was that we intended to go out and gather establishing shots for our poetic documentary in the city centre, however along the main busy street that we planned to film on, there are currently large and high up fairground rides which line the street and block the view we wanted to capture. We tried to work around this the best that we could by filming from a number of different angles around the sides of the rides, but in the end we want this shot to look a particular way that just is not possible with all of the attractions taking up the street at the moment, so here we decided the best thing to do would be to check online to see if we can find out how long these will be up for, and come back next week if these are no longer here, to capture our city centre contrast shot.
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