Today Sarah (cinematographer) and I (Producer) revisited Syd & Mallory's Emporium on Devonshire Street, as previously agreed with the owners, who offered for us to come in at any time to film around the store. We both feel grateful that we've had such a positive experience with contributors and managed to already build up an early established working relationship with them. We were allowed access to the full building, other than the top floor studio space due to health and safety restrictions.
The purpose of our visit today was to gather a selection of close ups, capturing small details of the store that make it so individual and unique. This was a very useful and worthwhile experience as we were also allowed to explore the store ourselves in further details - really get a sense of the place and the hard work and passion that goes into decorating the store as well as picking items which hold meaning. For example, we discovered a lot of historical items, old photographs and keepsakes that made us as the filmmakers ask questions - about who these people were and where these items had originally come from. Our visit today helped us to also establish a theme of our film - preserving an area of the city which holds history and is different to any other.
One issue we did encounter is that because the room spaces in the store are small, we could not set up a tripod due to us not wanting to get in the way of customers and interrupt the daily running of the business, therefore some of our handheld shots will be too shaky and unusable for our film. However, we did manage to get around this in some cases, by using nearby window ledges, tabletops and other surfaces to steady the camera on, and spending enough time reshooting any strong shots a number of times until we felt comfortable with their appearance. We also agreed that we can return to the store to reshoot and gather further material for the full length documentary film in a few weeks time - being prepared enough in advance and booking out a shoulder rig from the creative media store in order to strengthen our panning shots further.
After spending a few hours in both upstairs and downstairs rooms in the store, gathering a large collection of shots, we noticed that Lucy, who we had previously interviewed, was sewing in the store entrance and so we asked if it would be possible to film a few minutes of this, which she was more than happy to agree to. We also had a chat about the current stage of the demolition plans and how much further the petition had raised awareness, and found out that there might be a debate due to the number of signatures the campaign has attracted. We thanked Lucy for her time and letting us spend so much time in the store again, before agreeing to stay in touch.
After today, I feel like our idea is really beginning to take shape and come together, and I am looking forward to producing the final documentary film. There are some group concerns about the two minute poetic piece at the moment, which are mainly due to us having shot more footage and audio for the actual film than for the poetic film currently, however we have arranged a group meeting to discuss this in further detail and have all agreed that this could actually work in our favour, if we take parts from what we have gathered for the actual film and use these in our poetic film - as it is intended to inform our main production.
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