Our client Katie Ness, is a working student who likes to belly dance in her spare time, entering competitions and dancing at festivals for entertainment. She asked us to film her dance routines for a show reel so she can show off her talents to other performers and to get her name out into the performing world.
We also decided to do a separate interview with Katie, asking her questions about her self and why belly dancing is so important to her and what other things catch her interests, such as tarot cards and designing and creating her own outfits.
We filmed her questions with a still shot and placed her 3/4 in the width of the frame, your standard interviewee position shot, and shot plenty of cut-a-ways including, her books, drawings, costumes and tarot cards, while she also explained to us what each object was and why it means so much to her, this giving the viewer better insight to who Katie is as a person.
I worked on this project with Katy Larcombe who new Katie from work, who soon became our client. We met with Katie for coffee to get to know her a little better and discuss what she wanted out of these videos. We asked her her thoughts on the matter and what she definitely wanted to be included. We also discussed dates to film, preferred locations/moods and when she wanted the final piece by. Once the meeting was over, me and Katie went on to discuss the more technical side like what equipment we would need, locations and what questions would be most appropriate to ask our subject.
We filmed the interview in Katie’s home, giving us the best access to the objects she wanted to how us and talk about, giving us plenty of cut-a-ways and subject change, using a single Canon 600D and tripod. For our sound we used small mic attracted to the interviewee’s top, connecting to a Zoom. Her hair would sometimes scratch against the mic giving the audio background noise so we had to stop a couple of times to change the position of the mic.
For the belly dancing routines we used the ‘Green Screen room’, using the black curtain as our backdrop and setting up 3 LED lights for a 3 point lighting effect. We used 3 600D cameras, one in still position on a tall tripod at the front of the room to capture her whole body, one on the on a Gorilla tripod on the floor to capture her feet, and another attached to a Merlin Steadicam for movement to capture different angles and close-ups. We didn’t have any problems with the equipment and shooting went smoothly.
We required to any of our clients needs when it came to filming the performance, seeing as we could relate to how nervous she was performing in front of new people and in a location she was not very accustomed too, for example we used a stereo system to play her own music and did everything we couple to make her feel comfortable, giving her her own space to change in and bringing her water during her intervals.
I feel this project went very well, we interacted appropriately with the client, keeping her up to speed with the stages of production and took into consideration any of her thoughts and ideas. I think that me and Katy made a good team and worked together well, working off each others ideas and coming together to create these videos.
We have yet to edit this footage, but we think it will be done ready for our client to use to promote herself on the web soon and we are hoping she will be very pleased with the outcome.
In conclusion i feel i am more confident with contacting and dealing with new clients and i think the outcome to this project will be very positive in terms of Documentary film making.
Lydia A 