Aurelija's TV production blog

MICHAELA COEL I found out about her while doing reasearch for this unit. She's mostly known for her show "Chewing Gum" on Channel 4. The shows idea started on stage. Michaela wrote one-woman show "Chewing Gum Dreams" for her collage graduation project (I wrote more about the show in another post). Personally I think she's a great writer and overall person, I loved her acceptance speach in BAFTA 2016 . As a female, who wants one day to work in TV, I'm very happy to see other women succeed in this field. CHARLIE BROOKER I chose him because I love his show "Black Mirror" and wanted to find out more about the mastermind behind it. First, of from what I read about him, he has very dark sense of humour which has got him in a lot of trouble back in the day. I was not familliar with his work before "Black Mirror", but after visiting TV Go Home   I would love to watch some of his previous work, such as Nathan B...

Screenwriting was definitely something that I was completely terrified of doing. I have never written a screenplay before and only had a rough idea how it even looks like. Throughout this unit I found out that coming up with the idea for a script isn't the hardest part. The hardest part is to materialize the idea into a script and make it 10 pages long. At first I thought I'd go with the idea of clashes of class which I described in this post , but after trying to write a script about it I realised I had no idea about what I was writing. Thus I decided to go with a very different theme. I was inspired by what happend to one of my friends. However I tried to imagine the story from a guys who asked her out POV and make it kind of rom-com style. The research I did before starting anything was watching a lot of short comedy films on this website and trying to analyse the pattern and the camera work. I noticed that comedy films have more dynamic camera work than, for example, ...

To be completely honest my shoot was done very last minute, so there weren't a lot of planing done beforehand. The location of the action was the easiest part to sort out. Because I was thinking about how I will be able to film the extract/trailer for the project I wrote it in the semi deatached house in suburban neighbourhood, which is the kind of accomadation I live in so I decided to film inside and outside my rented house and getting the premission of my landlord took me just 5 minutes. Casting also was the least of my problems, because I knew for some time that the character of Charlotte will be portrayed by my friend Gabrielė who as well studies at UCA. The character of Harold was a bit harder to find, but thankfully Logan agreed to help me out.  Because everything was very last minute I didn't have time to do any shot-listing , but because of short daylight hours I decided to film everything within two days. First day we did all scenes inside the house and the ...

CHEWING GUM (2015-2017) It's a sitcom created by  Michaela Coel. What I loved the most about it was the breaking of the 4th wall, which is not a very common feature. The show is set in a council estate and is about a 24 year old virgin black woman, who was raised in a very strict catholic family and the way she decided to live her life like a normal person. The show shines a light on racism ( 02x02), religion(throughout the series), class and sexism(02x03). The show only has 2 seasons and has been discontinued, but the shows witter Michaela Coel has mentioned that there's a season 3 in the plans, however nobody knows when it will come out. The sitcom uses lots of cringe-humour which I tried to replicate (not really sure how it turned out).  I tried to look into the characters more and the way they were more than clichés. For example in the begining Tracy's mom seems to be very religious and narrow minded and even throws Tracy out of her home for hookin...

While looking for short films I tried to look for rom-com style films where the guy faces rejection or is really awkward.   HI-GLOW RETRO One of the first short films that ticked my boxes was Hi-Glow Retro. It's about a high schooler who has a crush on one of the popular girls in school and his main goal is to sleep with her. In order to get laid after the 70's themed school dance he asks his colegue to teach him how to dance. In the end he spends most of the school dance sitting at the table because he was to anxious to go dancing and when he finally steps on the dancefloor he embaresses himself in front of everyone there. However he end up with his colegue instead of the girl he was crushing on. I really liked the fast pace editing (especially 4:32-4:36) and I tried to mimic it within my script. Here characters are geting ready to start the dance lesson, while I tried to show my main character getting ready for a morning run.   TWO DOSAS This short ...

In the last camera workshop for this unit we learned about 180° rule and its importance. 180° rule is having two characters facing each other and imagining a 180° arc surrounding them, as long as the camera is placed somewhere on that arc the characters will be facing the correct way and won't confuse the viewer. To put our newfound knowledge into practice we were given scripts and had to shoot a short video. Probably the most important thing we learned during the workshop is to film the whole scene entirely from a fixed camera position before moving to a diferent one. In the end it helped with the coverage and I could hide obvious 'actors' mistakes by using a diferent shot. 

In one of our camera workshops we learned about the importance of coverage. It doesn't matter that in the end we won't use all of the footage and maybe even end up using just few shots, it's important to have multiple shots from diferent angles so that we would have options while editing.  During the workshop we had two exercises. One of which was "The Chair": It ended up being pretty short video and I ended up not using half of the footage I got for it. For next exercise we were given scripts and had to interpret it in our own way.  While editing I wished I would have filmed few more close up shots and to have actually filmed the whole scene from fixed camera positions.