Contextual research (screenwriters)

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 Barley and Spoons. Learning more about him may not impact my project, but it sure explained some of the dark details in "Black Mirror".

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DIRECTIONS

The magic 2 every director has to think about is: 1) what's in front of the camera 2) where's the camera positioned. It's important to read the script and break it down to questions: How? - style, mise-en-scene, mood. Who? - cast, crew, collaborators. Where? - locations, set. What? - production, costume, sound design, editing. Key director moments: How you pesent the character. Where you set the story. How you position the light. How you edit the story (rhythm, tone, mood). For our first Directions unit lecture we had to get into groups and have a go at directing a short scene. I found it to be very difficult to direct my DP instead of handling it myself. I ended up with a lot of spare shots I didn't need or couldn't use (mainly because it was hard to get the ball of paper to land into the bin) but the end result didn't disappoint me.

Studio Idea

Personally, I found it really difficult to come up with an interesting studio production idea. But because "one idea is not enough" (Brown and Duthie, 2010) I came up with 3 initial ideas: 1) Guess the song type of game show, but instead of guessing pop songs, the contestants would have to guess classical music. I got this idea from a game my friends and I loved to play and the way my music teacher used to test my class. 2) Travel guide about how to make the most of your trip, places worth visiting and places that are overrated and not worth your time. I got this idea from my sister who travels a lot and from the way she does loads of research about each and every place she visits. 3) Debate/Game show where 2 groups of people debate about nerdy topics ( whats better Marvel or DC, which Doctor was the best etc.). The idea comes from noticing how much rivalry there is between comic book lovers and overall 'nerds'. I feel like this idea is the stronge...

Camera workshop (coverage)

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.

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