UNIT 2C

UNIT 2C - Effective Arts Leadership. 

Effective art leadership involves good planning, and being able to make needed adjustments to the plan as the project progresses.  An effective leader needs to demonstrate that they can offer creative suggestions and solutions, help, direction and support.  They need to be able to listen as well as direct others.

Below is a description of what happened during our 2 day shoot, and I will identify how effective leadership was used throughout the shoot and prior in the planning stages.

Creating a Risk Assessment

It was the job of our First AD to create a risk assessment.  This is needed to minimise the chance of any hazards becoming a threat to us or to the general public. An Example of this could be the chance of injury from tripping over loose cables and leads, we fixed this problem by ensuring that all the wires were taped to the floor so they were no longer a risk.

The risk assessment also identifies some of the challenges we may encounter, and enables us to think about them in advance. This is all part of effective planning and leadership.

Our risk assessment outlined everything that could possibly become a problem when we moved to the Production stage.

Roles and Responsibilities

The role I was given was the Director.  It was my responsibility 'to control the film's artistic and dramatic aspects and to visualise the screenplay while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The Director would usually have a key role in the final selection of the cast members, the production design, and the creative aspects of the project.  A Director needs to have strong leadership skills.

The Shoot - 25th and 26th November 2017

Day 1

On the first day of filming we all got to the location for an early start. The setting for the first day was a cafe in the center of Cambridge called The Brew House. 

It is the corner building with a orange label above it in the image. 

The upstairs was a arty low-lit bar area with 3 log tables. 

We were all aware of what our location looked like as we had sent some of our team out earlier in the week to scout the location.  The biggest problem we needed to fix was the lighting.  By setting up 3 medium sized LED's to light up the room, we also changed the temperature on two of the lights to give the room and our actors a warmer look.

We based our characters in the center of the room so that we had enough room to get long shot from both sides.  Also to prepare for shooting I removed all other crew members from the location so I could see our actors, (called Siey and Buck) perform the script so I could get the acting just how I liked it, Siey and Buck had never met each other before so I thought it would be appropriate to spend some of this time letting them feel more confident around each other. 

Next I asked the crew to watch the acting and see if they where all happy with it too. I feel that listening to, and taking onboard, the opinions of others is a sign of an effective leader.

After we all agreed that the acting was how we imagined in planning, I gave a run down of all of the shots we needed so that we could be most efficient with our time. 

In order to use our time most efficiently I created a Shot-List (a list which shows the order we will shoot the scenes), this is crucial to keeping the project on track.

An important part of the shot-list was making sure we covered all of the shots needed to create our short film.  Only after I had made sure we had got all of the important shots did we consider shooting the more ambitious and creative ones.  As you can see in the image below I used colour-coding system to classify which shots where the most important. 

In the picture you can see that all of the important shots, (for example the establishing shot), were highlighted red, whereas the least important shots (for example the medium long shot, tracking) are in green to signify they are not as important. 

The first day of shooting ran very smoothly, as the environment (an indoor location) was kept constant.  Unfortunately we experienced more difficulties on Day 2...

Day 2

We met at the school, we used Long Road 6th Form as our base as we had access to power sources to charge the batteries, and had toilets for our crew and actors to use. 

We then walked down to a local underpass situated about 10 minutes walk away from the school. 

This day was way more problematic as we had to deal with external factors, such as pedestrians, cyclists, buses and the change in weather - all of these things tested us, and it was my role as the Director to keep our group functioning well under difficult circumstances.

To help out we made signs to explain to passers-by what was going on, and a spare crew-member to stop any cyclists from passing through the underpass whilst we were filming.

The thing I was most pleased with during day two was the quality of the acting (because our actors had plenty of time to get to know each other from the previous day and be more confident with each other and the crew working around them). 

This helped them enjoy the day as much as we did even though some of the uncontrollable factors were not going our way.  

Over the course of the two day shoot, and think I demonstrated that I was an effective leader (particularly on day 2) as I was able to keep the group's spirit high and make sure the task was performed to the highest possible standard.

Post-Production

Once all of our filming was complete, we left the SD cards with the editor so that he could take over and assemble all of the clips and audio together. 

After many drafts we finally got our final short film!