Individual Project_01
Working in a company either that is small or big is a great responsibility. Archangel Productions is comparatively a small production company but very progressive and fast in complete productions. I joined with them for work experience on May 2005. I started my job as a technical assistant. The project was a DVD set of 8 volumes featuring First Aid training. The goal was to produce a high quality marketable product that would be a good training resource for businesses, schools and training organizations. Each DVD features a few topics, with a chapters menu to go to each one, and a title page. Each DVD contains only 15- 20 minutes of grouped topics, to simplify the selection process of the huge variety of topics to be found in first aid.
I was involved with this project from pre production by doing shot composition and framing using my technical knowledge and ability. I had to work a lot for this because if the storyboard worked properly and the sequence was right, then the project would be easier to shoot and accomplish. This pre production time took almost two months to finish though we were changing things all the time as new ideas play in the mind constantly. I worked 20 hrs per week though it does not seem a lot of hours of work but I also had to think about the project when I was at home. The truth that I found when working in a positive environment is that love grows for the project. It helped me to work for the project with great passion. Also lot of patience is involved in it.
During the production time my role was frequent in all areas of the production. I assisted the director of photography, worked as camera operator, stage management, lighting, boom and microphone operation. Working in these multi platform environments I learnt how to organize the production step by step during production time. Unfortunate things come up all of on a sudden and that is why we always had a plan B. I found sometimes plan B is rather more supportive then the master plan and also it gives the production a bit more freedom and control. Our budget was tight for this production so we could not visit our location before the day of shooting but we had some stills of the location and we pictured our camera setup in the stills and as planned it worked very well. I think that is very cleaver thing to do. So if the budget is tight we always could ask someone to send us some stills of the place so that at least we could guess how things will be.
The whole October to December 2005 we spent lot of our time for postproduction and we did it successfully and fortunately without any hassle. As I mentioned earlier the more you give effort in the pre production stage the smoother the production and postproduction work gets. We basically used PC computers and Windows software. In this stage I did not really work much but I was with the editor most of the time. As everything went planned the editor did not find the work very tough and eventually we were more relaxed in this stage.
