REFLECTION OF STOURHEAD
I visited Stourhead along with the first years of my course and some of the other year twos to help them out with getting extra footage and directing the interviews. The client wanted a video based on the Genius of the place, getting a presentation to understand what we needed to create for the client and how they wanted us to represent it to the audience that watches the video. The presentation was put in place for us to be able to understand the topic that they wanted us to cover throughout the video and what the main focus would be, also helping us gain a better understanding of the topic before going out and interviewing workers and volunteers around Stourhead.
This experience was important as it allows you to work alongside a company and to produce a video that you may of not thought about, being able to learn more and to share your own knowledge with the company. It also allows you to learn to work in teams and keep up time management, being split into groups to collect different groups of footage and to arrive at interviews at the right time. Doing interviews are also very important and a good skill to learn as it gets you to speak to others, being your confidence in speaking and communication whilst also teaching you more about the interviewing process.
The whole aspect of this client video is to learn how to be professional which is an important skill before applying to universities and work placements as they will expect you to work well and professionally. They will also expect you to be able to work in teams and to rely on each other to cover the topic even if you don't cross paths for the rest of the day, this being exactly what happened at Stourhead. It gives you a sense of responsibility that you wouldn't normally get to have when working in a group and makes you see a different perspective as you are creating a video for another person, not how you wish it to look.
I was directing a team on the interviews, making sure that the cameras were framed correctly and that the audio was correct and working. This role allowed me to take charge of a group and present myself in a more important and professional way, helping teach the year ones what it is like to work on a professional project and how you should work around it as I have already worked on a video for Stourhead before, knowing how their company works and what they expect.
I feel like the process went well, all of us working well together and gathering all of the footage we needed, today all of us sharing the footage between each other. We all worked well as a team and managed to film everything we needed, all of us gathering enough footage between us. One issue we had was that some of the people asking the questions didn't understand the topic, meaning the questions wasn't detailed enough but luckily my team had a representative from Stourhead who helped us along the filming process.
Another issue we had was that some people were reluctant to be filmed but we managed to convince a few of them by saying that they could be interviewed together rather than alone about the topic. Some also asked us to come back later to be able to think about the question before we filmed them, allowing their answer to be more sophisticated. Resolving these issues wasn't much of an issue, managing to find others to interview or covering the questions correctly, but could have been easier if more of the staff at Stourhead knew about the topic and were more happy to be filmed.
Overall the whole filming process went well and we managed to get enough footage to cover the topic in a promotional video for Stourhead. Next step for the year ones will be editing the footage to the clients standards.
