Thursday 27th January

Today Harry continued with finalising the edit. Unfortunately Edem was unable to attend because of a football injury. As I had scheduled lectures upstairs from where Harry was editing I tried to make an effort to go and check on the progress every half hour or so. Once my lectures were over I was able to stay with Harry to continue making the final touches. There was a point where we thought we had lost all of our work when a member from another group switched off the wrong plug switch, prompting our computer to zap off. But luckily Harry had been remembering to save our work so only minor details were lost. This did unfortunately add about another half hour onto our work time though once the system had rebooted.

We managed to finish our edit and asked the opinions of other members of the class which received positive feedback. I am very pleased with the final edit and feel that we really managed to show the stressful process of organising a film festival. I hope that organiser, Trish Davidson will be pleased with our film too.

It was then time for me to set up the DVD menu using DVD studio pro. For a reason we never got to the bottom of, when I tried to import the video file into the DVD studio it only imported the audio. Unfortunately Rich Wood was not on hand to help my errors as I'm sure he would have managed to sort it out! So instead we had to use iDVD. I had already used this software before and although I would have liked to have used DVD studio pro because it seems that you have more options. However, I am quite pleased with what I managed to create on iDVD.

DVD Studio Pro - or - iDVD??

Another problem with our DVD was that the file Esther had sent me for the cover had changed format when I tried to print it so came out the wrong size. So I unfortunately had to use a print out from our research folder for the cover instead.


It is such a shame that the little bits of presentation did not work out how I would have liked them too. It is those minor details that make films look more professional. I am very happy with the edit but feel that the presentation could have gone much better.

Monday 24th January

Today we all met at midday to continue editing. We made steady progress following Friday's session so we just needed to continue working to make our edit as good as possible.

At 2pm I met up with Richard Wood to go through an introduction to DVD authoring exercise. During this I learnt how to design and plan the menu on the DVD. This included using pictures and applying the play buttons. It was all quite a lot to take in at first but Rich said to draw up a plan of how you would like the menu to look. The unfortunate thing is that you cannot really create the menu until you have the finished video so I would have to wait until we had the finalised edited piece.

I have to say I am very pleased with the progress. Harry, Edem and I have all played a major part in the editing process and will continue to do so this week.

Thursday 20th January

Today we spent most of the day editing our footage. We also decided on what music we would like to use for our opening scene. We wanted to start off with footage of the general public, in black and white, slightly blurred and with facts about human trafficking appearing over the image. When we edited this together we found it looked very effective, we are as yet unsure whether to just use the words on screen or to include a voice over. The music we have decided to use is by Nine Inch Nails from their album 'Ghosts' which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License, meaning we can use the music without any copyright restrictions or permissions. We have found a few of the tracks on the album are suitable for our film.

We are going to meet up first thing tomorrow morning to continue with editing. As Esther is going away tomorrow we are going to set up a schedule with regards to post-production, like editing and DVD authoring.

Tuesday 18th January

Today we continued logging and capturing our footage. We noticed a couple of areas where there was no sound which will of course, cause major problems if the second camera wasn't picking it up. We think that this may have been because the camera was set up to use an external microphone which was then removed from the camera so the internal mic was picking up nothing. This really should have been spotted while we were filming and this has taught us all to check, check and check again. While logging and capturing we took this opportunity to log any important parts of the interviews, making a note of the time code and what relevance the particular shot had.

We have also been discussing music to use in the film. Our first idea was to use music by classical singer Jatanil Banerjee because he did a pre-film performance at the festival. However, I was unfortunately unable to find any contact details for him. I will email organiser Trish Davidson to see if she has a contact number for him. We also have the option of using music from Trish's husband, Howard Davidson who is an established composer. If we are unable to use any of the proposed music then we have decided to use Nine Inch Nail's-Ghosts because they have made it available for anyone to use, without any copyright restrictions.

Monday 17th January

Today we all met at the Gatehouse to start logging and capturing our footage. This can be a long process, considering we have 4 tapes worth of footage to get through, so Harry and I decided to upload to separate computers to minimize the time spent. We also went through ideas for our DVD cover and Esther got started editing some images together on Photoshop. We also started to compile our group project folder and individual folder.

Friday 18th November

Today we had our scheduled interview with Trish Davidson. Unfortunately I was unwell on the day of the interview so was not able to attend. However, once this interview is finished, then we have all of our footage. We have decided to edit the film after Christmas as we all have many other deadlines to contend with. It feels great to know that we have all of our footage and we still have plenty of time in case we have missed anything.

Wednesday November 10th

Unfortunately our interview with Trish Davidson had to be postponed due to her hectic schedule. So filming today proceeded at 5pm. I had managed to book out two Sony Z1's, an external mic and a Manfrotto tripod.

On the agenda today was:

• Film everybody setting up
• Introduction to "It's a Free World" by Ken Loach, with a talk from Nick Kinsella
  
• Question & Answer session with director Ken Loach
  

We decided to set up one of the cameras at the top of a staircase near the entrance of where the film was going to be shown. It had a great shot of all of the exhibitors and campaigners setting up their stands and gave a great overview of the foyer. I then took the second camera and went around on foot getting footage of everyone setting up. We managed to get some impromptu interviews with another organiser, a spokesperson for Greenpeace and also the head of the UK human trafficking centre, Nick Kinsella. These all went very well and all were given release forms to sign which they were happy to.

Unfortunately a scheduled interview with Ken Loach did not go ahead as planned. However, we did manage to grab him for a quick interview before his question and answer session. We were very pleased he was happy to help us out and he even suggested that he would like to give a lecture at our university at some point.

It was then time for him to give his question and answer session, which we filmed a portion of. We were all really pleased with how this evening went. We worked in a very professional manner and seized some great opportunities for interviews. Though a few of these were not planned it really made us realise that you need to take risks to get what you want and it is best to speak up to be heard!

Trish said that she will get in touch with us regarding an interview with her next week, so once that is shot we will have all of our footage. Great progress!