Dolphinholme trip

We began the Dolphinholme trip with a quick briefing on the rules and layout of the farm as well as what we were expected do during our stay, admittedly I was feeling up to the trip due to the weather, regardless, we were put into groups and sent off to our yurts:
A yurt is a portable, bent wood-framed dwelling structure traditionally used by nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. The structure comprises a crown or compression wheel usually steam bent, supported by roof ribs which are bent down at the end where they meet the lattice wall (again steam bent). The top of the wall is prevented from spreading by means of a tension band which opposes the force of the roof ribs. The structure is usually covered by layers of fabric and sheep's wool felt for insulation and weatherproofing.

After becoming aquinted with where we would be staying for the night we went back to the meeting point and were briefed specifically on what we had to do, whilst there we had to produce a film using the farm and the surrounding area as our shooting location. We decided that it would be best to split the crew into two team as there was a lot of us in one group, we probably could have done with a smaller group in hindsight but it wasn't that much of an issue once we split. As a group we decided that we would produce a documentary and a promo for the farm, we would need to gather footage of everything from the other fine art students taking part in photography activities and textiles, to the goats and other animals around the farm. We managed to secure an interview with John Gorst, the owner of the farm which would be invaluable to the effectivness of the documentary since he could give us an insight into how the farm runs and what it's like to be a goat farmer.

My main role was operating camera on crew B, we went to the barn to gather shots of the goats and also managed to get some footage of the pregnant goats being scanned and sorted, aswell as footage of some of the newborns. We also went up to the top of the farm in order to gather establishing shots of the entire farm and film the sign. The only issue I had throughout the shoot was that most of crew B didn't seem willing to do much work and instead stayed in the yurt due to the weather, this meant that some of crew A had to break off and join cre B in order to make sure we got all the footage we needed, regardless we did indeed get some interesting footage and the interview was very successful since we had a lot of time to prepare multiple questions and work out where would be best to shoot it. We decided on the barn finally as we get shoot the interview with a backdrop of the goats pen, which was apt since John was talking mostly about tending to the goats and the process involved in producing milk and cheese.

At night we were all invited back to the barn for a showing of Everything is Illuminated, staring Elijah Wood. Although I was cold and absolutely exhausted I still managed to watch most of the film and thoroughly enjoyed, I thought there was a nice mixture of comedy and drama and overall I enjoyed the storyline: A young Jewish American man endeavors to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II in a Ukrainian village, that was ultimately razed by the Nazis, with the help of an eccentric local.

In the morning we were tasked with filming confessions in the barn, this entailed gathering as many people as we could to admit something infront of the camera whilst we filmed. I was on camera for part of the session and for the rest of the time was in charge of sound. I felt like we were quite limited for this session as we couldn't get as many people as we would have liked to come and admit something, however we did get a reasonable of people willing to take part. Another thing I wasn't too happy with in hindsight was how whenever a new person took over the camera they would alter the shot to try and make it better (me included), this meant that during editing it looked slightly off from shot to shot also the white balance changed from confession to confession making some look overly blue, but this can be corrected in editing.

Post trip
Me and Will began to edit the footage we had collated during the trip and came up with this short promo for the farm.