Week 2...

My second week began with covering a new campaign for the council, which involved a double decker bus, a councillor and some foster carers. After getting lost for 15 minutes (this seems to be a consistent factor in my work day at the moment) I eventually found the location and began setting up. This was a great opportunity for me to try out the wide angle lens within my kit bag as I've never had a full frame camera before and the image quality is ridiculous! After the obligatory getting people to pose in every imaginable spot for the photography i went to set up the video camera for the interview section of the campaign only to turn around and find the bus we were supposed to be using had driven off. Plan B. One of the foster carers kindly agreed to let us use their house for the interview, which actually turned out to be a blessing. I always feel people are more comfortable being interviewed in their own home, plus for a campaign which is centred around carers looking after people in their own home, the location was perfect.
Having shot everything we needed i headed back to the office to rip the footage and get ready for another interview. This one was extremely the easy as i had shot it the week before, but the lovely tape I used decided to cut off the first minute and a half of the footage leaving me without an intro to the person being interviewed. This led on to me cutting the rest of the interviews and presenting them later on in the day with some positive feedback(always a bonus).
With starting my new job I've not had as much free time to get out and explore recently so when i found out i had a whole Wednesday to myself i decided to make the most of it. I'd heard about a distillery up by Pitlochry, called Edradour. It's claim to fame is being the smallest distillery in Scotland, possibly the world. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to make a small film, so i phoned up to enquire about their filming policy and the receptionist seemed pretty confident it would be fine on most of the tour. Alas this was not the case. Upon arrival we were told no filming, full stop. Although they were more than happy for us to take photos in the designated area's. We figured having driven all the way up we may as well enjoy the tour, so off we went on a fascinating whisky adventure. The tour was brilliant, teaching us about the history of the distillery and the process of making the whisky. Did you know that bottles of 50 year old single malt can go for up to £1500!we also got a wee dram, to allow us to fully appreciate the experience:).
Having finished the tour we felt slightly unfulfilled with our lack of filming. My filmmaking friend had mentioned that there was a micro brewery in the area, so we thought we would try our luck there. We arrived at this small barn style building and wandered in, not really sure what to expect. The one worker was extremely welcoming and had no problem with us filming.Score!We were also starving by this point so decided to head across to the local pub for some grub and try the local brews. I had an epic ploughman's, the kind you can only find in small country pubs. Now that we were fed and watered, we headed across to start filming. My friend was shooting on a Sony A1E, a consumer style HDV camera, with an external XLR mic and i had my panasonic GH2 and konig tripod. After chatting with the guy for five minutes we thought it would be great if we could get a mini interview from him as he was full of info about the brewing process having been in the industry for 25 years. So we questioned away, then got some artistic cutaway shots and headed on our way.
My next two days were fairly manic as we had to get everything finalised for the sports awards on the friday. I had two interviews left to shoot, the first very straight forward, the second, not so much. It consisted of about ten excited high school kids who (after the teacher had left me in charge became even more hyper) relished the fact they were being filmed and didn't seem to want to stop talking to each other and the camera all at the same time. I fired through the questions and thought I had enough footage for the interview having not noticed in the swimming pool next door people seemed to be having a shouting competition, just adding to the editing fun!
Having shot the last interview on the thursday afternoon i finished editing later on thursday and prepared for my 12 hr shift the next day. The majority of the day consisted of setting up the room for the awards and finalising the DVD. After a few wee tweaks the films were ready to be shown, we just had to check the sound system worked. Picture the scene, I was alone in a huge chamber style room testing the sound on the films when i heard, "thank you Michael, 313" coming through the speakers. At first i assumed the that someone had a wireless mic and was testing sound levels from outside the room. Nope. My boss walks back in to me looking quite confused, so i ask him, to which he replies, "ah, that might be the the taxi thing"!It turned out that when the sound system was installed they set the frequency to that of the local taxi firm, so whenever they called out from their office, it came through our speakers. Happy days! The rest of the day was trouble free, so all we had to do was get through the night. With all the award winners and delegates arriving we settled into our seats. Within 10 seconds of the first speech we had the taxi company coming through the speakers much to the dislike of the speaker, who turned to us with a baffled look on his face. After the 5th time it happened we decided the only course of action would be to keep the mic's off and just play the sound when the films came on. Thankfully this worked and no more disruptions were had. On the plus side, we were offered a tasty buffet dinner and then got to meet Craig Brown the ex Scotland Football manager, who is a very likeable person with great stories and anecdotes about the Scotland team. Great way to end the week!