Its been a while since I wrote a blog, but I thought that my experiences over the summer were worth a mention...
Way back in the spring around mid May just as uni was winding up for the year, I decided to have ago at making a short film and entering a competition that Mike had suggested I have a look at. Every year at Glastonbury festival a compertition is held for amamature film makers, they give a list of the criteria of films they are looking for and any films deemed suitable are played on some of the screens throughout the festival, they suggest that the films have a strong visual impact as the audio levels can be very poor.
My initial plan was to make a montage of the varying different stages of the festival building up. I intended to film things such as the construction of the fence and staging and also capture some of the creativity that goes in to the festival such as the binpainting and flag making.
Having gained permission from the festival organizer I set about filming. I was initially suprised at the amount of activity on the site so early on, already things were begining to take shape and there were a large number of site crew already living on the farm.
I began by filming some of the construction and people at work, I didnt realy have a plan and found myself going off on tanjents. Where I saw something happening I would go and ask the people working if they minded me filming, some people were not happy to be filmed but most were fine about it, and in many cases people actually wanted to talk about their experiences. What started out as a mission to collect a varied cross section of footage of the festival developing began to turn into a catalog of peoples experiences. Initially I hadnt been concerned about audio as I intended to use music, but I soon realised for interveiwing purposes I needed an external mic and I also installed the help of my freind Liz as the sound lady.
As the festival loomed and the security got tighter we ran into problems gaining access to the site, the result of which left myself and Liz sat waiting by the main gate in the dust and seering heat for two hours while we waited for one very pissed off press officer to come and give us the third degree, after a great deal of explaination we were allowed to carry on but only under the watchful eye of the press office.
One morning I was out filming and was told that there was a suprise parade planned for Michael Eavis, all the site crew had made some sort of an effort to make a carnival like presession, unbeknown to Michael they planned to parade past the farm later that day. I contacted the Press guy and asked if it would be ok to come and film, luckily he was more than happy for me to come along and gave me the green light.
The evenings filming went well and I managed to capture some half decent footage. The next day the press guy contacted me and asked me for 3 minute edit of the evenings highlights. I began work on the edit and caught up with him later the next day, I was shocked when he asked me if I had finished it! when I told him no, he asked if I could turn it around by four o clock that afternoon, as he was meeting the bbc and would give them my footage ( "if it was any good"!)
Heart pounding I raced back home to try to finish it off in the three hours I had. Not been the quickest at editing I had to limit myself to a certain amount of time on each peice, I just managed to do it with no minutes to spare and ended up with my laptop purched on the passenger seat of my van burning a copy to disc as I drove back to the office. The press guy gave it the ok, next it was the boys from the bbc and the Eavis family, I was so nervous as we all crowded around my laptop, every mistake jumped out at me making me cringe, but they did actually like it and asked if they could take a copy. Which I of course was more than happy with...
Way back in the spring around mid May just as uni was winding up for the year, I decided to have ago at making a short film and entering a competition that Mike had suggested I have a look at. Every year at Glastonbury festival a compertition is held for amamature film makers, they give a list of the criteria of films they are looking for and any films deemed suitable are played on some of the screens throughout the festival, they suggest that the films have a strong visual impact as the audio levels can be very poor.
My initial plan was to make a montage of the varying different stages of the festival building up. I intended to film things such as the construction of the fence and staging and also capture some of the creativity that goes in to the festival such as the binpainting and flag making.
Having gained permission from the festival organizer I set about filming. I was initially suprised at the amount of activity on the site so early on, already things were begining to take shape and there were a large number of site crew already living on the farm.
I began by filming some of the construction and people at work, I didnt realy have a plan and found myself going off on tanjents. Where I saw something happening I would go and ask the people working if they minded me filming, some people were not happy to be filmed but most were fine about it, and in many cases people actually wanted to talk about their experiences. What started out as a mission to collect a varied cross section of footage of the festival developing began to turn into a catalog of peoples experiences. Initially I hadnt been concerned about audio as I intended to use music, but I soon realised for interveiwing purposes I needed an external mic and I also installed the help of my freind Liz as the sound lady.
As the festival loomed and the security got tighter we ran into problems gaining access to the site, the result of which left myself and Liz sat waiting by the main gate in the dust and seering heat for two hours while we waited for one very pissed off press officer to come and give us the third degree, after a great deal of explaination we were allowed to carry on but only under the watchful eye of the press office.
One morning I was out filming and was told that there was a suprise parade planned for Michael Eavis, all the site crew had made some sort of an effort to make a carnival like presession, unbeknown to Michael they planned to parade past the farm later that day. I contacted the Press guy and asked if it would be ok to come and film, luckily he was more than happy for me to come along and gave me the green light.
The evenings filming went well and I managed to capture some half decent footage. The next day the press guy contacted me and asked me for 3 minute edit of the evenings highlights. I began work on the edit and caught up with him later the next day, I was shocked when he asked me if I had finished it! when I told him no, he asked if I could turn it around by four o clock that afternoon, as he was meeting the bbc and would give them my footage ( "if it was any good"!)
Heart pounding I raced back home to try to finish it off in the three hours I had. Not been the quickest at editing I had to limit myself to a certain amount of time on each peice, I just managed to do it with no minutes to spare and ended up with my laptop purched on the passenger seat of my van burning a copy to disc as I drove back to the office. The press guy gave it the ok, next it was the boys from the bbc and the Eavis family, I was so nervous as we all crowded around my laptop, every mistake jumped out at me making me cringe, but they did actually like it and asked if they could take a copy. Which I of course was more than happy with...
Here it is ...Glastonbury Site Crew Parade.
I wasn't quiet sure what was going to happen to my footage, it was only when fellow student Anthony texed me to say he had seen my work playing on the pyramid stage and then I later saw it for myself, I was pleased to see that they ran the whole peice and the credits were on the end. After the festival the Press guy contacted me to say well done and that the bbc had used some of my clips on T.V.
What an exciting month and an excellent learning cerb, I realised how much I had learned in my year at uni and I had the experience of working with all types of people on many levels, from interveiwing to dealing with officialdom. In this sort of media enviroment I soon realised that you need to have plenty of 'blag' a lot of cheek and a certain amount of luck to get ahead. It also became apparent to me that Its not what you know but who you know that hold the keys that unlock some of the doors (or in this case I should say gates)......
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