Cucalorus Response

This past week, the Circles team has been working hard as we wrap up production for this semester, so we were all looking forward to Cucalorus last weekend.  The Circles crew was lucky enough to either volunteer for the event or have Pegasorus passes, allowing us to experience the event as a whole. This year was my third year attending Cucalorus, however this year I was able to get their full access badge. I was able to get into the screenings, filmmakers lounge, and the parties throughout the weekend. Some of the narrative screenings that stood out to me were The Arbalest, Hunter Gatherer, and The Love Witch. I thought all of these films have a unique story and what I enjoyed most was that they all put you in a different world or reality. However, my favorite documentary screening was Tower due to its incorporation of animation and its method of storytelling. By having the subject’s younger versions share the story made the documentary relatable to young students which was their target audience. I also enjoyed the Q&A for this block because Hillary Pierce was a panel option this year for Visions so it was fun to hear from her and about her film. I also attended some horror and comedy short blocks, which had a mix of funny, gruesome, and memorable shorts. I thought the parties were very expressive, like the sound wall at the Throne Theater. You can never go wrong with mini tacos. The past two weekends have been a unique experience. Due to my involvement with Visions, I had the opportunity of attending Virginia Film Festival the weekend prior to Cucalorus Film Festival.  Also, another plus is I got a chance to see films I missed out on at Virginia. This unique opportunity allowed me to compare and contrast the two festivals in how they were operated, programmed, and branded. Overall, Cucalorus was a unique experience and I enjoyed being able to partake in the experience as a whole. 

Blog Week 12

As production comes to a close this semester, we are mainly tying up loose ends and getting our rough cut down to a nice fine cut and tying up loose ends. Before this week we had a rough cut of about seventeen minutes long. After another long night in the edit lab, we cut it down to twelve minutes, which was in the time frame of when we wanted it. This week we are focusing on getting our interviews seamless and incorporating close ups and B Roll within the interviews. We are meeting again this week to work on the credits, lower thirds, archival footage, sound, and B Roll. As we gear up for Thanksgiving Break, finals, and Winter Break, the team has discussed duties over break and our game plan for the Spring. As a group, we decided to continue production in the Spring and get 3 more interviews, one per age group, to add more diversity within our film and make the interview sections more relatable and interesting. Over the break we will begin contacting and reaching out to our next subjects and begin to schedule a meet up and an interview time. We hope to get the interviews late January or early February, and have our final cute by the end of March of 2017. However, focusing on this semester, we are in the final stages of getting a good works in progress to show at the Student Screening at the end of this semester.

Blog Week 8

I know I know… I didn’t post last week, but things have been pretty crazy around here! So far we are ½ way done with filming and that is a huge milestone for the team. We launched our Indiegogo at the beginning of this month. We are still working hard and reaching out to possible contributors but still need to raise a lot more. We are scheduled to reshoot our Teenage Scene this upcoming Sunday due to technical issues.  At our last couple meetings we rewatched the old footage and talked about improvements and things we can change for the reshoot. We currently have filmed our Mom scene and Mom interview. Both our mom actors and our mom subjects were wonderful women who each brought something unique to the project. They all look wonderful on film. As of right now, we have a solid rough cut of our Mom scene and are just putting some final touches on it. Our Mom Interview lasted for about 50 minutes and we knocked it down to 7 minutes of footage, which had really powerful content. This week my goal is to trim it down more to around 3-5 minutes to get it closer to its rough cut. The following week we will be filming our Grandmother Scene and our Teenage Interview. The only thing we are still looking for and trying to coordinate is the Grandma Interview. Our main issue with this interview is finding the right subjects to interview. We also have had some technical issues, which we discuss as a team on things we can approve on for future shoot dates. But other than that, the production stage of our project is going well and I’m proud of my team.

Blog Week 5

This week went really well and we are starting to get things rolling as far as production and fundraising. This week at our Crew Meeting we talked more about our Indiegogo Campaign and getting things lined up for that. We talked about possible perks, what we are funding for, goals, and Campaign images. Kebba is working on the content of the Indiegogo page and hopefully we will go live October 1^st.  We also did a final revisions of 2 of our scripts and we will revise the third one this Tuesday. Kebba and I also met with our actors for our Mom Scene this week. The experienced actors gave us a lot of feedback, suggestions, and resources. We casted the moms and did some read-throughs and script revisions. This next week we will focus on getting everything prepared for the scene to shoot next Sunday. This past Saturday was our first day of production and filmed our teenage/ opening scene. We had a lot of obstacles like noise issues and we ended up starting later than scheduled. However, the shoot went surprisingly well even with all the obstacles and hoops we had to jump through. Right now we have solid rough cut of the scene, which we will work on this following week to get another rough cut lined up for next week. This next week we have a lot to focus on. Our Indiegogo will launch next week and we also have a scene and an interview we are shooting this weekend that we have to get ready for. Overall, my crew is pretty much kicking ass.

Blog Week 4

This week went really well and we accomplished a lot. As far as the scenes, we have met with our scriptwriter multiple times and will have the final drafts of our scripts by our Tuesday meeting this week. Last weekend my crew went to New Hanover High School to get some B-Roll as well as getting more shots for our ending. Along with getting some test shots, our crew also met with our subjects and actresses (2 different meetings) for our teenage segment of the documentary. We are scheduled to shoot the scene this weekend and the interview along with the Grandmother’s scene the following weekend. Our project requires a lot from the producer, having to schedule and cast 10 actresses and 9 subjects is a lot of work. So far Kebba has done an awesome job staying on top of things and getting all the necessary logistics in place. The meetings with our teen actresses and subjects went extremely well. All of the girls seem very excited about the project and the teenage subjects already started talking about past friendships and women shaming they have personally experienced. Along with getting our production underway, my group has also been brainstorming distribution and possible marketing items. We debated about crowdsourcing and the best program to use as well as the necessary content for the page. We are also beginning to do some production design for our scenes in purchasing necessary props.  Overall, this week has been very productive and we are all super excited and prepared to begin production this weekend.