in this post I will outline as many as i can recall of the major and exacerbative issues that we as a team faced throughout this production's course. this document will be updated periodically and serves the purpose of a record of our team failures, and my own failures as a team member, so we may overcome them.
Primary issues/Reasons for abandonment:
- communication - throughout the first weeks of this unit our team had numerous communication issues. in my view these initially stemmed from a lack of understanding of each other as we had not worked on a large project in the past together. I was worried about how we would split the work, if everyone felt included and whether any of us felt as if we were getting short changed through our divvying of the work. another issues relating to communications was the lack of a constant dialogue, I had no idea what the other members of our group were doing, I had no idea how their portions of the work was going and whether I'd need to question their work ethic(something I am always hesitant to do as it makes me feel like I'm doubting their work ethic and trust)
- other organisations - the initial, pitched show has had to have been redesigned and reformatted several times in part due to the above, but also in part due to the lack of communication from the organisations and groups we contacted. I beleive we waited too long in replying to some, and in the case of others gave them too much leeway as far as their reply times. of the organisations that did reply, one or two pulled out of the project, this led to a breakdown of my understanding of what stage the project was at.
- other responsibilities and distractions - I and one other member of our team have been dealing with outside influences and responsibilities,this led to a lack of focus which resulted in, on my part disorganization and blind panic at some points. these emotions were the result of a large number of different factors, events, and influences, many of which lie outside the remit of this project and so have only been touched upon briefly here.
Our biggest issue was drawn from a lack of ownership on all parts, after a harrowing event happening at my residence, my drive disintegrated, this was through a chain of events following the incident.
the incident was extremely traumatic for me due to my anxiety in relation to privacy and safety, immediately after the event I no-longer felt safe in my home, and I froze up for long periods of time, unable to concentrate at all for two weeks following the event. what I should have done is found immediate professional help, however this is not what I did, I decided to wait and get help by visiting my parents for an extended time, a week after the events happened. this resulted in an "onmni-shambles" whereby I nor my team knew what was going on for a protracted period. this put us severely behind schedule and necessitated the changing of the documentary in its entirety,
The second concept
I then went on to Re-write the concept from the ground up, in an enxtremely short amount of time. this redesigned plan got as far as the scripting stage(can be found (HERE) this concept also failed fairly early on due to some unforeseen circumstances, mapping issues and recce issues.
Reasons for abandonment:
- Recce issues - When preparing this concept I researched possible walks within the Medway Smile area, I wanted a walk that was fairly accessible from Maidstone and one that would show off the biodiversity of the smile area, I wanted to keep it river-based in-keeping with the first Idea, I found a walk starting at an easily taxi-accessible location with a reasonable length that should provide some interesting nature, architectural and geological features. unfortunately the recce I performed was solely from satellite images of the walk's route. In hindsight I shouldn't have trusted circa 2014 satellite maps and, as we've been taught, done a full recce. this wasn't possible due to the timing limits imposed by our previous setbacks, so upon arriving on the walk we realized a series of issues: the path was overgrown to both sides, in extremely bad condition and our walking speed was severely impacted by our heavy kit bags(supplies and cam equipment), and that it was far hotter than any of us had expected(we had looked at the forecast), on the only day that we filmed this concept we managed to walk only the first leg of our route, having been forced to divert due to a part of the path having subsided into the river at one point. we reached Alsebury far behind schedule and completely exhausted, this also resulted in the illness(heat/sun stroke) of myself and a team member,
Final Concept
Immediately following the events listed above, Leo attempted once again(having already attempted contact during our first Idea) to contact The Kent wildlife Trust, we eventually managed to get what we had thought was an interview with their head ranger at their HQ, this however was not the case and we ended up meeting with another member of staff and getting permission to film their small reserve that was attached, this allowed, through serendipity the shooting of some near-controlled environment shots, similar to how larger budget documentaries use completely controlled environments to allow for extreme detail and close ups.
Going out and filming exasperated the heat stroke, putting me in bed for another couple of days, immediately after my recovery I started to put A lot of work into my blog and research, performing an all nighter in the process. doing so with my weak immune system resulted in a cold/flu/throat infection that persists currently due to the workload following. It took a nearly a week for KWT to agree to a shoot day that was only a day or so away, we would shadow their work crew and have access to their lead ranger on that day. going out and shooting this again exacerbated my sickness, and immediately upon minimal recovery I performed another all-nighter attempting to write a script appropriate to the footage, I eventually threw this out and started again in the extremely early morning having worked upon it heavily. the script I wrote during this period can be found (HERE)
This Idea was not formally scripted until after shooting because of ill health and an unsureness in relation to whether we'd be able to shoot. I made a very informal and basic content plan, with sections devoted to three different major themes, along with a planned intro and exit based upon plan 2's intro and exit. a basic formalization of this can be found (HERE).
following the initial roughcut edit I tried to recover as best I could.
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