My Essay Evaluation
'Directors provide the vision and creative leadership for a project. They determine and guide the narrative content and visual style of a production, and are sometimes the creator of the original designs. In the early stages of production, they work closely with the Producer(s), Scriptwriter(s) and Production Designer.'
I found, from being a director, that you really need to trust your team and have faith that they will do whats been asked, otherwise what you tend to do is take too much control over the project, get to precious over it and end up doing all the work your self.
I think the main reason for this happening is when the director them self can't communicate what they want the piece to look like, this could be because they don't have a clear vision in his or hers own head.
This is why I made sure I had references of other pieces of work which I wanted the project to ultimately look like. These references were there to help me communicate the idea to the team, so hopefully they will be on the same wave length. I think people understood what the final out come was going to look like roughly...but i had a tiny bit of doubt, only because I had a video references which I kept on saying "i want this bit from this and that bit from another"...
...thats when Dave Bagulay, the producer, suggested me and him make animatics so people know the exact route were heading in. You could say this is us starting to get precious about the idea, but I agreed with the plan and thought of it more as and exercise which was meant to get across clearly the vision in my head better to the team.
This also lead to a rough script being made, and once everyone had seen the initial animatic, people were more clear with where the project was heading and people became more keen to get involved. For example; Luke Haslam liked how we envisioned the script (only possible through doing the animatic) and wanted to get on board with the script writing, and the same with Sarah, she was also keen on getting involved with re-editing the script.
This is where I started to step back. I left the script in the hands of Sarah and Luke...but I gave them restriction...I made it clear that i didn't want a new script...i just wanted a few things tweaked. Make the wording better. And also, less wordy...like this evaluation should be.
When it came to filming for the animatic, I did nothing except tell people what needed to be shot. Two teams of two; Sarah and Barney, Matt and Luke. My only criticism on the filming side of things is that i didn't give specific shots to shoot and I forgot to tell people to do different camera angles on each desision... this lead to people coming back with one shot for each decision, and if it wasn't right hen we had to just deal with it for the time being (if we were running out of time)
So yer, i could have been more specific with what I wanted visually.
To conclude, Me and Dave worked well together, I wasn't stepping on his shoes and he wasn't stepping on mine. I put my trust in him to run around finding out if everyone is doing what there suppose to be doing...it can be hard at times not to just take matters into your own hands and ask people your self...but like I said I trusted him to do his job.
And vice versa , Dave didn't take over as Director, he left me to making the final decisions, pardon the pun!, but at the same time he gave his opinion to take or leave it.
I was pleased with how I directed to an extent. I played the role how I was suppose to play it, I just created the vision of the piece and gave creative leadership. Hopefully I'll learn form my mistakes and hope that by the time we have to pitch to the neighbourhood, we have something really nice to show.
