Interpretations: An Evaluation

My multi-camera production was called Interpretations and was created and produced by Jodie Hadley. My role was the camera operator. Overall, the show went extremely well and I believe we have produced some good content.
The original idea, created by Jodie was to have a studio show promoting the talents of the actors within our college, BOA. There are a large amount of actors that are leaving without any visual proof of their talents and it is usually quite expensive for them to get such high quality equipment to film them. It would also give us the ability to work with the best actors, the ones that were seriously looking to further their careers. This, however did prove to be successful as we could not find any actors who would want a showreel to take with them.
The next idea was then just to draft in actors to read a given piece of text. We found that there were no available online resources for actors looking to study a piece of text in order for them to find a way to interpret it. Through brainstorming, the interpretations idea was then conceptualised. The idea was that there would be three different actors doing the same piece in different interpretations. Jodie consulted with myself and the other cameramen on the project, Laythan Jones and Gurdev Potiwal and we all agreed it was a solid plan.
After a while, we realised that it would be a very big stretch for an actor to learn an entirely new piece of text and to have them all have completely different interpretations. The idea then morphed into having the actors learning songs and speaking them. It would have a certain touch of familiarity as well as allowing the audience to hear words and receive a better meaning from their favourite songs.
We struggled very much so from the absence of any actors. Many people said that they were interested, however we found it difficult to actually lock anyone down. Mr Dodzo helped us out by calling in a friend, Sipho Eric Dube, a local spoken word poet and a former student at BOA. As he is an established spoken word artist, he would also be performing his own pieces as extra material for us to work with. He also became our back up option is our actors could not come or if their pieces were not up to standard.
The day of shooting came and our actors failed to turn up, leaving us to rearrange our show and have it as a piece about Eric.
On the day of filming I arrived at the studio at nine O’Clock and helped Jodie set up the studio as she wanted. It was a simple three camera set up and I was placed on camera three, on the right hand side. This camera was to be used for the zoom shots and getting close ups. I feel as though I could have performed better on this camera, however I did the basic and necessary things, such as framing and positioning of the camera. At times I was not sure how much Jodie wanted me to experiment with the shots so I decided to keep it simple.
Overall I feel as though the project went well. From what I’ve seen, the end product looks extremely professional.


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