Circus - What Have I Learnt?

Cirque du Muerte has been completed in full and was a success. Even though it did do very well, I will also talk about improvements and what did go wrong.

1) Teamwork. This was very strong in this production, with the director saying she had her "dream team". We are all very organised and got on with research straight away. Me and the director work particularly well together, and coming up with similar suggestions. We has quite a few meetings to discuss shot lists and I would suggest how we could achieve them. I also suggested a few shots, sometimes on the day. My favourite shot of the Hook-A-Duck stall owner as a canted angle (on a slider) was suggested by myself on the day and looks amazing. 

2) Organisation. Even though this worked, this could have been improved. The director knew what she wanted from the actors, but not from the camera. I suggested a few shots of what the director had pictured (we seem to be good at this), but it would have been more helpful if we had finished storyboards so I could see visually what the director wanted. We also had issues with sound equipment over Easter, so communication here would have helped, and we could have avoided recording in camera.

3) Keep pushing! We were going to drop the trombone shot due to how hard and difficult it was, but we still tried, even after the clown dropped out (so we ended up doing it for about 3 shoots). The jib shot was also difficult to execute but we kept trying and did multiple takes at the end of the day until the card filled up. 

4) Continuity. We had to scrap some of my favourite shots due to continuity errors. On a big scale set, one person would be in charge of it, but we left it to the actors and the director, and said to everyone "feel free to go of script, but stick to your words and gestures for the scenes after that". It didn't go well. I'm not sure how we can avoid this in the future (since we are all busy doing our own jobs), we will just have to edit around it.