The Appropriation of Blog for Academic Purposes

Ok, so, this is now and for the next six months or so to be considered as a part of my "reflective practice". 

I completed - at last - the little comedic semi-documentary I had been filming over the summer about the local tug-of-war team. I'll try to upload it though it'll probably take hours and hours.

Whilst I was editing that, I was storyboarding for the short film I'm AD on, "The Woodland Graves" outside of Uni, which shoots for three days over next weekend (very. excited.) and also brainstorming ideas for the documentary we're making within Uni.

Taz, Alice and I decided to defy convention - no buses, bikes or hospitals for us - and find out about ghosts. But seeing as we were confined to a subject based on Manchester's main road, Oxford Road, we needed a ghostly location nearby. We hit upon the Palace Theatre, and brief research showed that it was indeed haunted.

Our first grapple with filming had me on camera, Taz on lighting and Alice on sound, and took place on Halloween - £10,000 worth of film equipment and a lot of drunken Mancunians was a recipe for potential disaster, but we, and the kit, survived and got some entertaining vox pops.

After this we had a brief dry spell where we felt like we were chasing people via email and phone calls and getting nowhere, but Alice found some local ghosthunters who were happy to talk to us, and Taz tackled the Palace head on and got us permission to film.

Thursday night we trudged down to key103 with our kit and eventually found the right door, got let in and had a lovely time talking to the Mischievous Spirits crew. The next morning we were at the Palace talking to Lisa, the assistant, and to a cleaner, Sylvia, who's seen the ghost herself. After our previous night, and now with being alone in a huge dark haunted theatre, we actually got a little bit freaked out ourselves...but we didn't encounter the Grey Lady ourselves, even though I swear the box she haunts is at least 3 degrees colder than the rest of the auditorium.

So now the first stage of editing commences, I've been at this desk for hours, my fingers are like ice. We've got about 16 good minutes, so obviously it needs reducing more to fit out 6-12 minute time limit, and we need to get our music sorted etc.

I should mention the hassle I've gone to to even actually be ABLE to edit this right now: finding [and stealing] my family's miniDV camera, buying a firewire, re-formatting (wuth a great deal of difficulty and geeky confusion) an old external hard drive to use with my mac - it doesn't have enough memory on its own to cope with this level of filmmaking- and getting hold of and installing Final Cut Pro. All because those damn Film and Video students have booked out the editing suites and I hate the idea of missing my deadline for this project.

So...watch this space? I guess!

Jenny