The Hope Box.

Not only did I conduct my Mum's interview over the Christmas period, I also did the hope box sequence too. She spoke about the hope drawer or hope box in her interview and since I'm looking at a more personal side, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to show the audience inside her box. 

Inside her hope box she had hats, booties, jumpers and baby blankets that I did many extreme close up shots of, because I wanted to really show the detail that was going into each of these small pieces of clothing. 

I also created a small montage of throwing the jumpers on top of each other through a small part of the interview. I didn't want to add all the baby clothes into one sequence and I think it looks a lot better split up.

The Title.

After not having a title for the documentary for a long time, I decided on the title, "Knit and Knatter". This was because the knitting group was called Knit and Knatter; although I soon spoke to my tutor and she suggested to try and connecting it more to the knitting side of things, rather than the group side. There is a lot of footage of the group but my version of the edit is more about my mother and the personal side to the knitting whereas my partner's edit is more of a group element. After taking this into consideration, I chose the title, "Knit One Film One". I was worried that others wouldn't get what I was referencing; in knitting there are a large number of ways to knit including the knit stitch and the purl stitch. On many knitting patterns, you have to knit one, purl one (or in the abbreviated term, K1P1) or even knit two, purl two and film sounds similar to purl, so I think it adds a little twist to not only the title but you technically learn a stitch before the film even begins.

My Latest Meeting.

Following my meeting with our tutor on Thursday (5th December), my mind is truly at ease. The previous day I was made aware that we couldn't go re-shoot at the evening group because they had finished for Christmas; this was a huge blow because I felt like over this entire week, it was just one thing after another. As I explained in a few posts back, we have to do a complete re-shoot but now that I have seen the footage; I completely understand why and this will help advance our documentary, and make it the best it can be. I realize that this type of back and forth happens every single day on big and small productions in the media industry, but it all became a little overwhelming for a while.

I haven't had a lot of contact from my partner but I'm going to continue to film what I need to film, get all my documents together and continue to bring our idea to life, regardless.

We're ripping out a few rows and knitting them again.

If I sat and here and told you that I wasn't worried about an early meeting with our tutor, I would be lying. I had a feeling that we had done something wrong, or something just wasn't right. My partner and I were unable to go to the meeting together so we went individually instead.

After talking through with our tutor, we have decided to do a re-shoot of both knitting groups. When I first realized that this may be the case (the day before the meeting), I have to admit, my confidence took a good kicking. At this point, I didn't know what was going on but I knew something was wrong, and everything I had done up until that point (with the documentary production), I had zero confidence in it at this point. A part of that is obviously something that is in my head where everything has to be perfect, and of course, nothing is ever perfect but that's something I have been working on the past few years.

Our tutor and I looked through the footage together (which I hadn't been able to watch yet due to other projects production work taking over) and everything she explained she didn't think worked, she was completely right. For example, the second group we went to at night; we tried to do a wide shot of the entire group, and because there was so many people in the group, the shot simply didn't work because of numbers. Another problem we had was we tried to shot it handheld instead of using our tripod (which we had on both trips). On the camera when looking back over a good majority of the shots, the footage looked great, but when we looked at it on the Macs, you could see the shakiness of the camera and it didn't look like it would blend together as well as we had hoped. We also have a number of focusing and framing issues; we needed to capture more of the knitting and then capture who the person was that was knitting the project. The biggest problem we had was the time of each clips; the shortest one was nine seconds so for our next shoot, we are aiming for a minimum of thirty seconds for each clips and even try for two minute shots at a time.

During and after the meeting, I didn't feel as bad about having to do a re shoot. I still blame myself to a certain degree but this happening, it will help us in the end make a better documentary, which is our goal of course. This is a huge learning curve for us both, and this experience will help us in the future no matter what type of film or television work we do. 

Confirming and Booking.

I went today and booked us a digital SLR camera from the Media Department in college because we have confirmed that we will be going to the Wednesday afternoon group in Dundonald and the Wednesday night group in East Belfast. I will be collecting the camera on Tuesday afternoon after another meeting then bringing it back on Thursday afternoon just before documentary class. We're also hoping to visit a wool shop to take some shots, but this is still to be confirmed. If we were to do this; it would be done on the Thursday morning.