3 posts tagged “blogging”

With the school year done, I can turn my attention to film projects, starting with my documentary of comic book creators in Portland, Oregon. This also means that this blog will be sparked back to life. I will be posting more of my personal thoughts, frustrations, reflections on the documentary here, leaving the more "official" communications to the doc blog. There will also be other projects to write about as the summer continues.

As I posted to the production blog, the interviews for the main part of the documentary began yesterday. Before getting those interviews underway, I set up a Google Group for the crew to facilitate communication and provide a central place for asking questions, working out problems, etc. It is also a way for the crew members to introduce themselves to each other. I'm actually not sure if I'll ever have everyone together on one shoot. Fortunately, one of the advantages of digital technology is its relative simplicity. On Friday, I was able to get the two crew members I was working with, Tanya and Danny, set up for sound and monitoring without any real difficulty. As I've mentioned before, I'm essentially acting as my own DP on this project, but as time goes by, I hope to have at least one other person that I can trust to set up shots and work the camera. In addition to using Google Groups for the production, I've also set up a tape log in a Google Docs spreadsheet, which should make it easier for everyone to complete those assignments and have the documented updated in real time instead of having to track so many different versions of it (I was a little surprised to see that Google Groups and Google Docs are not seamlessly integrated with each other, which means that I can't share documents directly with the group via the group page). Other than all of the driving to Portland this stage of the production will entail, I'm looking forward to the remaining interviews, and to getting more of the crew working together.

After pushing my production schedule for 24-Hour Comic Day and Stumptown, I was able to move back into research mode. More particularly, I've been sending out a survey to Portland-based comics creators, and their allies in publishing, libraries, and retail, to get an initial sense of why so many in this community have decided to make the city their home. Now, it's time to sit down with the results and plan the first part of the shoot, which will primarily involve scheduling interviews (another purpose of the survey was to net potential subjects).

I am torn between different ways of approaching the next stage of production. I am drawn both to taking an intensive approach, where we focus on three to four subjects and "their" city, and an extensive one, where we build the documentary around many voices. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to effectively try both angles at once. What I think I might do is identify a few potentially interesting subjects from the surveys, schedule interviews with them, and see what I have. How well those interviews go may hint at whether we should to return to those subjects, or some combination of those I initially talk to and one or two new people, or if we should start building up a pool of interviews to draw on in editing. There are, of course, gradations between these two extreme alternatives, but I think the doc will substantially follow one or the other path.

I should also add that with production picking up, this blog will likely become more active again (I also have this to look to forward this summer).