Featurette Shoot

As arranged with Simon, on the 1st of March we had the opportunity to film for our featurette the interviews with both pianist, Tim Horton, and page turner, Rachel Shirley. On this day we also filmed the final concert of the Haydn festival, including Tim's rehearsal beforehand. We were told when we arrived that we were on a very tight schedule, as the concert was to start promptly at 2:00pm that afternoon.
Before the concert began, we were given 10-15 minutes to film Tim's rehearsal.  I was the sound recorder for this shoot, but given the short timescale, I was unsure and unable to test as to whether it would be best to use the Zoom microphone or the shot-gun mic. I eventually settled on the shotgun mic, as there was a a lot of background noise which was beyond our control, and the shotgun mic picked up very little of this. It was after this that we got the opportunity to interview Tim, we used a two-camera set-up, with sound recorded through the shot-gun mic. Immediately as we started, I noticed that we had failed to used the clapper-board, Aidan had already began the interview and Tim was incredibly talkative, so there was no opportunity to re-take. We had barely gotten through half of our questions when we were hurried a long by the stage manager, so there was no time to rectify our mistake.
We had been reserved three seats in each corner of the studio, as we had all planned to have our own camera set-up in order to capture the concert from different angles. We originally intended to stay for Tim's performance only, but ended up staying for the entire concert. This actually turned out to be very beneficial, as although our film is predominantly about Tim, there is a mention of how musicians as a whole feel about their sacrifices and achievements. Also, Tim featured throughout the entire performance, not just on his own, so it was useful to get the extra footage.
Finally, we had the interview with Rachel, the page turner. At this point, the crew had began to dismantle the stage and move all of the instruments, so there was a lot of banging and background noise. Also, we had very little options available to us as to where we could stage her interview; in the end we were given a corner in the foyer, right in front of the stage door where everything was being transported. We conducted the interview regardless, as we were only able to stay for 15 minutes or so before the theatre was shutting. We used a 2 camera set-up, using the shot-gun mice for audio- and again, a clapper-board became an after thought. The interview itself though was successful, and Rachel gave us some really interesting material.
I think considering the extremely tight schedule, we did very well on this shoot and managed to gather some very interesting shots and material. There is just the matter in post-production, we're hoping that our fatal flaw in not using the clapperboard doesn't produce too many problems while trying to sync our visuals with the audio.