72 Hour Challenge

In early March me and Gavin signed up for BDF Marketing Communications and Events' 72 hour film challenge. The challenge was, as the name suggest, to create a film within 72 hours. The winning entries will be screened at their annual Film Festival on 20 June 2017.

Tuesday 21 March we were given the topic and had to Friday 5pm on Friday to send a finished project. The question was: "Business, technology, disability - how does technology showcase disabled talent."

The requirement for the challenge was:
- A team of minimum 1 person, maximum 5.
- Film length: 5-10 minutes
- Format: .AVI .MP4 or .WMV

Since we're in the middle of a documentary unit me and Gavin decided to make a documentary. That way we could use the challenge as practise for when we're going to go filming our actual project late April/early May. We decided to interview Joey Thompson who was in an accident and got confined to a wheelchair 2 years ago, and tell his story.



The equipment we decided to use was a ring light, 2 LED lights, 2 DSLRs, 2 tripods and 2 Røde mics which we plugged into the camera (more or less the same equipment that we are planning to use for our main project).
Filming went pretty well. Since we were filming with DSLRs it was easy to get all the GVs that we needed in a short amount of time. Filming the actual interview was a bit more of a problem as the batteries died quite quickly since we were doing a long, continuously shoot and the memory cards also got full too quickly. Luckily enough we had spare batteries, but no spare memory cards so we ended up having to spend time transferring the footage between shooting. It was a very nice experience as it opened our eyes for what we need to prepare for when shooting as neither me or Gavin thought we'd run out of battery or space on the memory cards that quickly. We are definitely bringing multiple batteries and SD cards when filming the actual project.

Since we had very limited time we were, in the beginning, debating whether or not to use lights since it would cost us extra time. Watching back I'm relly happy that we did decide to get lights, even though it was only some small ones. It ended up doing a massive difference erasing the shadows under the interviewee's eyes.

Here is a short version of the finished documentary:
The "Wheelchair man" - Short from Trine Hagan on Vimeo.

Looking at the documentary now I'm pretty pleased with what we managed to make, but I'm sad we weren't able to focus more on the technology part of the task that was given. But overall I'm very happy with the storytelling, the footage and the fact that we managed to pull it off only using our own equipment and having 72 hours at our disposal.