It's been a very busy few days, but all is good, I have an up and running website, not perfect but I will work on that further, and my Proposal is on it, all handed in, on the right day and a bit ahead of time. So, here's how it went.
Difficulty with website
Although I had decided to use the Wix website builder, I was having some problems setting up my website, and I was finding it difficult. This was because initially I had started looking through the various templates in Wix to find one similar to what I was after, but I found that there were so many templates that it was actually confusing, AND I wasn't finding what I wanted. I decided to try another approach of trying to create a website from scratch. This started out well, it was simple to make a list in Wix of the headings that I wanted. However, I soon got stuck, when trying to figure out how to get the headings displayed on screen and I needed to look at various help pages to figure this out. Then I got stuck again figuring out how to make menu options go to other pages. After more time looking at the help pages, and getting stuck again, I decided that I needed to rethink my approach, because it was taking too long. I thought there must be a better way.
The next day, I started again with a clearer head. I reassessed what I did know. I had some ideas about what I wanted it to look like, and what I wanted it to do. I think that I was probably not finding a template that I was happy with because I am quite a perfectionist. I decided that the best thing to do was to choose a template that seemed kind of close and get it edited ready for handing in my Proposal the next day, then to take some more time to do more research on designing websites.
Although there is a lot I want to develop about my website, I am now pleased that it is started, and sufficiently developed to allow me to put my Proposal Document and also my Daily Schedule on it by Friday.
Finishing my Proposal
Along with the other things that I had been working on, I had also been working on my Proposal. Again, it was an interesting exercise.
The Rationale made me think back over the year's course. There was so much that I could have written about what I had learnt over the year, it has been brilliant, and I have learnt so much that has helped me creating my films. I have also been working hard, with good success on overcoming my anxiety, which is often tied into my perfectionism and wanting to do the very best that I can. I have been working on balancing perfectionism with the ever-present time constraints, and I feel I am developing a good balance. I have learnt editing skills including colour balancing, technical equipment skills, the camera movement skills by which this FMP was inspired by experimenting with the Steadicam and slider track, Film Theory like Propp's Theory, Lighting and Audio, Screen writing, all the Pre-production technical skills and about the paperwork that goes with it, and I loved being chosen, along with Adam, to film the Performing Arts End of term production for a week, it was a great experience. And when I visited Digital Orchard in the Autumn term seeing a real-life company in the business was fascinating and educational.
The highlight of the learning for the year for me though was when I got to shadow Damian Power, director of, amongst other things, "The Only Way is Essex" and "Made in Chelsea" for 2 days when he and his crew were shooting a Proof of Concept film at College in January this year. I learnt so much, being involved with lots of things including holding the boom mic whilst recording, helping with cameras in between filming, and getting to see Damian and the whole crew in action. And of course, that vital skill on any film set, how to make the best coffee. I loved it all.
I couldn't see how to get all of that into the Rationale section of the Proposal. So, I thought about it and decided to focus on the skills and learning that had taken me in the direction of the camera movement subject of this FMP. And also to link the relevance of that learning to my career aims and ambitions in the future in the film industry.
Regarding the Project Concept, I was aware that when I had first tried to explain my idea to Tom, he hadn’t been able to pre-visualise the end product that I had in mind. Although I know he said this didn’t worry him, and I was able to explain it better to Nargess, I wanted to try to improve my description so that it made more sense to Tom and hence hopefully to other people too. I decided that once I had written my whole Proposal, I would ask Tom to review it for me to be sure it was all appropriate and clear.
It was helpful writing the Project Concept part of the Proposal after having worked out my detailed Daily Schedule since writing the Daily Schedule had really focused my mind on the detail of the different elements of my FMP. This meant that I was able to write my Project Concept confident in the knowledge that I had all the information that needed to help me. This made it quicker than I had been concerned that it could be. I also think it enabled me to write it better than it could have been because I could really think about the order that I was putting things to explain my concept in the clearest way possible.
I also used my Daily Schedule to help write the Weekly Project Action Plan and Timetable part of the Proposal, because having worked out a Daily Schedule it was helpful to be able to condense it to a weekly one, since I already had the information all there.
When I had a draft that I was happy with, I asked my tutor Tom to take a look and give me feedback.
I was happy that his feedback was "Nice and clear, well done" which was exactly what was aiming for and had hoped for, so that was great.
So far so good. And I was ahead of schedule. But then I started to have some problems…
Problems Editing the Proposal document and getting it on my website
I had written my Proposal in Word first as Word is easy to edit. When I tried to type the words into the Official Proposal Document, I started to have problems which I believe were due to a combination of reasons such as it being a pdf document and I didn’t have Adobe Acrobat. So, solution 1 was to download Adobe Acrobat. This allowed me to edit it a bit but the formatting was inconsistent and kept changing what I was doing so that you couldn’t read all the writing. I tried Preview as well but that didn’t work either.
So, I tried to analyse the problem and started by asking my father to try too, to ascertain that it wasn't me doing something wrong, and it did the same for him. My next step was to ask my friends on the course how they were editing it, they said using Acrobat but then we discovered that I was running it on a mac mini not a Windows PC like they were. After trying a number of things, I came up with the idea to put the blank sheets of the Official Proposal Document into a Word doc and use transparent text boxes where I needed to input the words. This took a lot of time, but it worked.
The concern I did have was whether doing it this way would mess up the formatting when I put it on my website. So, I did some of the pages and decided to put them on my website and ask my Tom (tutor) if he could see them OK. Although I could have asked a friend or my parents to look and see if they could see it, I thought it was better to ask my tutor since he is the one who is actually going to need to be able to see it and just because a friend can see it OK it doesn’t mean that it is certain that Tom can.
But when I tried to get the Official Proposal as a word doc onto my website, I couldn't get it so that you could see it as well, it only did a link. My next step was to try as it as a pdf. This still didn’t work. And I had the same issue trying to put my Daily schedule on too. At this point, because it was half way through the time that Tom had said he would be available to us to email him, I decided that rather than keep on trying and maybe get to the end of the time I should email Tom and ask him for any suggestions. He was very helpful, and the final solution ended up that he said it was fine to put the 2 documents with links to open the Official Proposal in a word doc format and the Daily Schedule in a pdf format. And he could see it OK, the text boxes didn’t mess up the formatting. So, this meant that I could get my Official Proposal in on time. I decided that I would put both documents on my website as links, then figure out a way later to make it that you can see them without having to go into a link, because I think that would look better and be more friendly. I had considered printing them then scanning them and putting them in as a .png file but that would be my ultimate back up and not preferred because they don't seem to be as clear that way.
It was a bit stressful as it was the day it was due in, but I just kept on going, trying new ideas, asking advice where appropriate and I'm pleased that I succeeded in completing my Official Proposal and getting it in on time.
Overall Reflection and Evaluation
My Daily Schedule is proving invaluable. This was a very useful learning experience, and showed me just how valuable and actually time saving it is to do a lot of up-front planning, since it meant I was able to write the content of my Proposal with more confidence than I would have done without my daily schedule. I have tried to plan my previous projects, but not too this degree of detail. It always felt like it would use up a lot of time, but I am learning that it is actually time well invested as it saves you time later.
The problems that I had getting my Proposal onto the correct form and also onto my website show me that even things that you think are going to be straightforward can suddenly create a problem. Had I not been able to sort it then I may have missed the deadline despite having done what felt like "all the work" of writing the Proposal. I am pleased that I was able to keep calm, and come up with a series of possible solutions (even though many didn’t work) then ask other people (firstly friends) then when that still didn’t work I still kept calm and tried other ideas which partially succeeded then checked with my tutor for the last bit. I'm pleased that I was able to problem solve a lot of the problems myself, and come up with an innovative solution.
My website is coming together. I need to spend time adding to it and rearranging it to get the look that I want. The website is the way that I present my project to "the world" so I want it to look good, be easy and enjoyable to navigate, and reflect me and my creative process.
My Key Learning: I learnt that extra effort put in at the start (e.g. planning my Daily Schedule) actually saves time later, because I had a cohesive detailed plan that helped me put my Proposal together quickly but completely. I also learnt that no matter how well you plan, problems arise, but as long as I keep analysing the problem, trying different solutions and know when to ask for help then I will find a solution. Going through this process each time a problem arises will improve my analytical skills.
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