Day 1 of filming 29/10/14

For our first day of filming inside Syd and Mallory, we decided that all we would film today was the interview with on of the owners Lucy. This is because we did not want to disturb the shop for too long as she was the only person downstairs to watch the till and customers, so she also didn't want to be kept for too long. After arriving she advised we film in the back room as upstairs both rooms are too small and full of too many things for us to film an interview in there, which we agreed with after already seeing both the rooms upstairs. We gave ourselves around 20 minutes to set up, Emily was sorting our the sound equipment and doing sound checks while I was setting up the camera and working with Hannah to figure out which position would be best to film Lucy in and where to have her stand. After this she came into the room and I framed her to the what I thought looked the best while she was doing a sound check. I think that the interview went well in some ways, mainly because she gave us some new information that will be really good for the documentary and that we would have never found out without conducting this interview. For example she told us that they found out about the plans via social media, the landlords of the property warned them about it or sent them anything to let them know these plans could be a possibility in the future. The only thing about the interview that I think could have gone better is that she rarely kept eye contact with Hannah, who was standing next to the camera asking the questions, so her eye line goes all over the place, mainly on the floor a lot of the time. We know this is because she was quite nervous, so from this we have learned that from now on when filming interviews it would be best if the director or producer would run through the questions with the subject while sound and camera are setting up, so the subject has a slight idea of what we will be asking them, and then do a few warm up questions with the subject in front of camera so that he/she can get more comfortable with being in front of the camera. Apart from the problem with the eye line I think that we got some really good footage for the main documentary, and she speaks really passionately about the store which will definitely help the mood of the final film.

                                                     (a still from the interview set up)