Progress Report on New Bird - End of Shoot Day 2 (6/3/12)

Today, we have had much more success on every element of the shoot. At Lost Art we were able to speak to Mackey, who agreed to give us an audio interview at 5pm. Later, I convinced him to interview on camera, which will prove instrumental in us being able to represent skateboarding in Liverpool on a more personal level.

Meanwhile at New Bird, Jordan and Robin managed to speak to a skater who was involved in the building of the park. We were particularly lucky in finding him, as he lived in Austria was only back in the UK for 2 days! Without his interview, we only had VOX Pops from various sources, most of which were not very useful to our project.

We have found that the story of New Bird contains less straightforward conflict than was portrayed in the media, and that they received support from the council after a local business helped them win the park back. We'll see how this affects the edit.

Again, the GoPro footage is limited! Jonny had it for most of the day (he brought it along in the first place), and shot a relatively small amount of material. He also took little direction from Jordan, instead choosing to shoot unnecessary and wasteful material while missing important moments of skateboarding, and spending a great deal of time sitting idly on the sidelines. And for the second time, after complaints from the whole group yesterday, many of the files he gave to me were either from the hostel, or included one or more moments in which he shoved the camera in crew members' faces. After a pre-production process in which he did nothing but send a few emails out, this has been highly disappointing. Robin shot some additional GoPro material because of this, making sure to get close-ups of skateboarders in action. Unfortunately, this material was missing from the files I received from Jonny - what went wrong is a mystery.

Dan Walsh joined our group today after having problems with his own. This has proven to be highly beneficial to the producing side of things, as he has been willing to speak to the public much more than Jonny, the producer. He has supported the production as a whole, filling in various roles at different times, and along with myself has handled most of the interview material (although VOX pops were handled by Robin). He is also intending to help out with the post-production process.