Early in pre production I put myself forward as the producer for our documentary project. I did so because I relished in the challenge that I believe it held.  I never took a back seat in projects from the first year but I also never put myself forward as a dominant overseer of them either, but always wanted to. This gives me a great amount of creative control, which I found incredibly exciting.  To be an effective producer I needed to make sure each group member was aware of all goings on in the production and that each member was doing their job to the best of their ability and on time.

To begin with I had the group all come up with two ideas each and then pitch them to our group to which we would vote. My two-primary ideas we the follows: a expository investigative look into the day-to-day life of a dockyard and a more poetic observation into the work of aspiring dancers to be. The second idea was discarded by the group due to lack of interest despite my objections.  I had a invested interest in this idea as some close friends have gone into the industry and I understand how hard it is, but I conceded as the group made an important point that while it may be interesting to me, it may not to be to a grander audience.

As a group we did then go on to choose my dockyard idea. I had this idea after being inspired by a drama series on HBO, The Wire and because I had previous knowledge of Southampton dockyard being one of the most bustling ports in the UK. This documentary would follow the people, the issues and events on a dockyard. We immediately went into research into locations for this idea. Being a production group based in Winchester it made sense for us to be in contact with a dockyard relatively close-by as we would be travelling to and from constantly over a course of a month or so. Due to my previous knowledge (albeit limited) of the port of Southampton and it being located in Hampshire it seemed like one of the most likely candidates for our project. We also paired this Portsmouth. Although upon research we found that Portsmouth is more of a Naval port which is not what we were looking for as well as other various complications of filming with the armed forces. From this I took on the role of ambassador for our production house and started contacting the port of Southampton through as many relevant contacts as I could. I found that this port (as well as many others) are all under the umbrella of an organisation entitled A B Ports. I began by contacting them by email directly to their media office to which I found virtually no success; I then changed my tact to contacting them by phone. Something I feel I have learnt from this process is that you need to be clear, confident, concise and relatively forceful with your idea if you want to gain results in a short turnaround. I believe I was very confident and concise when talking to the primaries, I proposed our intentions succinctly but due to the infantile age of our idea we were not clear on the substance we wanted to gain from them. This sacrificed how clear and forceful I was upon questioning and forced me to go away to formulate our intentions better and in turn waste some of our time. I got in touch with them again and was purposefully more aggressive and got some immediately results over the phone. The contact told us that they probably wouldn’t be able to accommodate us due to security but would take a look at our ideas if we were to email them. They then confirmed our worries and the idea was scrapped.

This caused us to go back onto the ideas we had originally from the shortlist we had made. We chose Ben’s idea of the daily commute that would be a poetic observational. We began some research into this topic while keeping vigilant in our lives for anything that could be used an idea, which is what led to our current idea - Cabbie. The idea spawned from when 4/6 members of our group all took a taxi trip together and we got talking to the driver. He explained his rather interesting story of how he had come over from Pakistan where he was a teacher. This led to us taking his number and contacting him at a later date to confirm and meet with him.  Upon meeting him we learnt a lot about him and the idea bloomed into something even more. At this point my mind began imagining the visuals that would tell the story. I pitched forward to the group that it would be a artful take on the life of a taxi driver emphasising his role in the city through music that connotes an bustling urban sensation, to which the group agreed after I showed them music I had in mind. I then told the group to undertake external research, and seek out any other documentaries similar to ours within the next week. The group came back with varying results. There was one documentary that seemed to fit our themes of race and the economy of the cabbie world quite well: ‘Beijing Taxi’ – Documenting the growth of Beijing’s tourism and culture due to the Olympic Games from the point of few of the taxi drivers. This helped us to assert our own themes relevant to our project and inspired everyone to think more visually about the production.

After we had a solid idea in place, and the primary was on board, we moved on to collating marketing and PR pieces relevant to our project, because before the job I gave to marketing was to just get our production house name out there. Ben Collins had created the Facebook page and image; Martin Wilde put together the Wix website and set up a SpreadShirt account and Natalie and I began a back and forth of physical objects we could promote as well as a Twitter page.  Natalie began work on a flyer that would be used on shoot, containing all the information about our project, including a synopsis and each of our roles while Ben and I began production of a poster. We wanted to the poster to be easily distinguishable to what it was about so we used iconic colours of a New York taxi to convey this. This also anchors the title of the film – Cabbie – because of the American heritage that the word holds and portrays to our audience a sense of taxi drivers being talkative and a bit mad that I don’t think is the same with London black cabs – although an image of those is on the poster.

We then took all this work into the presentation that mostly I worked on. I wanted it to be a slick and stylish representation of our ideas that accurately and clearly portrayed our intentions. I worked on animation and slide layout to give the best aesthetic I thought and then practiced lines with the group. When the pitch finally came around I believe nerves got the better of some us and the pitch was not quite what I hoped it would be, but I felt we came across professional and informed.

Overall I think the first semester of this project has gone very well. I think most of the building blocks are in place for what we need to go head on into next semester to produce a high quality, entertaining and informative documentary for the U-Doc festival.