Studen Survival- My 2nd feature!

In one of my recent posts I mentioned making my second feature that was based on how to survive a week as a student on a £20 food budget. Well, after days of filming, hours of editing and stressing over the audio levels, it is finally up on youtube! Yay! It has been such a difficult project. Hana and I put so much effort and heart into it.

We were very excited to begin with. Our plan looked just amazing! I was very looking forward to an upcoming week. I was definitely ready to take the challenge, even if I knew it comprised having to eat cheap, unhealthy and tasteless food for the whole 7 days. No one in the Finance Department was able to tell us how much roughly students spend on food weekly. The only way to find out was to ask them! From vox pops we worked out that the usual number spent on food weekly is about £20. That’s how much I decided to limit myself to. We decided to start the week off with empting my cupboards. Now that they were clear, the next step was to go food shopping. We rang Tesco Express Winchester to ask for permission to film in there, which we happily got.

The shopping bit so much fun. Running around and about the store trying to find the cheapest food/ basic values was actually quite difficult. We found some really good deals though.
From that day on, I filmed myself every day having a breakfast in the morning and dinner in the afternoon. Breakfast looked the same every day- coffee, toast with butter. That’s why we put only one shot of that in the actual piece. I tended to have lunches in the canteen, which was pricey. I’d usually come home but never had the camera to film it which was a shame! I tried to fill the audience in with what happened on the day by making a few video diaries where I talked about what I did/ ate.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t very happy with the final result. I imagined it would look much better than it does. My ambitions and expectations were much higher. We had so many technical problems during editing. We spent 11 hours at the university trying to put all the pieces together. When everything looked quite tasteful, it was highly disappointing to see the audio levels being very low. We couldn’t hear anything. The reason for it? We are still very unprofessional (even though, I believe we are getting there :-) ), instead of using radio mics, we were using only a microphone on the camera. We got the audio levels up somehow but it was hard work. It was still better than having to redo they whole piece again which we were advised to do.

The things I have learned from doing this project are:

1. Never, ever say the brands names while filming in the shop just in case it’ll end up looking as if you were promoting/ advertising the certain product. It unfortunately happened in our work and we had to get rid of it. It’s better not to stand near the signs promoting some products, just because you will have to get rid of it too.

2. Always- I mean ALWAYS use a radio microphone while filming a feature that includes walking and talking, or even talking in a distance. They camera microphone or even a gun mic will not pick up the sound very well. You will end up having to redo the whole speaking bit.

3. Eating cheap ready meals is not the best way to go. Just to warn you- They are tasteless.

4. Spending the rest of my money on alcohol and then filming myself while quite tipsy was quite amusing but left me with no money for the rest of the challenge. If you end up going to the pub with your friends while being tight on budget, either spend your money if it makes you happy OR just stick to soda water- it’s much cheaper!

I have written an article for www.Winol.co.uk and I will post it very soon.

For now- here my and Hana’s SECOND feature!

Remember not to be too critical because we really are still learning and I promise that our next features will be OUTSTANDING.

Enjoy!