*Film* Match Day - Short Art-Style Documentary

[georgemaier]

I produced this at the England v Ukraine match at my local pub in Ilkeston with permission of the landlady - I'm pre-university, just finished A-Levels yesterday to give you an idea of my level so you can judge me in respect of this (Hopefully lightly as I haven't really been taught filmmaking) haha

Let me know what you think, I'd love some opinions. I currently want to make an online mini-series so that is my next aim!

George Maier

[georgemaier]

I just want to add that I did everything myself, planning, filming, editing - Followed my heart with it, trying to capture the essence of my community and the beauty of people coming together like this. I had a lot of fun making this. I really want to become a filmmaker, I just love it.

[Gareth]

Welcome to the forum,

is the video shot on a DSLR? if so you should get yourself a Zfinder type device to give you that extra stability. I haven't shot without mine since getting one.

You seem to have a great instinct for atmosphere which is a huge plus point but this idea of filming people watching football in this style has so much more potential than what you've managed to do here and I'd really like to see you take this concept and redo it properly

this concept has the potential to be an amazing 30sec - 1min advert or short film in the same vein as this type of thing

so as far as I see it the best use of your time would be to throw this footage away and commit yourself to film every England match in this tournament and for each match only focus on getting 5 or 10 BRILLIANT shots - by brilliant I mean beautifully composed but also more importantly story telling shots. Pick out the faces that instantly tell a story and then film them slow mo beside themselves with tension and celebrating.

the great thing about filming football is you've got a solid idea of the emotions people will be going through for that 90 minutes and you just have to make sure you're there to capture it

capture that sense of community of everyone pulling together to watch this and the shared atmosphere

then when you've got all the footage throw out everything that isnt OUTSTANDING and cut together a 30second or one minute shortfilm or commercial and you'll have an amazing moving mature piece of work to sell yourself

[georgemaier]

Cheers for all the great constructive feedback Gareth! I find it all really useful and will keep it in mind. Yeah, I did shoot on DSLR, 60D with 50mm 1.4 and 17-85mm 4.5 - I do have a Zfinder already, I chose not to use it in this instance. I love the Orange video, that indeed is the sort of thing I was aiming towards.

I like your plan about filming loads and then cutting down to the bare minimum, and indeed when editing this I did scrub through my footage looking for the best bits but quickly realising that most of the shots were average with only a couple of highlights.

I think my progression plan however will be to diverge from this project as it stands. My plan is to go back on Sunday and add to the shots taken on Tuesday with shots of the actors for my mini series in the crowd, focused on them. Then I plan to merge the footage from the two and make it the introductory segment to the first episode of the mini series, introducing the characters in the context of this environment I discovered through Match Day. What are your thoughts on that?

[Gareth]

That was just my initial reaction to where i would like to see that go but yeah be good to see where you go with it,

and you really should use that zfinder for everything handheld, the help focusing is one thing but the third point of contact makes shots twice as steady.

The thing to remember is less really is more no shot should be in the edit for the sake of it. Every promo I shoot seems to have significantly fewer amount of shots than the last, the last promo I shot had 7 shots