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Film-making with RIG

Like I said in my first blog I've had the chance to work on my film making skills with RIG's Recycle Upcycle project.

Recycle Upcycle is a year long project teaching people about the importance of recycling and how to upcycle items to save them from landfill. The project includes workshops led by upcycling artists where people can go and work on their own projects - screen-printing on used materials, painting and distressing old frames, decoupaging tables and drawers and glass paining old bottles to name a few activities.

One of the workshop leaders was Jeanette Sultan. Jeanette is an artists who specialises in upcycling furniture and runs her own company selling such items - Shabby Shock.


Jeanette has quite a big following from her business as well as her monthly articles in 'Reloved' and 'Reclaimed' magazines. I thought it would therefore be a good idea to create vlogs for the project so that people further afield that aren't able to attend the workshops can still have a go at home.

I got the chance to film two vlogs with Jeanette - one upcycling an old lamp with paint and tea towels and another upcycling a cheap frame with chalk paint, sanding and decoupaging. We filmed at RIG's 'Art Flat' - a community flat in a high rise that hosts the workshops. Due to the regeneration in the area there is a lot of building work going on so it can get quite noisy which is a concern.

The first video was filmed in the front room, the biggest room, so I set up a table for Jeanette and made sure all windows were closed. Filming went relatively smoothly and was completed in roughly three hours, however whilst watching the footage back in the studio after I realised there were a few issues. The sound wasn't bad but there were portions you could hear traffic and people outside, and the lighting was quite dark in some places. I tried to cut a lot of these using tactical editing but there were some scenes that just had to remain.


For the second video I learned from my mistakes; I moved filming to a quieter room, used extra lighting and increased the ISO on the camera. This video also had issues as to me it looks a bit too bright, and although much quieter the room was much quieter it was also smaller so it was difficult to get certain angles.


I filmed a third video where I aimed to resolve my previous problems and filming went well. However there was an issue with the SD card and I couldn't get the files transferred to any computer so the files were lost. I was pretty devastated by this as everything had gone perfect at the shoot but it has just taught me to triple check everything before hand.

I uploaded the videos to RIG's vimeo (will also upload to youtube) and advertised them on facebook. Jeanette also advertised the videos on her personal and business social media pages. We've had great feedback and steady viewers (the first video over 100 so far) so this is definitely something I want to continue in future projects.


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