Today I spent the day with the production team. The morning started off quickly when they had a quick meeting about the issues they faced with a recent shoot. After 15 minutes of discussing issues with memory, storage, and random flukes with the hard drives, one member of the team turned to me and promised that they would start speaking English soon! After that, we took a walk to the kitchen where I tried out the coffee machine, very useful!
Then, I was put to work to try to track down the artists behind several pieces that were featured in one of their shows. They wanted to ensure that there weren’t any copyrights or legal red tape. This sounds like an easy task, but after two hours of searching, I had only found 2 of the 8 photographs. I took a break for lunch, and had a veggie burger from BurgerFi! When I returned, I helped research the price points of various items to help finalize the budget for a show that will be filming soon! Overall, I learned that production is much more about planning and working with various companies than it is hands-on. However, each person within the team plays an important role, and they all have to work together to produce a show or docu-series.
I ended the day by learning more about the various journeys that everyone on this team took to get here. I discovered that a lot of people at Trailblazer had journalism degrees as opposed to film studies. My mentor for the day, Rebecca Moore, helped explain the process of documentary work and what makes it so difficult. Ultimately, I gained a better knowledge of how complicated it is to create a show, and how important it is to communicate between departments.