My secondary goals for last week were clarity of communication and appropriate attitudes, which I chose in the hope that these things would help my shoot go well on Tuesday.
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Clarity of communication:
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With regard to working with crew, no time was wasted in having to go over and explain things multiple times, no one expressed confusion, and no setups had to be changed, so I can only assume that my communication with the crew must have been clear! These things were also the result of very thorough preparation with my AD and DP.
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With regard to working with actors, I don't think my communication was as clear as it could have been. It was fine when working with Paradise, but with Veronica I think I was trying too hard give her something to work on as an actor, and ended up making my direction quite convoluted. Because the acting needs of the commercial were very simple, I feared it might bore her as an actor, and therefore I made my direction overly complicated, or rather tried to explain a simple thing in an overly complicated way. Although the outcome was good - her performance was exactly what I was looking for - I think if I were an actor in her position I would have found it frustrating trying to strip down what I was saying to find the essence, which is all I really should have said in the first place.
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Appropriate attitudes:
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I think I did fine with the attitudes from the original list (humility, good faith, generosity, can-do, respect for others). I can't think of any slip ups in those areas. Another thing that I should have had on the list, however, was "unfailing positivity". A director won't always get the outcomes they want on a shoot - there always bound to be shots that don't quite fulfill expectations - however I think that if the director and crew have tried everything they can to fulfill the original vision for that shot then the director has a responsibility as a leader to hide their disappointment and maintain a positive attitude at all times in order to keep the energy of the shoot high. I think I had a slip up in this area during my shoot on Tuesday, which although small, is something I would like never to slip up in again. I had been disappointed with y first two shots. We did not have a monitor and in the playback on the small screen of the camera they seemed to be unattractive shots by comparison with what I had imagined. I only mentioned my disappointment once quietly to one crew member, however this is one too many. Although it didn't on this occasion, that kind of thing has the ability to spread through the whole crew and infect the shoot. I need to be better at a) maintaining my poker face and not allowing people to see disappointment, and b) maintaining a constant, forward-looking positive attitude. Instead of feeling disappointment with those two shots, I should have been thinking, "Okay, those two weren't as good as I thought they would be. Now how can I squeeze even more out of my remaining shots and time to make up for it?" The thing is, I was actually falsely disappointed; when I saw those two shots on a larger screen in the rushes room at the end of the day I was actually really pleased with them!
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This week my secondary goal will be "using effective problem-solving techniques". I'm having difficulty editing my TVC to actually look and feel like a TVC. I have a problem, now I have to solve it!
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