Part A:
I'm not even sure how to start this. I'm the director of Tabletop. Not the Wil Wheaton Geek & Sundry show, but the documentary about tabletop gaming in Brisbane.
This is the Wikipedia description of a film director:
"A film director is a person who directs the making of a film. A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfillment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design, and the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.
The film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which a film eventually becomes realized, or noticed."
Preparation for a role as a director has been interesting. I'm not even sure how a director does everything they'd need to in a documentary setting. I know they interview and talk to the interviewee and try and elicit an emotional response from them or more personal stories, and I feel I can do that as I'm quite disarming, but I can't think that there's any way specific to do so, it's just to build a rapport with them.
I can't say that there's much in the way of professional work or inspiration that I've really been looking at and going "Yeah! That! That's what I want!" because there frankly just isn't anything there like that for me, but reading about some famous documentary directors like Louis Theroux, Errol Morris, and Michael Moore, have helped me sort of realize how some documentaries can be.
Part B:
After the entire production has concluded, this is what I must do. I'd like to be able to say that everything went smoothly and flawlessly. It didn't. We had issues. Not many, but they were fairly major and out of our control. The two weekends that we had used to film tournaments of Warhammer at the Dark Magician were either overshadowed by other events or it was Easter. It's....it's bad, but we got footage and we did our best, though our best wasn't quite good enough with some of the footage.
Knowing the ways of Louis Theroux helped imagine this project as semi-serious and semi-satirical, but that wasn't the way I wanted to go with it at all.
Most of our captured audio on additional filming days was unusable by itself, even cleaning the audio as best as possible still left some of the issues in it.
If I could do it again, I'd go back through and be a bit more headstrong about what I thought of shots as well as make sure that every little aspect that could possibly cause problems, wouldn't. Examples aren't coming to mind at the moment, but they're there.
As for what I'm most proud of in how I performed as a director? I'm just proud that I didn't have a mental breakdown in the middle of the production. I had to force myself to take a step back and reevaluate things.
There's not much else I can say for what I'm proud of in how I performed. I was headstrong in the last few weeks of the trimester and that apparently caused issues with my crew, but at the end of the day, it's my production, it should be a final product that I'm proud of, that I can look at and go "Yeah, that's right, I did that. Look at it again."
That's all for today.
