The boy who never grew up and some dancing children...

A couple of weeks ago I told you all I had a new project lined up. Well, that time has arrived, and it involves me working with Starlight, Kettering's own dance and musical theatre school. Natalie (who of course you may remember from previous posts about News Man and such) got me involved in all of this, and now I'm filming as many of their shows as I can.

This all started because Starlight wanted to replace their current DVD suppliers, who were charging a whole heap of money to film their shows and send them DVD copies. The DVDs were... eh. The filming was okay, but the sound was... eh. I, of course, said I could produce something at the very least on par at what I reckon to be about a fifth of the price. They snatched that up offer very quickly indeed.

So a few weeks later, I had set up my camera in the Castle Theatre in Wellingborough and I was once again making money doing the very thing I actually want to do with my life. Yay!

This show was the sort of thing I'd never actually come across before, it was a sort of variety show with loads of dance routines performed by the kids who attend the dance school. It was sweet. It ranged from two/three year-olds who didn't really do very much more than bounce on the spot and wave at their parents, but nonetheless did try to follow the routine, to some quite talented teenagers. Some bits were better than others. But really, the show is for the parents, to watch their little angels on the stage for (maybe) the first time and going "aww" a lot. One of the routines was to the theme of James Bond, which had a very young Bond brutally murdering some teenage girls. That was pretty cool. It got loads of complaints from parents. But hey, art doesn't happen when you don't tread the line between what is and isn't acceptable in respected society.

So that one was easy, I just set up my camera and watched the show. Easy squeezy.

A few weeks later, Natalie's shows came around. Peter Pan and Second Star to the Right. Peter Pan, of course, was an adaptation on the original story in which a young boy brutally murders pirates and kidnaps children. The kids performing in this were the younger of the two groups of kids Natalie teaches, and they did an absolutely stunning job. It was remarkable that these young minds could adopt a persona, learn 90 minutes worth of dialogue and then perform to an audience. I couldn't do that.

Second Star to the Right was written by Natalie and her friend, John. It's a completely original story, and sequel to Peter Pan, performed by Natalie's teenagers. Again, they pulled it off spectacularly and made the audience roar with laughter and shed some tears. It was fantastically written and it was a genuine pleasure to be able to sit through both the rehearsals and the performances.

I decided to make my filming of these far more complicated than the dance show by literally tripling my work. I didn't need to; it's not even what was asked of me, but I wanted to. Because filming. Instead of just setting up a camera, leaving it and trusting a sound tech to record the audio, I set up a central wide shot on the balcony well above everything else, had my DSLR recording close-ups with a 300mm lens and captured sound using a shotgun mic. So I was doing the work of what I would normally direct three other people to do. But no matter, I'm Peter Hutchinson, the best videographer in Kettering (probably). It was stressful, tiring, and awesome. I hadn't felt that kind of buzz in such a long time. By the end of the two shows (which both happened in the same day, I failed to mention, making this feat by the team even more amazing), all of my gear was down to the five minutes or less, either in battery life or card space. It was one of those shoots where I had to stop and think in every break to try and maximise efficiency in my gear. Thankfully, everything worked.

Immediately the day after that mega tiring day I was back in Wellingborough filming more kids dancing. It was... Less good. I decided to only use the one camera again basically sleep through the show. And it was a bloody long show as well. Each act lasted nearly an hour. But hey, there were a couple of bits of interpretive dance in there that were pretty cool. Everything else was literally for the amusement of the parents, I feel.

Now, of course, I have to edit it all. The trickiest part of that will be synching up the footage from Second Star and Peter Pan, but for all the effort that was put into making those shows, I owe it to make some damn good videos from them for the parents to enjoy all over again.

I very much hope that life gives me more of this sort of stuff to do. It really is fantastic.

Pete out.

DMUsed to It

Yesterday I finished my final stint at De Montfort University. This time round, as a member of staff than as a student.

I remember very clearly, as a student, fighting the upper management, trying to get something good out of them. They sucked massive balls. Hard. So naturally, when they offered me a job I immediately accepted it without question. I would be working for the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences instead of the Faculty of Technology (the faculty I belonged to when I studied). The Faculty of HLS is the biggest and best faculty in the university, so naturally I thought everything would be well managed and things would be fine.

Well, that's how it started.

I was hired originally to make a video for the July graduation ceremonies. Cleverly, HLS decided to get a head start on it so that they could have the best video out of all the faculties and wouldn't have to run around at the last minute trying to get it done in one go. And of course, who better to hire than the best videographer on campus? Precisely. This was ideal. Five months to work on a project that didn't need to be finished at all until the end of June. I've made awesome videos in a couple of days, so this should have been a synch.

Obviously, this got put on the back burner a bit. Since I had so long, I decided to do lots of research and loads of pre-production (everything involved in planning a video before you film it) so that when it came to putting the video together, it would be awesome. So in the meantime, I started working on "e-induction" videos. E-inductions are, as every fresher will know, the online course that you take before arriving at the university. Since I was around, we decided to turn a lot of the on-screen text into video form, to make the whole experience (hopefully) less tedious.

This is where the nightmare began.

I had to organise every programme leader and every head of school and get them to agree to a filming date, go through the pre-production phase with all of them and hopefully make some damn videos. This mostly went okay. Trying to talk to lecturers is a pain, because they don't have PAs, but otherwise most of them were an absolute pleasure to work with.

You know what's worse than trying to talk to and organise lecturers? Trying to talk to and organise students. My word. The graduation video was back, and I needed lots of students. Again, this mostly went okay, but I was missing all the students from one of the schools. One student said it so well:

"I would have taken part, but my perception of DMU is so bad right now, that I wouldn't be appropriate. And honestly, everyone is feeling the same."

Ah. I won't go into why every student from that particular school was angry for legal reasons, but you get the idea. Things started to unravel.

So I had a video, somewhat incomplete. The e-induction videos were going swimmingly, with a couple of hitches but hey, that's the media industry. The end of my time at DMU was fast approaching, and so I needed to sort out what this graduation video was supposed to look like.

"Yeah, the upper management of the university haven't yet decided what to actually do with the graduation videos from the other faculties so... We can't really do anything more yet."

WHAT?! I'd been working on this video for ages, getting stressed out, ready to crack on with the final edit, and suddenly I've been told that it's been put on hold. And guess what, that's the way it's stayed.

I had to end my time at DMU with an incomplete project. And it sucks. I've told them that I'll happily finish it once the university has decided what they're doing, but this is silly. To think that we planned so far ahead, only to turn around and go back to the beginning months later.

I realise that I've done a lot of slating about DMU here. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed my job. And in every single job ever, you are going to have to deal with people who don't seem to fully understand what it is you do, or how hard you've been working, but mostly you won't actually come into contact with them. They'll just annoy you from afar. I worked with some brilliant folks, who helped me when I needed it and mostly let me get on with my projects, and allowed me to be fully flexible with my hours. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had, and I'd do it all again. DMU is a good university, but it does need to sort out its shit every now and then.

So there we have it. Another door closed. With my leaving of DMU, I'll also soon be leaving Leicester. The next chapter of my life is about to begin, and I have no idea what road I'm going down. Recently I've had some excellent changes to my life that are going to make my time back in Kettering genuinely amazing, included in this are some new projects that I'll explain soon and of course News Man episode 2 is well underway, with more of it being completed daily.

Things are good right now. Very good.

In other news, I was working at the old Park today, and I made some new best friends. Every time they went on my ride, they'd fist bump me, tell me what number ride they were on, and we'd have a laugh before I pushed the button that made them go away again. Before long, they exclaimed "SQUAD!" and I had no idea what this meant. Apparently, this means that I'm now part of their crew, or indeed "squad". I feel like this is going to be a thing.

Pete out, squad.

Natalie