The Film-process.
I think it’s worth noting right at the beginning of this blog post that besides Carman, who has some experience in camerawork and editing through studying journalism, none of us had had any experience with film making. This was our biggest challenge to overcome because we had a limited budget and thus, limited time with the professional filmmaker we were going to be working with. The budget available to us covered the cost of filming for our interviews, however it was insufficient for our filmmaker to be able to help with the editing.
Before cracking on with the filmmaking, there was some research to be done. We created our questionnaire on surveymonkey, and we were watching the responses roll in. Meanwhile, together with the article group, we read a wide range of scholarly articles to expand our knowledge and our research findings outside of the survey.
It was from this extra reading that we started to gain a deeper understanding of what we wanted our question to be. We started coming up with ideas of the possible contents of our film. However, our lack of film experience became really apparent here because although our research findings were becoming clearer, the structure of the film and the coherence of our ‘story’ was still a distant, unclear vision which we needed to quickly address.
At this point we emailed our supervisor Amanda for some help. We knew what we wanted our film to say but it was channeling that into a clear and interesting structure for the film that we were struggling with. Together, we began to storyboard on a sheet of A3 paper which soon became 4 sheets of A3 paper sellotaped together. These were split down the middle with one half for the flow diagram of our story which clearly illustrated the order and structure of the film and the second half for film ideas which at this stage was worryingly bare. But, this was good progress; our film outline was clear and we had a clear research question. We had split the story into 2 parts; Part 1 → How migrants and refugees are typically represented in the mainstream media and the consequences of this on society, from public opinion and discourses to effects on government discourses and policy making; Part 2 → How is / can the dominant representation being / be challenged and our conclusions.
We met for the first time with Lee, our professional filmmaker, at the end of week 4 of the project. We showed him the diagram of our film outline and hoped he could help us begin to add to the blank side of ‘film ideas’. He advised us that for an interesting film we needed interviews and we needed to extract our findings from the interviewees, so it is them, rather than us, giving the narrative of our film. This struck up another challenge for us to overcome. We emailed all of the respondents who had left their contact details for further follow up from the survey, however the majority of people were busy, working and/or on holiday. We were aiming for at least 4 interviewees, but from the emails we sent out we only managed to get 2. We then invited other people we knew to be available and we succeeded in fulfilling our 4 interview slots that would be filmed by Lee.
Lee also advised us to further divide our film outline from 2 sections to 4, adding that each section needed a clear questions and it’s own conclusion, which together would answer the overall research project. These were: 1 → typical representation, 2 → consequences, 3 → challenge, 4 → conclusions.
Somehow, knowing that the main structure of the film would be around interviews and having 4 clear sections which we could work on independently, changed something in the way we were thinking that enabled us to visualise the film and start covering the film ideas side of our storyboard in post-it notes. Finally, the film looked like it was starting to come together. The most significant point amongst Lee’s advice was to take as much control as possible of the interviews and the film itself by having a clear script. This was our next few days set.
Throughout the whole film process and storyboarding, we were continuing with our extra reading and constantly tweaking the film outline. For example, early on in the storyboarding process we came up with a cycle for the section on the consequences of the media’s portrayal of migrants and refugees:
Media propaganda (official images provided by the govt) → media image selection → shapes public opinion → shapes govt. Policies / discourse → (back to the beginning).
Although there was some evidence for this cycle, it was a more relevant cycle for topics, such as war, where the majority of images provided to the media outlets are those from govt. officials and provided by the media themselves. But, from further research we realised that we couldn’t include the first cycle of consequences as we didn’t have enough evidence that this cycle could be applied to the coverage of migration. However, from the scholarly reading and our research from the survey, we came up with a new cycle that definitely applied to media coverage of migrants and refugees which focussed more on the repetition of similar images and the effect this has on the public and govt.
With the script finished, interview questions clear and the film finally starting to look like it will eventually come together, we held a day for the interviews. With tight 20 minute time slots (which somehow managed not to overrun) and the professional filmmaker, we had completed the final big component. We then spent the rest of the day in the radio booths, recording the voice overs for the film and recording the final illustration of our cycle which depicts the consequences of the media’s representation of migrants and refugees.
With one week to go and only the editing remaining, we’re very happy with how the film has progressed so far and how much we have learned throughout the process. We’re all looking forward to seeing the end product of both the film and the article.
(The film group)
Representing Migration 