Hannah Bowler Contribution Evaluation

I became involved with the film as I felt moved by the issue and wanted to express the emotions involved in a new experimental manner. I feel that most films about issues like sexual harassment as very cliched and do not emote with audiences who are tired of seeing the same old things. I felt that through experimental film we could personally affect many more people through more raw interpretations of emotion.

We believed that what would drive this story the most effectively and portray difficult emotions would be real life stories. I contributed my own experiences and ideas to the initial concept of the film, and found inspiration for the director in spoken word poetry about the emotions we were attempting to convey. On the most part, my role was mostly organisational, I acted in a producing role, and as first AD and script supervisor.

I realised that in order to achieve the vision of the film that was coming together, we would need some funding. As such I set up a gofundme in order to crowdfund online. This was successful, we had a number of donations from friends and family members, and we received a budget of £134. This was enough for the expenses of the actors, and any necessary production costs.

The weekly meetings with Sarah Bowen helped us quite a lot, and I organised meetings outside of these, during which we developed the idea and identified how we could progress.The casting process took some time as we were searching for very specific characters with specific looks. I assisted the Director through booking rooms for auditions and rehearsals, and found one of them through posting casting calls on Facebook. The crew met together to do the shooting schedule, based on the shot list, and I wrote this up into call sheets.

Filming went well. The crew were all very focussed and passionate about creating the film, and with some on set changes to the shot list we finished earlier than expected. I acted as First AD on set and tried to stay busy and helpful; moving kit around and delegating tasks so that the director could stay focussed on the actors, and stay in the creative flow. Upon reviewing the footage, we realised that there were a few boom poles in shot etc, and Connor wanted much smoother footage in order to achieve almost a “one shot” look, so he contacted the actors about coming in to film again, and I booked out a studio. The second round of filming was more smooth than the first, as we learned from any mistakes made the first time - for instance, we knew we had to make sure that the bin bags we used to block the light were not visible, as we could see them in the original footage.

I think that the only problem that we really had was communication. I feel that I could have been more of a mediator between departments, and organised more meetings in order to ensure that everybody was on the same page. Moving forward as a producer, this will be more of a focus for me, as I really believe that teamwork is the drive behind any successful film. Otherwise, I’m very happy with the filming process, and the finished product. I think we achieved what we wanted to. We break conventions, and present something new and hard hitting that will command audience’s attention.

-Hannah Bowler