Lachlan Mayfield Production Blog

Week 2

The main focus for this week was forming our group and choosing an idea to go with for our major work for documentary. During the Uni break after second year, myself and two of my group mates Lachie and Tom had come up with the idea to do our project on The Jew Boy Gang. I had first heard about it from Tom during out first year of study, where he told me of the Gangs exploits across the Hunter valley and his intention to possible one day adapt the story into something like a feature. I had never heard of this Gang or their stories before, despite them being from and operating in the Hunter Valley. As such, during the break, we decided that this may be a good topic to go into the course with.

During this first week, we were able to do some preliminary research, in order to scope out just how much information there was on this gang. Through this research, using both the internet and the Library, we were able to find a full history of the Gang in the form of a book, titled “"An Organised Banditti": The Story Behind the 'Jewboy' Bushranger Gang”, written in the early the early 2000s by Colin Roope and Patrica Gregson. And to our luck, the University had 3 copies of this book available to hire. As this book will provide us with a wealth of information on the Jew Boy Gang, we have decided that we will go forward with this topic.

Week 3

This week, we continued our research into the Jew Boy Gang, reading through the entirety of the book we found in week 2 and making thorough notes regarding the finer points of the story and key characters. We also began to look into some of the news articles from the time, which proved to have some interesting visual depictions of the Gang. These depictions were in the form of black and white cartoons, holding a very strong visual style. During this week, I also by chance found a news article in the paper on the Jew Boy Gang in which a local historian went to some of the key locations around the hunter such as Pilcher’s cave and Doughboy Hollow. As we are still unsure of whether we will use any interviews, we will at least be able to use him If we decide. We also created our website, adding in the foundations of it such as the crew page, narrative page, blog page and a gallery, which will slowly get filled out in the coming weeks. This week, we also began to start some of our pre-production documents, with Tom and I beginning to decide on a visual style for the film. Taking strong inspiration from the cartoons we have found in our newspaper articles; we have decided that we will film our documentary using silhouettes of our characters. Not only will this allow us to try and emulate the style of the time, but will also mean we can hide the fact we wont have access to a rge number of period accurate sets, costumes and actors.

Week 4

This week we continued to work on our pre-production documents as well as completed our class pitch. Throughout the week, Tom and I further confirmed the visual style of the documentary, deciding to utilize a 4:3 aspect ratio for the final product. This would not only allow us to have a distinct visual style, similar to old Hollywood westerns from the 40s, but would also mean we would be able to block everything for the camera in a much more tight and intimate way. Continuing on from this, we have decided that we will shoot this in black and white, not only to continue with the style established from the cartoons, but also to assist in editing as we will be shooting outdoor shots on location, and in the studio, so matching will theoretically be easier. I also did some research into possibly using a projector to project news articles from the time onto our main actor. I will be doing some experimentation with this over the coming weeks to see if this would be viable or not. Finally, we had our class pitch this week. The pitch overall went well; however it was noted that we went a little too overboard with the information in parts, and as such, we will keep this in mind for further presentations.

Week 5

During this week we mainly kept working towards finalising our production documents. Tom and I have fully confirmed our visual style, deciding we will try and do a test shoot next week to make sure the style will work in practise. We also casted our main actor, Luke Consani in the role of Teddy the Jew Boy. After speaking with our Tutor, we have also decided that we wont be using any interviews within our documentary, instead utilizing archival documents from newspapers to tell the story, as well as a voice over.

Week 6

This week our main goal was testing our visual style. For our test footage, we utilised the Radio Production room at the ICT building as it was a semi large space that was completely empty. For our main production, we will be hoping to secure the TV studio. Tom and I have decided that in order to shoot the silhouettes, we will utilise a large shower curtain with a HALO light behind I am shooting towards the camera. This light will help create shadows against the shower screen which we can then capture. Overall, or test shoot was extremely beneficial. During the shoot we did some tests to see where the best position the light would be able to produce the sharpest shadow while not blowing out the shower curtain completely. We also did some tests with smaller lights against the screen, however these did not have the desired effect, instead making the shadows too light. We also tried using 2 HALO lights as our main source of light, however these ended up producing double shadows which was not our desired effect either. As such, we’ve decided our setup will consist of only 1 single light shooting as far from the screen as possible. We found that the best setup was to have our actor right up against the curtain with he light as far away as possible produced the best image. WE also did some tests with the dolly; however, the main tests were in relation how much we could capture on the screen. Overall, I am very pleased with how the test shoot went. It allowed us to confirm that our visual style would work, and it was really rewarding to see our visions materializing from our head into real life. We also discovered that the shower curtain was a little bit too small which we will have to rectify when we shoot next week. Tom managed to also get some rushes from the shoot day edited which showed the footage on black and white with our 4:3 bars which we thought looked very good.