As some of you will know, I was lucky enough to attend the Adventure Film Academy Professional (part of the Kendal Mountain Film Festival). The course was run this year on 19th-26th July in Kendal, Cumbria.
Here is a brief (very brief) over view of what the course offered
“The Aim of AFA PRO is to develop and extend production skills in hazardous environments with an emphasis on outdoor adventurous activities, and HD work flows.” – Link to AFA site
The week was incredible. We were being taught by the very best people in the industry. Keith Partridge is an International Award Winning Adventure Cameraman (check out his CV here), Brian Hall is a hugely experienced rigger and expert in Film Safety and Logistics in Extreme Environments (check out his CV here), Richard Else owns Triple Echo Productions, an independent TV and Radio production company who have made a number of extremely successful adventure and exploration films (website here). As well as these we had some of the staff from kendal college to help us out with Final Cut and post production techniques.
So a fairly experienced team there then! and with that experience came a week long mind dump of information and numerous pearls of wisdom. It was pretty intense. We were there for 8 days and we had a full program 9-5:30 everyday. These days of training covered just about every aspect of film making but was very geared towards people who already had a base knowledge of the media. No sucking eggs. It was all really useful stuff. We covered everything from planning a film production, story boarding and generating ideas, story telling, through to hardcore camera techniques with all the latest equipment, nitty gritty editing and big discussions on the hot topic of HD workflows, right through to how to sell a film and what to do with what you’ve got. The content was faultless. It was exactly what I hoped and more.
One of the main tasks for the week was to make a short film, as you might imagine. We went out on the Tuesday to have a recce of an area. We looked at a gorge in the Yorkshire Dales. When we recce’d it, it was raining and the river was flowing quite nicely down the gorge. We thought this would make quite and exciting film. When we got there on the Friday with an obscene amount of gear and two “tallents” the gorge had dried up and there was nothing more than a small trickle of water going down.
As we had planned everything for a film about gorge walking, this is what we did.
All seven of us took it in turns doing different roles within the production. Directing, camera operator, sound, rigging/safety, moving gear. These were the main roles. When we got all the footage back to the edit suite, we split the group in half and had two teams editing giving two end products. I have uploaded the film that I helped edit.
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The aim for the day and for the whole course was really about acquiring skills and knowledge, not about making a finely polished product. The making of this short film was just a vehicle for us to explore different ways of doing things with advice from some pretty knowledgeable people.
This week was fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone looking to develop their skills in the media.
Here are a few photos from the weeks events. More photos here on Flickr
