For the live show, our worse flaw was that our pre-production was very slow. This may be due to a very low rate of communication between a certain crew member that was in fact meant to be our producer. We began the module barely having production meetings until I began to organise them myself. Because of this slow start it meant that the scripts were slightly more rushed as the ideas were constructed quickly to allow for multiple drafts and both scriptwriters were put under a lot of pressure. Despite this they both normally got us updated and improved scripts on time, although we did have to spend a lot of time on read-throughs. This delay was the first of many that would cause our show to suffer greatly. The second hurdle was found was that through all the many script reads the producer had not began trying to cast any of the roles in the script at all. This meant another crew member had to begin casting for him until he picked up her trail. The late casting meant that not only did the actors have less time to learn the scripts but we had to use one of our fellow course members because of the short notice. Thankfully all the actors we had found were both patient and helpful in their own ways and made time in their lives at short notice to help this production happen. However despite both main and side role actors trying their best to accommodate our needs we had a hard time fitting rehearsals into the short time we had left. The producer showed no signs of organising either technical or blocking rehearsals so again I had to tell him to do it or begin orgainising them myself. Despite all the cast and crews efforts I believe the main reason for most of our production problems were these too little too late rehearsals that we had to resort to. The camera movements were planned by directors but we did not have time to practice the show in its technical aspects and one of the crew members missed a full technical rehearsal days before the show was live. However although we did not have enough rehearsals to practice the show we did have time to practice with all the equipment for our respective roles, this was not done by some of the crew and several of us spent a lot of time telling people to go practice which of course did not happen a lot of the time, I believe this to be the reason that some of the sound did not turn out too well. Through all this as well we of course had to pre-record our second unit footage which became another victim of the late casting as one of our main actresses had an important deadline amidst the chaos, this caused serious delays in our second unit material that effected both second unit crews in drastic ways.We struggled to get locations as because of the uncertainty with dates me and the other producer had to get permissions last minute, thankfully most of my scenes were indoors so I could use both the university and student houses for quick permissions but the other producer had to battle with getting council permissions in short time limits In the end to avoid leaving it too long we filmed our scenes in parts, mainly the therapist scene in which we filmed Barry as the therapist well before we shot Jemma as in anger in this scene, although it gave the editor extra time to build a basic outline for the scene on avid therefore meaning he could get the final edit done faster, we did not anticipate how different the lighting would be and in the end the editor actually had to spent time colour grading to make up for this. The lamp flashback however was filmed well and was not rushed as it was easier to effectively plan. My second unit editor worked very well with the footage he had and had it all done as on time as it could be. While all this was going on we of course had to prepare the set, the set itself was sourced and built quite quickly however because of this quick build the flooring was not quite attached properly and we had a couple of shifts in the carpet during the show. However because of some drastic changes to the set layout very near to the build my job as the lighting designer got a little harder, I had yet to receive a proper floor plan and had to light the set hoping that the furniture and walls would remain in the same place, also a few blown bulbs stopped me from testing if all the lights purposes were achieved even after I had put them all in place. Once all the lights were fixed I discovered I had a dark patch and added a cool light on the side of the set to remove this. I also had to back light our kitchen partition through tissue paper on short notice, thankfully a red head did the trick for that. All the lighting was balanced to the eye during rehearsals in all places apart from a few shadows around the sofas and a shadow on the to of one of the walls, which could not be eliminated due to the furniture all already being in place, making moving the lights a health and safety risk.
During the Live Show it became more apparent what the faults in the lighting were as they stood out more clearly through the cameras than they did to the eye, the shadows were less obvious because of the cameras angles but the cameras setting revealed that there were too very strong light spots on both sides of the set, this could be passed off the being the actual lights in the house but it did cause some problems with shadows on the actors in when they stood in these spots.
For the first episode I was floor managing and I personally feel like I did that role well. All the props and actors were in position well before it was time to go live and we had a good count in despite the PA for this episode barely giving me the information I needed to ensure I did my job right. I was not informed of when we were actually off air properly as later I found out that when I was told we were off air we actually were not. During the show I also had to attempt to signal one of the runners to turn on a cool light which the lighting operator for this episode had neglected to turn on, this did happen however it was in the middle of the episode, meaning that the part of the set that cool light was meant to light was slightly more shadowy than it was meant to be. We also had a sound issue in this episode, because the sound designer had not pre-downloaded the sound effects the effects had to be queued in youtube. This somehow lead to the sound operator on this episode accidentally activating Siri and having that sound play over the audio.
A problem we had with all three episodes was they actually ran short of the time given of 10 minutes. This meant the end section of the show had to improvised and the directors and actors had to fill time. This could have been avoided if rehearsals were earlier so script changes could have been made in reasonable time. However despite this these section went quite well.
The sound problems escalated into episode two when the sound guy played a sound effect in a random place and mixed it wrongly in the place it was meant to be used. Depressions sound levels are also too high in this episode. Episode two also contained the worst transition between 2nd unit and Live footage as the 6 second position change failed and the actors were Live while they are moving, this is simply down to a bad decision to only use a 6 second clip and in any future projects something like this could easily be avoided. In this episode I was directing and I really felt the effects of the lack of rehearsals as the camera operators were often adjusting their cameras when I cut to them or began moving before I cut away, I can take some responsibility for this as I often missed camera directions and they had to move off the camera scripts I gave them but some early in shot movements were not scripted and could have been avoided,
During the shows we also experienced a couple of colour problems where the colour would either become tinted or too vivid, we discovered that this was due to some of the Level 4 students standing on some of the camera cables, an element unfortunately out of our control, in future we could avoid this by marking out all the cables more clearly so people can avoid standing on them.
Episode 3 was were the internet began to fail us and we lost whole sections of the show, this was again out of our control. However other problems in this episode included problems with the complexities of moving furniture off a Live set. We did eventually work it out but these movement were not as great and do break the flow of the show. The final improvised section with 7 deadly sins was not originally meant to include the landlady, this is made obvious by the fact that she has her back to the camera for the whole section which is distracting.
All in all I feel like our Live Show suffered the most due to the last minute nature of most of it, we spent much too long waiting about for things to be organised and needed so many more rehearsals than we got. We needed better communication and people needed to put a lot more time into understanding their roles. However I also feel like the amount of different roles we each had individually made the task harder.
