Recce and practice "drunks"

Just finished the Recce with Joe from the hand bar which gave a young persons point of view of the drinking culture in Britain. It would have been good to have the director here, as it's still early on in and no script has appeared so the sound man took on the role and came up with the questions. Hand bar is a very classy bar which visually was beautiful to shoot. After chatting with the manager, we realised we needed to get him involved with the documentary. He had some strong opinions on the drinking culture and the rise of tax on alcohol. His opinions could help give the doc a stronger storyline, he was telling us how supermarkets are encouraged to sell cheap booze in order to get their tax back, yet bars are being taxed on high percentage beers which aren't the drinks people would binge on. This made me think more about why we are making this doc, not only to show the truth about binge drinking culture but to show people can socially drink and where the blame lies.

For the project young and pissed, I'm using a Panasonic P2 to film the entirety of our documentary. This is a new camera to me, I have previously used it for our 1 minute projects but that was just practice. The main reason for using this camera is it's close to industry standards and docs that are being made like 'Bouncers' CH4 are using cameras like this but with small snippets from the popular Canon 5d.

We have thought about using the Canon 5d, as stylistically they work well in low light and the quality out of the can is spectacular. But to show why we can't use them for filming drunk people, we tested the P2 and the Canon 5d in similar situations. The sound man, James, acted drunk with the typical loud running at the camera, fake vomiting and fake fist fights. As you can see the P2 worked better at maintaining focus, although the 5d looked better straight out of camera following focus was a nightmare and is the reason it's used infrequently in most documentaries.