Sean P. and technical considerations

After a bit of wrangling, I managed to film the projects first subject, Sean from about 7:30 Thursday morning until 6:00 in the evening. The line of events leading up to this I will document in greater detail later, but in summation:

• I first posted the idea for the project and a brief writeup on Facebook, a week before the semester started.
• Sean responded to this post, expressing interest in being a possible subject.
• I proposed acting upon this idea in my first Studio Project tutorial.
• Sean consulted his manager, who gave the go ahead so long as I am insured against public liability.
• I consulted the School of Design and Art administration, as well as the unit co-ordinator, and I was pointed toward the head of department.
• The head of department said I am automatically assured by the university if it qualifies as an authorised practicum, which is dependent on his authorisation and that of the unit co-ordinator. He would email Sean's manager informing him that I am covered, but I would need to get authorisation from the unit co-ordinator by submitting a pre-project proposal brief for consideration.
• I submitted the brief and was given authorisation from the unit co-ordinator, on the condition that I additionally submit an ethics form, which I will hand in to the head of department when I see him next.
• With the bureaucracy mostly dealt with, I loaned the necessary equipment from the department two days before filming.

The filming itself proved to be something of a pilot episode to my semester's season of work. Although I planned ahead for extensive filming by having two cameras available, with the aim to alternative between filming with one and recharging the battery of the other, this was only one of many concerns to take into consideration when intending to film constantly for long periods of time.

One of the biggest disappointments of the session was due primarily to a lack of technical foresight. Apparently, attachable microphones for cameras depend on AAA batteries in order to record sound and, as I found out earlier today while transferring the video files to computer storage, the battery inside the microphone I was using was flat. This effectively means that half the footage I took was silent, unless there are some hidden audio files recorded by the camera without the microphone a technician can point me to.

I'll write more about this later. The most I can draw from this experience at the moment is that it was an introduction to the skills and processes I'll need to draw from to engage in this project later on.