Saturday 22 August 2015

The Camp 2 - Slightly More Camp

Last year it was easy; nobody expected anything of the Summer Camp movie but, somehow, something we managed to splice together from shaky RAW footage actually turned out half decent. I'm told it was informative, intriguing, humorous, poignant and - most importantly - it didn't drag. The final product, received just shy of 400 views on YouTube which is 1/1,358,695th of the estimated views which James Cameron's Titanic got (what experts call the film most similar to 'The Camp 2014').

This year, planning for the sequel started weeks before summer camp when ideas were discussed with the production team at Seniors. Although we seemed to have found a winning formula with the original camp, we needed to make this year's film subtly different so people didn't find it repetitive. We also discussed possible names for the film. Rejected suggestions included '2 Camp' and 'Even More Camp'. In the end it was 'The Camp 2 - Slightly more camp' which stuck .

During Summer Camp the Scout and Seniors took it in turns filming different events. They had the ethos of: if you film someone for long enough, they're bound to do something funny. I also conducted my midweek interviews with Scouts, Seniors, and Rovers which were to be overlaid with the footage of the events to give them some context. By the end of the week, we had just shy of 40GB worth of footage.

Roughly a fortnight after camp, the Seniors, James and Neil met up at the den to begin the colossal job of editing. This took three days in total and involved no story board or formal plan - apart from the one in our head. We skimmed through the footage, inserted the appropriate scenes in an order which seemed to flow, move onto the next sections,  and then come back to it hours later when we'd notice some more useable RAW footage which we missed first time round. Although some may find this method questionable: hopefully it worked - however you can be the judge of that.