Andrew Sheppard at Blissfields 2010
BA (Hons) Popular Music Journalism| student Andrew Sheppard was a part of a media team who created a programme and documentaries for the festival. Better still, the work the team did is going to be submitted as a part of a Level 3 collaborative assignment.
"I was asked to help out on the journalism team to write the programme for Blissfields 2010, and along with four others – a designer, editor and two other writers – we started work in late May/early June.
I was interested in doing this because it seemed like it would be fun to write and work with course mates, give me something to do as all my deadlines were already gone and also give me a huge head start for my collaborative project in the upcoming 3rd year. As well as writing this, we were asked to do a documentary while we were at the festival documenting 10 years at Blissfields and Solent’s contribution.
When we got to the festival we were shown a press area where the bands would be coming to do press interviews, and there was quite a few other media forms there as well as us – radio shows, independent magazines, DIY reporters writing for blogs etc.
Bands were ushered in by the Blissfields press manager after their sets, and the group of us waited in this area for each one – two camera operators, a sound man and an interviewer. We decided to take a more artistic filming approach rather than just having one boring head on of the interviewer talking to the band, so I took up duties of the hand-held camera – getting shots from the side of their faces, hands, and other things we could edit in as passing shots for the final thing – while another camera was stationed on a tripod for a good clear image of the whole group sat down. This is a technique we had learned in class for an effective, professional looking interview on camera and proved very useful in this situation.
This proved troublesome in some areas however, as some people found it hard to maneuver the hand-held camera around without breaking the 180 degree rule that we also learned on our course, which is put in place to give a consistent angle of the subjects rather than getting shots from everywhere and getting a messier looking documentary.
For the 10 years at Blissfields part of the filming we decided to set up in the middle of the festival where all the stalls and bars were, and where the highest traffic of people was, and asked random people to give us short interviews about their experiences of the festival. This was all done in front of a board that had been put up for people to sign, and was covered in writings and drawings which gave a really well composed shot and just gave it a community feel with all the messages and people having fun at the festival in the background.
Most of these interviews were spur of the moment, and there was no written formula but the journalistic styles we had worked on in class helped keep the interviews fresh and interesting.
As well as this we went round to the stalls that I had written about in my feature '10 things to do at Blissfields 2010’, for the programme. We filmed short interviews and took some footage of each stall, keeping the same structure as before. Each stall got their own focus with spur of the moment interviews that relied on the interview techniques we had learned in class. Many of the stalls were busy so time management was crucial but everything went smoothly in the end.
Finally we interviewed the crew and workers for the festival, including all the Blissfields team and some of the backstage crew that had made all the work happen. This was more of a laid back atmosphere as it was the last day, but we still had to utilize a lot of organisational skills to get everyone to come over and talk to us in time before everyone packed up and went home.
The night before this, Stereo MCs, the weekend’s headliners, had played and everyone seemed a little worse for wear, especially us as we went straight backstage to interview the lead singer immediately after their set, and until the wee hours. This was by far my favourite part of the weekend as although the interview wasn’t the most charismatic or explosive one we conducted, the vibe was really cool.
I’m glad I took part in the project. It’s let me put a lot of skills I’ve learned actually into practice and it’s the first time I’ve felt like a real practising music journalist. Being part of a well structured team, getting in to the festival for free, having a press area to work in and hanging out with band after band in quick succession, gave me a real taste of what it might be like to do this as a career and it was definitely something I’d jump at the chance of doing again."
By Andrew Sheppard, BA (Hons) Popular Music Journalism|