I have been a little quiet on the development of my response to the Zero project which I regret as I am sure that I will now miss some of the details of the process.

Concept

I have been incredibly fortunate to have a hugely supportive and inspirational extended family and I want to use this documentary to document this important part of my life. I felt that a useful visual for this relationship would be a family meal prepared by my grandparents as this has been a regular fixture throughout my life. I chose my grandfather as the central participants I felt that I might also be able to explore his eye sight through the kino eye of the camera.

Process

I was already very familiar with the space were I would be filming and having help out in the kitchen with my grandparents on numerous occasions I felt that I would also be able to anticipate the order they would do things and how they would more around the space. As I wanted to capture the whole food preparation, cooking, and serving process and that it was a small space I decided that I needed a small and light recording setup.

Creative Technology

I chose to shoot on a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera because I thought that the lack of viewfinder or image stabilisation would allow be to explore the ethos of the zero project, going back to basics. I continued this with the selection of a fully manual SLR Magic 17mm Cine Prime lens.

As I would be working without a viewfinder after the initial setup of the camera I prepared for  the shoot using a street photography approach. I set the camera up so that I would be able to use an aperture of around T4. I felt that this combined with the focus scale on the lens barrel would give me the best chance of getting things in focus, but that it would also reflect in some way Denis’s challenges in preparing the meal with his eye sight artefacts.

Filming

Filming went better than I could have expected, everyone there seemed to enjoy the experience and seemed to forget that the camera was there fairly quickly. My grandfather, grandmother, wife and son was all there and continued to interact with each other in a very similar manner to normal. I had some challenges will the lack of view finder as I did not spot who I had knocked the aperture ring and over exposed a long sequence, but overall found that it was liberating being able to stay in the moment with the participant rather than becoming obsessed with the image I was capturing. This results in some very loose and unusual framing at times but I feel this works in the context of the relaxed setting of the family meal.

Edit

Having shot nearly 3 hours of material the edit was always going to be challenging. After an initial assembly it was clear that my initial idea to follow the whole creation of the meal would not work. I managed to get it down to 16 minutes but cutting it further than this changed the pacing too much and resulted in a film that felt rushed.

I also short some material after the meal when there was a conversation between Denis, my wife and son about Cox’s Orange Pippin apples. I felt that this interaction gave a summary of the relationships so I attempted to cut this to the 3 minute time length.