Innovative film project reveals production process
Published February 2013
An innovative piece of research carried out by Principal Lecturer in Media at Hastings, Dr Sarah Atkinson, is featured on the BluRay release of the film Ginger and Rosa.
Dr Atkinson was given unique access to the film production team during the filming enabling her to document the entire production process. Her eight-month documentation included filmed interviews with everyone involved, from ‘runners’ through to director Sally Potter, and contributions from high-profile practitioners such as the editor, Anders Refn and casting director, Irene Lamb. Details of financing, publicity, distribution, production paperwork, communications and still photographs were also included.
The result was the 55 minute feature The Anatomy of a Film which describes the stages of the film's making from scriptwriting through to completion. A review said: for any aspirant filmmakers out there, this will be invaluable as an in-depth look at how this kind of film is made.
The motion graphic designers commissioned to produce the graphical elements of the feature are graduates from the University of Brighton. Alex Frois and Adam El-Sharawy both studied Broadcast Media in Hastings, graduating in 2008.
Dr Atkinson plans to conduct an investigation into the impact of the digital revolution upon feature film making by analysing the processes of filmmaking, arguably the most multi-disciplinary of all art-forms, whilst exploring ways to open up, reveal and communicate those processes to a wider audience. Her investigation will move the theory of filmmaking in line with current developments providing a holistic view previously unavailable to the industry and will facilitate the review of processes currently embedded as common practice since the early time of analogue production.
The collected materials from the project, a collaboration between Dr Atkinson and Adventure Pictures, will be used to expand Potter’s own online archive SP-ARK to create an open educational resource which can be made available for public audiences as well as scholars.