Dan Goodwin's project log

For quite a while now, the vast majority of people visiting this projectlog have been looking for the Claire Goodwin Theatre Arts School. The school's run by my mum and sister and I've done lots of technical theatre work for them over many years - hence several entries in the log, hence lots of hits from Google.

The school has long needed its own website and this year I eventually agreed to make one. I did my first ever real bit of web design for it (it's basic but clean and effective, I think) and then built it using my work's own CMS, Contented. Since I was doing it in my own time, it took me several months to complete. But now it's live and loaded with content for both prospective and current students and the school are very happy with it. The site's here: http://www.claire-goodwin-theatre-arts.co.uk.

Of course, the readership of this projectlog is dropping through the floor...

My friend Edward has been doing audio and video mixes for a while now and they're brilliant. To celebrate the release of a new video mix called Watch With Edward, he organised a premiere screening at The Jericho Tavern in Oxford.

I helped him with the get in/out of the gear and did some warm up DJing for him too (the first time I'd DJed in public for years).

I was sound recordist for two days of shooting for a short drama called Sarah.

The short was directed by Victoria White who was building a showreel of pieces she had directed and/or produced.

The film was financed by the OFVM production award.

I did some filming work for multimedia collective The Sancho Plan who have been touring a live AV performance which incorporates animation and live drumming.

The group want to produce a film of their performance and were working with directors and camera operators to capture two of their performances at The Big Chill and Bloom festivals. I recorded live sound at one and operated a camera at the other.

The footage is due to be edited together later in the year.

I attended a Creative VJing course at Oxford Film and Video Makers. The course was a great way to get an introduction to the kit, software and techniques involved with live video mixing. The course was tutored by Ed Cookson from multimedia collective The Sancho Plan. Over two days the attendees worked on putting together a 3 minute live piece which we performed at the end of the course.

The course was informative, fun, pretty hectic and highly recommended.

I operated one of four cameras shooting the dress rehearsal of 'Fuente Ovejuna', a play staged at the Oxford Playhouse theatre.

One camera was capturing wide shots, two were capturing close ups and I was operating a camera capturing mid shots. The project was a technical exercise and the footage is being edited together by the director.

Live sound operation for four performances of The Wizard Of Oz at the Theatre Royal, Winchester for the Claire Goodwin Theatre Arts School (yes, that's my mum!).

I drove a sound desk mixing the soundtrack, sound effects and 8 radio mics for live vocals.

You can read more about what this log is and why I've done it. It's taken me ages to get it even this far (mainly because my day job is web development so it's an effort to do things for fun).

This is the first thing I've done using PHP and MySQL (until now my web development has been pretty much all ASP, ColdFusion and MS databases). There's potentially much more to do with this log to make it better but at least it's actually live now.

My sister is a partner in a theatrical production company called D&L Associates. Over the past few months, the company has been performing a selection of West End and Broadway musical numbers in a show called (wait for it) West End and Broadway. The production has been touring regional theatres and I have filled the sound operation role for it in the most recent three shows in Winchester, Cannock and Brentwood.

This involved me driving an audio desk mixing the music with multiple radio mics worn by the performers. At Winchester and Brentwood, the music was pre-recorded, at Cannock it was performed by a live band which had to be mixed too.

My friends Victoria and Gordon asked me to take along the paparazzi camera to a naming party they were having for their son Sam. The idea was for me to take some candid, reportage style shots as well as a few posed ones (for example some shots of all the babies who were at the event who were lined up specially). It's the first time I'd done the reportage photographer thing at any kind of ceremony.

I shot three rolls of colour film and overall was very pleased with the results. Vic has distributed some of the prints to party attendees. Someone made it very easy for me to get some "aaahh!" (not "arggh!") inducing shots of kids and babies by bringing along a bubble machine (that's one to remember!).

I'd definitely like to do some more of this and will look out for more opportunities to build up a portfolio of these type of shots.

I attended a stills portraiture course with the folks at The Oxford School of Photography. It's something I'd wanted to be able to do more of, particularly to take shots of bands etc.

The course was very good with advice on how to make your subject feel at ease when directing and posing them, lots of information on how to use light (indoors, outdoors and in a studio) and plenty of practice through assignments and group discussion.

The course was geared towards both film and digital and there was a good mix of attendees using each. I'm still shooting on good ol' fashioned film myself.

I took my film SLR on a snowboarding holiday for the first time in January with the aim of trying out some high speed shots and using the 3 fps thingy (which makes me sound like a proper paparazzi snapper) to get some good shots of my buddies in mid-air.

The results were pretty average overall (people didn't really look like they were going very fast, some shots were badly underexposed...) though I did get a couple of good ones of Edward looking gnarly.

Oxford band The Gs want to make a video to send to promoters to try to get some summer festival gigs. They're a great live band and they want the video to give some of the feel of the exciting and improvisational style of their performances.

I shot the gig in mid-December (ably assisted by my wife on second camera) and then cut together a couple of minutes of the shots to give the band a taster of what could be done with the footage that we shot. I'm waiting to see what the band want to do to progress the project.

Whilst struggling with the GIMP to do my photo manipulation stuff, I'd been looking for a course to learn Photoshop (one which isn't really expensive as most of them are) for ages. I finally found one at City Lit. So that meant that I had to trek from Oxford to London every week, but the course was conveniently on Saturday mornings and only cost about 140 GBP for 7 weeks tuition.

It was fantastic. I was the only techy there - all the other students were arty types so it was great to see Photoshop being used in really creative and exciting ways. I finally learnt how to do all the things I'd wanted to do with pictures (and not just being able to stick my mates' faces onto other people's bodies).