may days

Creation of the story, the shooting:
10 May, Thursday (cont.) we made them talk about the places, they were so enthusiastic that practically they started work… they started choosing possible places for the shooting like Cerdanyola and Rocafonda quarters, the city centre, the main park and the beach. After choosing the places Katalin asked them where they thought different characters lived, what their job might be. They said that mainly the poor and the immigrates lived in Cerdanyola and Rocafonda. As Katalin suggested there are good and bad, as children suggested there are rich and poor, and characters are inspired by places. In the story there was a secret agent, one of the main characters, another policeman, girls, drug dealers, criminals, an ill mother and her poor child who becomes a robber to be able to buy medicines. Alpha will be rich, he insists on that. Ainoa and Cristina dominated group communication because of their dominant personality and their age.

12 May, Saturday Meeting with the guys, going to see possible places for shots. In the morning we tried to talk through what children had found out by far: characters: 2 policemen, 3 girls (one works in the pharmacy, another has been robbed), a poor boy whose mother is in hospital, 2 rich criminals (one of them is the good boy’s father who had left the mother, so the good boy does not know that he is his father).
We meet children at five in the afternoon in Can Xalant. Out of 14, there are only 8 children. 3 girls will probably not come later and we don’t know when others will join the group.

15 May, Tuesday The state of dialogues
The meeting is a bit chaotic at the beginning but finally with Monica’s help (she jotted down the dialogues) we manage to create the script of some scenes. She understood them, work went faster with her, she was carried away by the work which unfortunately meant that she gave them tips when they got stuck, she wanted to inspire them. Her good intention again resulted in her controlling the communication. It became impossible, of course that she interpreted at the same time but at least she wrote down the story successfully.
Anyway, it became almost impossible for me to study communication through work process and it is obvious that now there is nothing I could do about the situation… there is no chance to use any verbal information…

16 May, Wednesday Shooting in the afternoon we took the camcorder and visit some places where we planned to do the shooting to make stills of squares and houses from outside. The children came at 17.00, there were only two boys again, Quim and a new boy, Adonis who was unfortunately quite young. We managed to film three places: the hospital, the park and a part of the beach.
The girls, especially Esteisis and Rosa María were acting like perfect cuties. María seemed absolutely natural but Esteisis seemed to have prepared for the performance, she had pencilled her eyes and dressed up. She was a bit exaggerated when stressing the effeminacy of the main female character.

In the afternoon when we checked the shots, it turned out that some voice recordings and some shots were missing and some of the scenes were of poor quality…Anyway we had a discussion over technical problems. It slightly disappoints me that these technical issues are beginning to dominate the work whereas we still don’t know much about the children.

17 May, Thursday the panic of the shooting. Unfortunately, half of the group hasn’t arrived, so we shot some scenes but I didn’t give the questions of the survey to the children. Sessions are usually shooting stories that had formerly been invented, children are instructed by Katus or Andris; the story this way remains more or less the same depending on how much children empathise with their character. The places and other elements of the story have changed several times depending on how much energy or time we actually had. As Demba was injured we couldn’t go to the port to shoot the bad guy scene but we shot it in front of two office buildings, too. Earlier girls proposed that Cristina should fall in love with Demba but as Cristina didn’t come to the shooting, Katalin changed the story and made Rosa María to get together with Demba in a scene at the football pitch, that was previously not in the story. Rules of film making are determining the process as children let it out of their hands. As at the beginning they were leading us creating the trunk-line of the film with enthusiasm, now that we got to the labour-intensive and halting parts namely the shooting of each scene, they’ve lost their patience. They don’t come which sets back the work.

20 May, Sunday Parents’ attention. We met Christina Pratzal’s family. They were very kind. From their reactions we could tell that they were interested in the programme. A strange part of this work is that although the parents know about our work as children needed their permission to come to the shootings, we haven’t had any contact with them by far. Apart from Christina’s parents we met only Quim’s mother who was kind, too and we could tell that the child talked a lot about us at home. Fussier or more thorough parents - as it turned out – had called the Can Xalant where it was explained to them in details what their children were taking part in.

21 May, Monday When Katalin and András came back we divided the group. Andris, Quim, Ainoa and María plus me went to shoot the pharmacy scene. Quim interprets and instructs a little bit and girls go to the pharmacy (without being asked) and they ask very politely whether we could film in front of the pharmacy.
While we are shooting at the pharmacy, Katalin started interviewing the children. These were quite interesting, the majority of the group really enjoyed that they had the chance to talk at last, there were only a few of them who couldn’t clearly understand that they had to talk about their characters and not about themselves. We had to face a technical problem that noise was too loud everywhere, so we had to record the interviews again. Kids were working mainly on the base of stereotypes, but it became clear that if they have the opportunity to talk individually and can concentrate on themselves instead of the situation, so let’s say in an interview situation, they tell a lot more information about themselves. In my opinion they are originally more inhibited to talk in group even though it seemed that they were much better in this area than their peers. (I managed to record something else onto these interviews the next day, so on the last day we re-recorded them but that tape has disappeared for good……)

22 May, Tuesday Apart from shooting some scenes we talked through the script of their scenes with the children; the majority of the group was present this time. Monica helped to jot them down. Girls were dominant in creating the script, of course, unfortunately they weren’t able to liberate themselves from the basic information and story-telling, and as far as I understood they created stereotypical dialogues, but at least they had a good time laughing at quotes they borrowed from pop singles or soap operas. Naturally, telling the love story generated giggles, too. This time, Monica didn’t really intervene and she could hold the scattered and giggling group perfectly under her control.
In the meantime, Katus and Andris are shooting the missing scenes in various rooms of Can Xalant. One scene has been shot in Monica’s studio when Rosa María tells her friend, Sandra (who is otherwise one of the cops) about her flirt that Demba has chatted her up. Maybe because other children were not present at the shooting you can feel the intimacy of the situation that makes it authentic.

23 May, Wednesday I (Monika) intend to make the interviews again, while children are recording dialogues in the studio. Children were sparkling in the studio, they were able to enter into the spirit of the scenes, but sometimes they broke into laughter…
Fascinated by professional environment, microphones, for example kids decided to record a song together, but it took them long to find one that everybody knew, but when they realised that lyrics can easily be found on the internet; hell broke loose and everybody started searching for other Spanish singles. They took the office and captured the employees of Can Xalant to help them as there is no real TV series without a theme song….