I apologise on the delay of this post, it’s been a busy few weeks leading up to the easter break but it has finally come and I can now fully direct my attention to FYP writings. I’ve been doing a lot of Interviewing in the Background but no time to blog about them until now.

Around two weeks ago on Friday 12th of March I met Songwriter Adrian Crowley who kindly invited me to his home so I could Interview him for my final year Documentary. In my first semester my supervisor for this project was Hugh McCabe who knew Adrian and thought he would make a good subject for the film so asked ahead for me if he’d be interested in taking part, alas he was! I contacted him around the end of January just to double check to see if he was up for being in the documentary and confirming dates for filming. A one week break from touring in the 2nd week of March was scheduled so we decided to do sometime between then.

As you can see Adrian was my third Interview for this project so I felt a little bit more prepared and relaxed for this one. In preparation for our chat and a few days before filming I wrote down a few questions, always referring back to my main core idea of how and what I wanted the documentary to be about. The bigger picture being about ‘The process of songwriting’ but focusing in on some key underlining points such as 1- ‘does the process get easier with age, experience’ and 2- ‘where does a song really come from, is unconsciousness involved’.

So with every question I wrote in my notes I always tried to relate it to my core points so if anything goes off track I had this as a kind of barrier to protect me (in a silly way)

I filmed the Interview in Adrian’s music room/study in his Attic. We filmed it early in the morning which was good for light as the room was well lit by a sun roof.

Here are some screen grabs from the Interview:

N.B – the Colour between shots looks a little off as the first is taken after the sun reached its peak at noon, and the second from an earlier part in the interview.

Adrian was a gent and touched on some really interesting points surrounding his sub-conscious when he’s in writing mode.

After the Interview I filmed some little bits of B – Roll of him working at his desk and also, filmed a little solo performance of him playing a song off his new album in his own stairwell. I edited this little video around a week ago, and Adrian was more than happy for me to put this up on my own YouTube channel I run outside college called Musicians With Cameras.

I will properly include this in an introductory segment to Adrian.

I was very happy with how the footage turned out from this Interview as my good friend Donnacha (who will have to get a producer credit in the FYP) lent me his Lumix GH1 camera so I could use this as a wide shot and have the two cameras perfectly synced up. A good option on the GH1 is you can set the White Balance using Kelvin which not many cameras surprisingly have. I set the White balance hear around 5600k as it was midday and their was a good bit of sunlight.

A picture to explain better: