In our tute last week we formed into our groups (well-kinda) in terms of what we were interested in doing for our research projects. Our group is focusing on creating creative content and where the ideas behind the Australian film industry and where film is heading. What came up as one of the questions in our group discussion was: “What does going to the cinema distinctively do and is different?” in an environment when everything is free and the concept of something being cheap is expensive in comparison to being free and by constantly downloading free films, music, etc. we are only increasing the gap between the two polar opposites of free and cheap and cheap and expensive. In light of this how are we going to get people back to the cinemas, to support Australian film in a way that is both commercially viable- keeping loyal Australian fans, etc. etc. and also what can the internet offer in this convergent media environment. Basically, it’s really complicated, but I think I kind of established some ideas when I was doing my Histories of Film Theory reading this week, in which Bordwell’s article Defending and Defining the Seventh Art: The Standard Version of Stylistic Theory, which looked at how all different theorists attempted to differentiate cinema from every other art form. Even though this is not wholly relevant I think people need to be interested and dependant on cinema again in terms of what it offers as an art form in the context of it can only be viewed in the cinema, where the lights go down and you sit there collectively eating popcorn in a cinematically appreciative environment. What we need again is to create a film culture, that we get a lot with music- there seems to be a really large music culture in Melbourne, but a lack of film culture. It would be really great to research this further in terms of hyping Australian film and giving the industry a boost through creating a dependence on cinema as an art that only exists within a cinematic environment, but advertised and promoted through a convergent web-based environment to create this hype.
Reference:
Bordwell, David. ‘On the History of Film Style,’ (p. 12-45, 274-281). Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.
So how did our documentary go?
Well, I think this is a hard question to answer because every documentary was so different, yet I wouldn’t say that our documentary stood out because we didn’t do anything that different. The documentaries that stood out were the one’s that embraced their topic and explored it the best they could and I feel that perhaps ours lacked slightly, apart from that opening fact sequence which I was really happy with. Overall, I am really happy with our documentary because it is polished, has structure and tells a story of something that I am really passionate about and that I’m really glad I did because it definitely has that humanistic stance to it. A representation of the human spirit. Therefore I am happy with the story. I truly am. What I am slightly disappointed about was not making the most of the opportunity of perhaps not doing more. There were so many documentaries that took brave steps and made the most of the opportunity, collecting footage and having an array of material to work with as well as inserting themselves into the documentary and showing that they had learnt. I wish that we would have tried all these things to really experiment and do something different that also captured the essence of Maggie. However, in saying this it was difficult because Maggie was very limited in terms of when she was available and therefore it was hard for my group members to get to know Maggie as well as I did, which I think was difficult for them.
So what does all this mean?
Be brave, take risks and don’t be afraid. Documentary really inspires me and I loved making this project and was really happy with the way Maggie was portrayed in our documentary I thought it was very ethical and presented her as a 3 dimensional character that I was not simply defined by her homelessness, which was always really important to our group. Therefore, I think we show what we originally set out to show. I also think it shows Maggie in all her elements through sadness, happiness and just being funny, which is what characterises Maggie to me. However, I think our ideas started out better and had more movement and as our options became less and things fell through we didn’t embrace this as much as we should or thought of a new creative strategy, with exception to our cutaways which I thought looked amazing and broke up the interior-ness of Maggie’s interview. I guess we almost ran out of time to think up something amazing, which is disappointing but something I’ve learnt a lot from. I think it’s really important to always share your gut instincts because your other group members may love it or hate it but atleast you know and I think a part of me is always a bit scared to express my ideas. Next time I’d want to do something that really embraces everything that documentary can be because in True Lies there is such an array of documentaries and they can really be anything you want them to be and I think I would love to play with that more.
Now that our documentary is finished I thought it would be nice to do a series of reflective blog posts on different areas, which will also include reflections on other people’s documentaries after the screening. I am going away on the 3rd of November, so I really need to get these done before I leave.
I didn’t write a blog post on our own in class assessment because I thought it would be more worth while to write this after the editing process had finished so I could talk about my role as producer, director and also editor, and then reflect on my changed attitude to filmmaking or really what I’ve learnt about group work and the processes of a documentary production.
Producer
I would probably say that this role was the most difficult and frustration, especially when your subject is constantly on a rollercoaster of massive mood changes and therefore made the process of organising film dates almost to the point of impossible. I think I did well to deal with this myself, yet didn’t really communicate the difficulties I was having to my group members, which I assume would have been very frustrating for them. Producing is the most stressful because people are busy and you have to finalise dates and always be on the ball communicating between your subject and group members. It is also about being on top of all that pre-production stuff and being extremely organised. In having produced our drama last semester I have to say that producing drama is a lot easier because it’s formalaic, with everything lined out. Your director gives you a shot list and you strategically and practically go through it to create a schedule you cann actors who legitimately want to be in your film for rehearsals and everything is very formalaic you can write a step-by-step list of everything you have to do. In documentary because it’s less structured, a lot of the information is in your mind and you write down some shots that you need but all in all you have to work around your subject who is often unpredictable. What I learnt was a large degree of patience and that it is more important to make your subject happy than really anything else because you have a great crew that will organise everything else in terms of technical requirements. Especially, with Maggie it was about reassuring her making her feel as comfortable as possible in front of glowing lights and a camera.
Director
Perhaps I’m not cut out for this role, because it’s really difficult. I worked really well with Meenal to come up with a visual style and then was happy to let her go with the camera because I had built a trust with her and was fully trusting of her capabilities to use a camera. This is one area of the group work I was really happy with as it made me way less stressful on the day because all I had to worry about was communicating with Maggie and making sure we got the stories and information we wanted. Again, with documentary this is unpredictable; things that she had talked about previously with me she didn’t want to talk about to the camera. Yet, I was happy with this as she seemed in control of what she wanted and didn’t want to say, which was one of the ethical things Liam brought up when you’re dealing with vulnerable subjects- that they told you things that they didn’t want to. I would always say I don’t want to trick her into saying anything because that is being unethical and taking advantage of that vulnerability. In the first interview I probably didn’t go in as hard as I would have liked and talked to my group about what we NEEDED from the next interview, which made it a lot easier, except that Maggie wasn’t in the best place. Ultimately, what I learnt is that you need a lot of time with subjects like Maggie and heaps of flexibility so maybe if this was not a uni subject and I had infinite time to interview we would have kept building the trust and got a lot of information. However, I think all my previous research into aesthetics and what we were dealing with really made me prepared for what Maggie was going to offer.
Editor
I really loved editing. I literally edited as much as I could and it really paid off on the final days of editing where we could really focus in on fine-tuning. What I learnt: editing makes a film. That is it and also mastering Final Cut to a higher degree. I really understand now the reliance Observational doco makers have on editing because it allows you to embed meaning and make what your subject says more important mimicking how you saw it on the day. This goes back to all that pre-production stuff of really knowing your subject and being able to use your editing to convey what they want to say as truthfully as you can, because sometimes when they say something important to them they rush it and it now emphasises something unimportant. This was all about timing. What I also learnt: give your subject time. When we started editing we knew that Maggie was very spaced with her words or rushed through them and I think we were too eager to cut everything down to being really precise and fine, when we really needed to give Maggie’s words space, to let her ponder and let the audience wait to hear what comes next. When we gave Maggie space everything was a lot clearer, you could hear Maggie clearer and her words meant more, which was really important.
Overall
I want to edit. If I spent my life editing I would be happy. Editing is when you can really just think about everything and get to know your footage, whether it is good or bad and just let it speak for itself. It allows you to be 100% creative without having to worry about technical limitations, things going wrong, etc. It is also very inspiring and I often found myself going home and just thinking about the footage how we could structure it and how everything could link together to create a whole. I think I like editing the same way that I like writing essays or watching films, it’s about analysing each bit of footage and then putting it into a context that gives it meaning. It’s like making your own topic sentence and then filling in the gaps that convey that topic. Except, with the structural freedom that you don’t get with an essay. Editing is right up my alley it’s about seeing what isn’t there, what is there and then analysing it, creating and forming meanings that you didn’t think were there in the first place. It’s like being utterly shocked and suprised when that film makes that fatal twist.
After Gina did the voice-over and we put it into the cut originally I thought it would be alright, however when I got home I realised that it totally killed the mood of our entire documentary turning way too current affairsy. Luckily over night I had another idea to creatively use text to get the message across even stronger.
When Gina and I looked through the footage yesterday we realised there were so manygreat shots of Maggie’s emotion when she doesn’t speak, that convey a lot of raw emotion and make Maggie more three dimensional. I thought, with some inspiration from Tarnation that we could intermingle text with footage of Maggie’s interview. One of the things that Liam pointed out was that there was not a lot of movement from Maggie and I think in a way this gives Maggie more movement as we show her outside, standing up and looking directly at the camera. We also added some overlays later on that shows her curiously looking around the room as we set up. I think these add little moments of reflexivity and help make our documentary more sophisticated.
Today, I also found a really great track to put to the text sequence that Sarah and I worked to cut the sequence with the music to make it stronger. I was really glad Sarah came in and gave this idea as it makes the opening section of our documentary much stronger. We have also used the text quite dynamically by allowing it to cut in over the image and then the image to go away and have the text on black. Using text in this way makes it more than just text, but makes it a visual component as well, which I think is really important. It also makes a more substantial beginning to our documentary and gives it more life.
Yesterday, we got some feedback from a few co-media students who said that we need to break it up. We need to have a break from her talking and we need it to linger longer. Gina and I thought that perhaps we were too keen to cut Maggie’s running monologues down and making them precise. However, now after we got this feedback I realised that perhaps we need to have more space, allow for space, especially since Maggies speaks very quickly and therefore give the audience time to catch up and think, yet also linger with Maggie.
After I’d done the beginning section we really are on our finishing touches, which include colour correction and audio mix. Sarah and Meenal were set to finish the colour correction today and Gina and everyone that is there on Monday will do the audio mix. I do really think that it’s coming together really nicely. A huge leap has been taken since our rough cut.
Today, we went on a filming expedition to film some much needed cutaways for our documentary. Like Liam said in his feedback to us we can afford to make our cutaways quite literal since Maggie is quite difficult to understand at times. We went as literal as we could and went driving around Melbourne’s inner suburbs on a search for street signs, milkbars and cigarettes. Along the way we filmed houses so we could do some tracking shots. These ended up being fantastic as the broke away from the very interior and stillness of Maggie’s interview and also provided a much needed break into the outside bright world, a world that Maggie is missing to some extent. We also wanted to make her cigarettes and gun story much more visual because she speaks quite visually about it so we filmed two milkbars that were closed down, which Sarah led us to. These milkbars were great because they were old-styled and had a lot of really good advertisements and decour, which provide a visual lift to our documentary in providing colour and light, especially since today was so sunny and bright. While we filmed most of these shots we got audio as well to create a more dynamic soundscape to our documentary, because we felt that a lot of the songs didn’t fit as well as we would like so we thought some atmos would be quite nice to add some change. We also filmed some interior shots of staircases because Maggie brings back staircases quite a lot through her story so we thought it would be a needed addition to our documentary. We filmed these at uni in building 2 and captured a more darkened aesthetic, which I think works really well in the context of her story. At 1:30 we went in to capture and begin editing this new footage. Unfortunately we had another break in the time code, which made capturing a bit of a pain, but we managed to get through it.
We then started to piece together our documentary with our new footage and found that it was much more visually intriguing, where these new visuals really break up Maggie’s interview and also give context. We used the drive-by footage quite extensively to break up each of the different stories Maggie tells. We also thought it would convey more strongly that Maggie was homeless in the sense of moving from one place to another, which is also highlighted through the street signs. I thought of this idea from a film that a really like called Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986), in which the film opens really strongly by tracking through the town in which the beginning of the film is set. Originally I thought we could use it only as an opening sequence, however I really like it embedded throughout to move the audience along with Maggie from not just one place to another but from one point in her life to another. It helps create a flow to the story without Maggie’s story needing to be told by her structurally.
We all agreed that because Maggie doesn’t explicitly talk about moving we thought that we needed to address this in the voice-over, which I am finding very difficult to write. However, I think I have come up with something both reflexive and informative, without over-sentimentalising Maggie’s cause.
Women’s homelessness is commonly caused by relationship breakdowns and domestic violence. We put this documentary together because we wanted to show a woman, whose experiences of homelessness break the common perception of people living on the streets. Maggie was homeless, but her homelessness was confined to insecure housing, places that didn’t represent a home or somewhere safe. She now lives in a home with 10 other women. Nearly half of the homeless population are women, yet they are hidden as images of homelessness.
Overall, I’m really happy with how our documentary is coming along as I think there is a lot of charm in its simplicitly.
I always find the feedback process a really daunting experience because it’s thoroughly terrifying to have anyone look at your work, especially when it is at its roughest and others are a lot more polished. I thought it was great to have forms to fill out because it gave you tangible ways to make your story better, even if some of them can be contradicting. I think the thing with documentary is that you are never going to get it right for everyone, because people like different things. You are never going to please everyone and therefore in some sense it becomes more about pleasing yourself, and making sure you can do the best that you can do, in consideration of wider feedback. This in fact was the case with our short drama last semester, where Christine hated one of our actors and Paul liked him, sometimes it is simply up to personal taste. Therefore, when you get feedback for films I would say that half of it is tangible things and technical things that you can fix and half of it is opinions relating to things such as style and subject and often things you need to negotiate with.
Our feedback came with one general consensus great character, needs a better structure, or more a clearer structure and more escape to the outside, as in more cutaways.
These are things that we considered extensively when coming into our rough screening and are making positive steps to solving these problems. One of our solutions is through voice-over, which will contextualise the story, one of the feedback’s was ‘we don’t even know her name’ and to ‘contextualise this to the point of ridiculousness’ or something along those lines. Liam also said the same thing with visuals, that we can afford to be quite literal. When thinking about this I total agree because of the nature of Maggie and her rambling quality, where it would be clearer in terms of her stories to give the audience a visual aid to guide them and listen more carefully. I was extremely happy to see that one person in their feedback said ‘it’s great that she’s not completely clear, because it makes you really listen and be involved.’
To be honest, I am a big fan of subtlety and I think there is a lot of room for it in a documentary, especially one like ours, where maybe it’s not a documentary you watch once but one you come back to and discover more because you have to listen just that little bit closer. However, I think by juxtaposing the not-so-obvious in Maggie’s stories and bluntly obvious pictures will give a nice contradiction and make the audience come away with something the first time the watch it and leave an impression.
In terms of structure, we have already worked really hard at this over the past few days in consolidating the stories we’ve already chosen and giving them more emotional weight. I think that you have to go though each story and give every word weight by giving words time to breathe and resonate. I found when watching out rough cut that some bits were rushed and I wanted to slow things down and give Maggie’s words more resonance without becoming overally draining. It’s almost like proof reading an essay and thinking if these moments ‘say anything’ because if they do it is worthwhile keeping them. I also think it’s important to look for moments that reoccur because they can become motifs and then create structure. I found this come through with the use of staircases in Maggie’s stories, which is a very visual motif that can be expressed more clearly.
Making a documentary is not simply about carrying it from beginning to end chronologically but by looking at each moment and finding how that links into a bigger picture that says something that extends beyond Maggie’s existence to something universal.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, editing, group, interview, structure
Today Gina and I spent three hours logging and capturing all our footage from Maggie’s interview and to be completely honest thank god I did this after the lecture on Monday because it allowed Gina and I to log and capture in a really efficient way. Due to the fact that I got there earlier I finished logging the clips, leaving the name as the clip as the question and within the logging notes, put what stood out to me in what Maggie said so I would find written references within the Final Cut project. When Gina arrived we began capturing the footage, where Gina was able to transcribe the whole of our interview so we got super organised straight away and discussed some key points in the interview and what other footage we needed to get on our next shoot on Thursday to fill some gaps.
What Gina and I talked about were moments in her story that correlated beyond her story but into the wider context of her life. For instance, Maggie talks about having to go through medical appointments and explains how she is always waiting for answers as they take more blood and do more test in this kind of repetitous manner I thought that this really correlated to her overall story of moving from place to place and having to wait inside and never get this form of conclusion from staying still.
Once, Meenal and Sarah arrived for the tutorial we discussed some major issues that we needed to resolve in terms of where do we go next? Meenal wrote some excellent notes to convey our change of structure that came from a realisation that the hats that she collects and holds so dearly convey more than this. They convey Maggie’s movement from place to place that contradicts the very interior life Maggie has lived. Overall, there is a large contradiction in Maggie’s story being that as much as she has moved from this place to the next there is this sense right through of her being imprisoned to a certain extent and scared to face the realities of the real world. Her hats convey her movement that she has found recently going to Apollo Bay and other places that she talks about in her story. We discussed this with Liam and came up with a solid structural idea that avoids this sense of conclusion that Maggie herself doesn’t give us. Meenal explains this quite well:
As Maggie talks alot about being locked up/scared to face the
world , we thought we could use that as our starting place to portray that sense
of fear she has from moving anywhere . As sound and image goes hand in hand we
thought we could have a overlay of her collection of hats that she loves and are
from different places ( denotes movement again) to play while there is a voice
over of Maggie as she contradicts this movement. “I was stuck in the house for a
month . Some one always did my shopping”.
This lies as a contradiction between what Maggie is saying and what is being revealed and also foreshadows the ending of the film, which will reveal how Maggie has managed to get over this and walk down the stairs, go outside pay her bills, where at one point she claims that “this opened the door for her.” The ending will be the conclusion of the foreshadowing that the hats implied and we hope to capture some overlays of Maggie outside and experiencing the world in a way that she never felt possible. I feel as this is a very literary way to structure our film and reminds me of studying literature in year twelve where you look for different things within a text, labelled by the abreviation MILCSCON- mood, images, links, context, structure and narration. I can’t remember what the ‘O’ standed for. As I looked back through our interview footage I was trying to pick up on certain things especially metaphorical, pithy moments that correlate to a wider sense of Maggie’s life and the links that bring these moments together. In a sense it’s like sitting back and objectifying your work, analysing and searching for moments that are not only good but create a rythym of that person’s life.
I feel that looking at our footage and now stepping forward to do some more filming has really made us grasp what we’re looking for in our next interview and what images we need to capture. Obviously, we need to capture Maggie’s hats in detail as she looks through them and capture hats what show different places that correlate to her life. We also what to get some overlays of Maggie moving to get a sense of the things that she can achieve now as little as they might be, where at one point Maggie does say herself, “it’s step by step.” As Liam said we need to see our subject succeeding or not succeeding but the fact is that we need to see them doing rather than just saying. In conjunction, we want to get a further feel that this is not Maggie’s home in the normal sense of the word “home” and that we thought we could convey this visually by showing room numbers and exterior shots of the way the house is set up to visually show that Maggie is sharing with other people. She still hasn’t gotten to the point where she can live independently. This is how we’ve decided to end our film, by highlighting what Maggie still has to overcome and the ambiguity of what’s around the corner, especially with her health issues.
Update Update Update!
So after much hardship we are filming tomorrow afternoon with our subject. Yay!
In our tutorial we had a meeting and organised our schedule, which is a rather small time frame. Tomorrow we will get our interview footage and cutaways of her room that will add visual depth to our documentary. To be honest I am completely EXCITED about it. We had a few set backs and have to film in the late afternoon and have decided to take on a slightly different aesthetic approach than we originally invisioned. This is a good thing more than a bad thing as we’ve had time to really suss out the reasoning behind our visual style.
With style.
Originally, we wanted to go with a rough hand held natural lighting approach and we have now changed this to a flowing more artistic approach. We decided on this from a reading by Kirsten Johnson that deals with a lot of difficult subjects that we thought applied specifically to our own documentary. We not only decided this because of her we also decided that a rough approach was a rather silly manouver because our subject in some respect does not want to deal with the roughness of her past but to move beyond it. Therefore we decided that filming in a more stylistically beautiful way with flowing pans and nice lighting would make our documentary visually rewarding for our subject as they will feel that they have been depicted in a way that is beautiful, a way that they haven’t been depicted for the majority of their life. I think this is important because as much as we want a distinct style we also want our subject to be happy with how she is presented. A way that is powerfully invigorating and empowering for her and the other people that watch it. It places her within a more powerful position that makes her appear visually as less of a victim, which is what we really were made to think about in Steve Thomas’s lecture.
With story.
A lot of this I gained from Steve’s lecture in regards to finding moments of colour and contradiction. Moments that stand out on a visual level, without being visual. In thinking about this and from gaining information about our subject today I found somethings highly visual and realised that we are definitely going to get these moments with our subject. Moments of hardship that are covered visually and emotively by our subject. We talked about all sorts of things from her love of John Wayne a Western film star to her entanglement of destructive, good and rekindled relationships, which I think are at the heart of her story. She is also able to laugh about some of things that she has done in the past, which shows her ability to move beyond them and there are also visual things that are symbolic of the things she needs to carry with her everyday such as a past experience with her breaking her shoulder and her inability to get it fixed, where the pain still lives with her 34 years later.
With structure.
I would say this is our major inherent problem, not that we haven’t thought about it but more that it has been difficult to find something solid. I will be shaping my questions about 3 stages of her life being her childhood, her homelessness and her life now. However, will ask her these in reverse order as she tends to think and mull over the difficult moments of her life to a rather painful degree. This could be the structure of our film and we will be looking for overlays that will split our film into these three defining parts. However, this is more an assumption than anything else as her life might be formed around three rather seperate times.
With organisation.
- Our group is very organised and on the same page, Gina, Meenal and Sarah are picking up the equipment and driving it to location. I will meet them there.
- Our subject has been informed as to what tomorrow is going to be like and is prepared according to these ethical outlines.
- The equipment booking sheets have been handed in.
- Editing for the log and capture has been organised.
Image Source:
lucianvenutian, Gear Up, flickr, CC-Attribution-ShareALike, <http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucianvenutian/1367423859/in/photostream/>
As I have mentioned in a previous blog post when dealing with people that are naive in terms of knowing about the documentary process and filming it is your ethical obligation not to exploit them, and therefore I wrote this list.
Our ethical approach to informed consent:
It is a) important to tell our subject that she has the right not to answer questions and b) the right to tell us to turn the camera off. It is our obligation to tell her that she has these rights. It is also our obligation to c) tell her what is expected of her to eliminate as much as possible situations a) and b).
What we need to tell our subject:
a) That our documentary is looking to promote awareness of women in regards to homelessness, and not to discriminate against her cause.
b) That we will require her to respond to personal information about her life with the possibility of others (the general public) also viewing our documentary and therefore seeing and hearing her story.
c) However, if she feels we are being too pushy into personal details she has at any time the right to tell us to stop or to move on and we as filmmakers have the ethical obligation to do this.
d) In light of this we will tell our subject when the camera is rolling and when it is not rolling. We will keep her entirely informed of what is happening, including when we are and are not recording.
e) The technical aspects that will be involved before we film. We will have a camera and tripod, lapel microphone that is a small microphone attached to you top, a boom microphone that will be kept out of the way and used to capture background noises rather than our subject’s voice this will be held below our subject rather than in an intimidating manner. We also inform her that there will be four people there to film.
f) We will inform her that the filming will take place over a few days, which are convenient for both her and us.
g) We will inform her that we would like to film other aspects of her life and wish her to grant permission for her to show us things that are important to her to create our visual aesthetic.
h) We will tell her that we would like her to tell us about three aspects of her life: before homelessness, during and after-now.
Site research has been a rather rollercoaster journey in terms of establishing what’s normal, because to tell you the truth nothing really is that normal and is constantly filled with ups and downs. So maybe what I can establish as normal is that it is constantly up and down, and maybe an abnormality would be a constant. I’ve been trying to integrate myself as much as possible within the environment and realised that a lot of the women are open if not too open about their problems. However, what I’ve realised is that to get them to tell you this information it is easier to bring it up in a conversation than ask direct questions. Asking more open-ended questions are a lot easier as well.
What you realise is how little things impact their days and it’s this constant struggle that is never going to end. One little thing could bring their world crashing down. I’ve been talking to the people that work there and started to get the overbearing sense of injustice towards homeless women, and that men who are homeless have a lot more opportunities away from homelessness than women. This I feel brings a stronger hold to our documentary because we are doing something that hasn’t been done before. In also talking to the workers there I get this sense of the major issues that women face and the common cause that women become homeless is domestic abuse. This seems to be a common thread through homeless women. Therefore stories that don’t adhere to this could be remarkably more fascinating.
What I’ve also noticed is that some of the women have quite functional families such as sons and brothers and sisters that aren’t affected by the same predicament as these women. This I haven’t been able to get a lot of information about, but seems fascinating how one member of a whole family unit is affected by something so dramatically that it leads them to homelessness. It’s truly fascinating and makes me wonder how these women deal with the rather normalness of their family units.
In terms of organising it’s been rather difficult as there are so many other priorities and obviously we don’t go on the top of the list and it is constantly busy there. I apologise to my group members for not getting anything set in concrete yet and fingers crossed this will happen by the end of the week. In dealing with this I expected a sense of difficultness as opinions change and things get forgotton and this just adds to the dilemmas these women have to face everyday, however it is something we also need to face and treat as respectfully as possible while still getting the job done.
