Evaluation
Over the second semester we have created a three minute documentary and a five minute drama, on the documentary i played the role of sound recordist. Overall, i enjoyed the liverpool documentary, i feel that some of the things that could have been changed on watching the final cut of the film, such as overuse of music, and not enough soundtrack, but i am very proud of everyone in the group including myself for our contributions towards the film, we really had a go at achieving a certain aesthetic, and i think it payed off in the end, our documentary was as colourful and playful as we wanted it to be, i had a go at some of the camera work and the static street shots that me and alice went to film i feel were a strong point in the film, and were commented on during our presentation which made me feel even more proud, i realised from this that i needed to choose a more creative role for myself as i have learnt that i find it difficult to take a step back from those types of roles, but i am glad i did this time as it gave me chance to try something i had not necessarily done before, and helped me affirm the roles which i do and don't like doing. I think if we had left ourselves more time to edit we would have been able to tidy it up a lot more, and could have achieved a better more consistent style, the initial shoot went well, we could have benefitted from more initial planning for locations, as when we got there on the day we were pretty rushed for time to find interviews, i feel some more care could have been taken for planning time for the sound edit, as many of the sounds i recorded got washed out with music. Our initial presentation of our ideas didn't go to plan, we had only focused on one idea and had neglected to have a backup choice, putting all of our eggs in one basket like this was a risky move but in the end we managed to pull it off. For the sound recording i had to improvise, it was extremely windy and the rifle mic was not powerful enough so i placed the handheld mic in my coat pocket and slowly walked around to capture some of the dock sounds, this actually worked quite well and i managed to cut out a lot of the wind distortion. While in liverpool we actually managed to be very organised and set aside enough time for the days filming, we had some technical difficulties such as the camera running out of battery during a time lapse which was a bit of a disappointment as we had a lovely shot of the gate as it got dark. Other mishaps involved us losing the memory card with the interview on, which was returned to us by one of our fellow course mates, to then have our editor have his bag stolen with his laptop all the other footage on, so Chris went back to liverpool with some of his friends and reshot a good third of the film. The final edit of the film looked really good despite all of this, the interview sound quality was clear and didn't take much sound editing and the shots that were taken within the supermarket that i shot were luckily still there and were used in the final cut of the film.
I am pleased with the overall project but there are things i took on board for the drama such as wanting to play a much more creative role and more organisation of time. For our drama we had a few ideas at the start for our scripts, eventually we settled on Alice's film as we thought it would be much easier to create a definitive style, we took inspiration from films such as moonrise kingdom and tried to look at the shot composition, and how he has used colour to create something that reflected a childlike mindset. It wasn't until the actual filming that we managed to establish a colour scheme, using our actor max's red coat and incorporating red bricks and sign posts to keep the theme and make it more obvious. The green surroundings that we used contrasted this nicely and i made full advantage of this during the colour correction part of the edit. I actually had quite a lot of input in shot planning on the day which i was pleased about, as i was trying to work out how i was going to make this work in the edit, i needed some static shots of him stopping on his journey, so i could start some of the dialogue at that point and continue it as the film progressed, this provided us with the option to think of some really well composed shots, on of my favourite shots is of Max standing my a post eating a sandwich and checking his watch and walking out of shot, i'm so glad that we got this shot last minute as it provided me with a cut in the edit, something i ended up struggling with. When i first got the footage into the edit i encountered my first problem, first of all half of the footage had been shot at a much higher quality and it was already formatted in widescreen and the rest of the footage was in a lower quality in the standard aspect ratio you normally get from a camera. I had to go through and manually change the frame size of the widescreen shots during the edit, using the wireframe overlay, losing some of the quality but not much. I should note at this stage that i had already forgotten to decode the dslr footage in mpeg streamclip, i had done this before in previous edits but only for the purpose of making the edit easier as it usually makes me render everything i move on the timeline. But because the dslr footage was shot in a low quality it wasn't doing this continually so i didn't realise that not doing this would actually affect the quality of the export to quicktime, which i will expand on further in this evaluation. I started by putting all the footage into different bins for each location so i could easily go through the script and match each piece up to the script, i then laid all the best dialogue sound takes out onto the timeline to get a rough idea of the length of the film. I realised after i had done this that something was going to have to be cut out as we had almost four and a half minutes of continuous dialogue. I decided to leave this decision until last and begin by piecing together each bit of the narrative with its corresponding scene. This turned out to be more difficult than i anticipated, as i had already mapped out the opening scene in my head, which me and Alice had previously talked about and we had collected some really nice static shots of Max getting ready and putting his coat on, I overlaid this with the Pink Martini's song i had chosen and i felt this worked really well with the gaps in the footage going to black, this was around the point we had our first tutorial, in which we showed the work, we got quite positive feedback despite it not being a full rough cut, i was unable to work on the edit for a few day afterwards due to writing for my theory module, an error in time management on my part, leaving myself only two days to do the full edit. After quite a lot of trial and error i managed to create a visual story that matched the script, this was difficult because all of the shots were of him walking and there was no point at which to intercut them, not even with artistic licence, so i pulled out all the useable static shots i could find and started to place them in where the dialogue stopped and started, although there was a story board to work from it didn't really prove to be much use in the edit. I tried to develop an editing style that conveyed a blunt dry humour, i favoured bold cuts and actually tried to establish pace and give the film a 'full' well rounded feel, so it felt like an actual short film rather than an excerpt from a film as many student short films can feel, i used the song at the beginning and end to achieve this, and i also followed a similar editing pattern to the beginning at the end, where as the beginning had black and then image of him getting ready, i mirrored this and showed clips of Max walking to signify the end of his journey, and the blanks that were there previously are now filled with images of peggy, i feel the black in the opening scenes signifies the audiences unsureity about what he is doing, and this works well with the last scene as the audience are now aware of what he is doing and are able to see peggy's reaction to the letter, even though max is unaware of this. During the colour correction i learnt a lot, i had previously not known you could colour correct in real time rather than doing a trial and error and applying it to all like i had been shown in college, this discovery was probably the thing i enjoyed most about the edit as it enabled me to colour correct more efficiently and expanded my skills as an editor. I also learnt how to freeze frame shots to save some of the shaky shots, i only used this once or twice but it was a useful trick. On completing the final cut, the sound editors were able to edit to my version on soundtrack pro and create a separate sound file that could be added to my edit for the export, this however worked in theory but in practice there were some problems exporting the sound file, the voiceover became tinny and the levels of the spot sound messed up. And the song i had chosen wouldn't import into soundtrack pro, this resulted in me manually editing the song to create a fade out at the beginning and the end, i did this by cutting it up in multiple places and gradually turning the levels down. When it came to exporting the final file this is where the problems came from not decompressing the files beforehand, this resulted nomatter how many different ways we exported it, in it having less quality, by the by the finished product is something i am happy with, and we received really positive feedback during our presentation of our work, which has given me the confidence to look a little more positively on work we have made, and this is something i think that will be useful next year. Things that i have learned throughout both projects are that i feel i have made the right choices for my modules next year, as i much prefer creative realisation and post production, i have learned some simple skills in post production that will benefit me next year and i'm glad i got a chance this module to fulfil a role i am more capable of doing. I really enjoyed the documentary film making, i am now looking forward to my module next year, one of the benefits of not being in a fully creative role was that i was able to take a more objective view of what went wrong with the documentary, and now have an idea of things to avoid to ensure we get the highest quality piece of work, such as relying on unstable interviews and "fixing it in post". Things i will be watching out for in drama are making sure we have a solid story board to work from. I thoroughly enjoyed working with my group, i think we all work well as a team for the actual production but more of a team effort should have been made on all parts on the planning of both projects.
