Creative media project evaluation

At the beginning of this module I decided to pair up with Danny Wild. We had known each other quite well from last year at uni and we know our strengths and weaknesses quite well. Creatively we are compatible, and neither of us is afraid to say if we aren't keen on an idea. Danny is typically more of an editor, and I am pore of a production person, both in camera and sound. Because of this we decided to assign these roles to us, however there were times that we would swap roles to give each other more of a chance to have a go on the other side. We both took on the role of director.

After the first session we decided to meet up and attempt to start brainstorming for our sound piece. During the brainstorm we were also starting to choose ideas that we knew would work with film, we didn’t just use the sound piece to influence our final idea for the experimental film, some of our final product was influenced by some of the other ideas we had on this initial brain storming session. However the majority of the influence was still from our sound piece. We should have just focused purely on the sound piece at the time. If we had done that we might have ended up with a more purely experimental film idea. After we had done our brain storm we couldn't choose outright so we just eliminated them one by one by attempting to find flaws in each idea. E.g. we wanted to get the atmosphere of a football ground, but we realised for filming we wouldn't be able to get permissions to film, and the sound will be very difficult to get clean, level recordings. After we justified getting rid of most of the ideas we were left with four. And we carried on this process being much more ruthless and we eventually ended up with our final idea.

Our final idea was to attempt to replicate the rising feeling of stress in a day to day office environment along with its peak, and followed by calm, relaxing come down. We were both happy with this idea so we did our list of what recordings we needed to get, and then did our audio timeline. I feel in the long run all of this planning helped us be much more efficient in our production as we didn't have any time to mess about. After all of the production planning we went and hired out our Marantz and rifle mike to do our recording. We were also prepared with our Para shoot to help protect us financially if anything went wrong.

On the day of actual recording we started at my house in order to get all of the sounds we needed for our first three scenes, we were going to do a separate day for our recordings in Grindleford. Once Danny arrived at mine we started pretty much straight away, got all of the recordings without any problems and I made sure that all of the recordings were saved onto my computer and hard drive so that we wouldn't lose anything if one of the devices failed. After this we did our Para shoot and rehired out the equipment for the week after for Grindleford. Overall a great day recording.

In the mean time we did a rough draft of the edit of the first three scenes (waking up, the office, and the journey to the train station) we were happy with all of the recordings we had, they were all clean and what we wanted to use. We liked the idea of layering up the recordings over each other, we tried it for the first scene and it all worked well along with the strong alarm in the background shadowed by the other sounds gave it a very stressful feel. At this time we weren't paying much attention to the levels or effects, we just wanted to get a rough cut of what would be where before we started to do any finer touch ups.

The following week we went to Grindleford after collecting our recording gear, but we had made the mistake of waiting until around midday to leave, by the time we got to Grindleford it was rapidly getting dark. Regardless we decided to carry on and get what recordings we could as we didn't to want to have to reorganise another day to go. Walking through the woods we got some good atmosphere tracks, along with the sound of a stream, and a larger waterfall. After only a half hour our batteries had run out as they were only half full when we got them, but hadn't realised until we got off the train, we could have been better prepared here, but luckily we still had several good tracks to work with. It was also a shame that we were running out of light as we wanted to use this opportunity to do a location scout as we wanted to use this location in the experimental film. overall a disappointing day recording.

Regardless of the previous day we decided to attempt to finish our draft edit for our tutorial a few days later. We only needed four separate recordings for the last scene so it turns out we got lucky that we didn't need anything apart from maybe some breathing. So I hired out the Marantz for half an hour and did that in a quiet room. With the Grindleford atmosphere track over it you can't tell that it was recorded in the uni. We finally got the draft finished for the tutorial, and we were happy with what we had created, but I kept in my mind that we needed some fresh ears to listen to our piece to point out any flaws.

After the rough edit me and Danny decided to do some planning for our experimental film, we already had an idea on how we wanted to portray our sound in the experimental film, so we storyboarded it, I got the actress sorted along with the equipment hire and the Para shoot. And we both did the storyboarding and shot list along with suggested editing notes. We felt like we were ready to shoot, but we decided to hold fire until the tutorial to see what Debbie's suggestions would be.

After the tutorial Debbie gave us some really useful notes and suggestions such as sorting out the levels on certain areas we hadn't noticed. I feel it was particularly useful on the comment on the voice in the second scene, the performance wasn't convincing, and the levels were too high and it stuck out of the mix. In the end we actually completely got rid of that voice and just stuck with what we had; we feel that the subtlety of the keyboard, along with the office atmosphere track will be enough in conjunction with the phone ringing periodically. We also threw in a traffic section in between each scene to use as a transition period; this gives the listener more of a sense of space, as if they were following the actress. She also looked over our plans for our experimental film, we pitched the idea and told her that we would be experimenting in terms of our editing, and want to play with the idea of the build-up of stress, and reflect that in the editing pace. To focus on the editing a lot of the cinematography will be the same to keep the focus on the editing. Debbie made the suggestion of making a structure for the edit and sticking to it. We decided that we would include the structure for the stressful parts, but during the peaceful section we are going to break away from that, to emphasise all of the differences in feeling. We noted this down for ourselves for when we edit. We are now ready to do our experimental film productions, overall I feel this tutorial was a big help to us.

The first day of production was fairly easy as we got all of our shots indoors in the evening; we only needed 18 shots for 2 scenes as we are playing with repetition in the edit. No problems, the equipment worked fine for us, and we worked well with the storyboard and noted down any more ideas for our edit whilst we worked. The second day was a lot more hectic; we had to make sure we came prepared for long walks uphill in the freezing cold with food. We got our third scene shot fairly quickly in the morning before midday. By the time we got to Grindleford we only had about 8 shots left, and a couple of other shots we chose to get because they looked so beautiful. Even though we had very few shots to get the locations were a couple of miles apart and we had to get them done well before sunset so we could climb down safely. Again there were no issue with the equipment in the cold; we had plenty of spare batteries this time round. Aside from being freezing cold there were no issues our actress was very good, she followed our directions perfectly in terms of acting, and was also on hand to help provide us with some help getting clean sound, as she is a professional sound recordist for her job. After this we started our film edit the day after.

We edited one scene at a time and then repeated it several times, becoming shorter and shorter until each shot is only a couple of frames long, I feel this worked to get the viewer stressed with our character. We had to get some new recordings to match up to the sound, and we had to relocate some of the files we used previously in the edit which was a pain as we couldn't remember which folder they were saved in for a while. But otherwise no other real problems. We showed this film in a short tutorial and all the audience came back with positive feedback, only minor things we needed to change, such as levels, and putting in the sounds of breathing in the original sound piece. There was a suggestion made to mix up the physical structure of the film, we changed a bit at the end and put it at the beginning, just to tick the box for the tutor's feedback, but I don't agree that it makes the film any better or gives it any benefit whatsoever. Unfortunately this is put right in the start of our final edit but if I had the time to re burn it I would take it out as it a much better experimental film without it.

In terms of this module I was fairly happy with the content in the sessions, I would have liked more theory sessions instead of just the one on experimental film and one on sound pieces to help us provide a deeper meaning to what makes and experimental film. There was also too little in terms of professional practice, it was mentioned once, I would have liked at least another session, I felt like it could have gone into much more detail. As a result of me not feeling the theory stuff was detailed enough I often missed sessions in order to film, plan, edit, or do other work that I felt that benefited me. As for the blog I felt that was a very good idea for us to keep everybody else up to date as it keeps everything on record and you can use other people for inspiration.

Overall I was disappointed in the main assessment of this module, I feel like you are supposed to learn the rules before you can break them, and I don’t feel this module did that, and I think a lot of the other students feel the same way. However I still feel I provided a strong sense of space sound piece, along with myself learning in production and pre-production along the way and I learnt through my experiences in the experimental film. I am happy with my final sound piece, and my final experimental film, bar the very first pointless shot. I look forward to next semester where we will be producing much more practical films.