At the start of this module we were shown
an example of some documentaries, some more factual, and others that that were
more fun, and were more personal. At the end of this session we had got
ourselves into groups and decided on our roles. I was in a group with James
Webb, Reece Ronan, Jack Roberts, Kyle Piercy, and Ant Wilson. I have worked
with Ant and Kyle before and know their strengths and weaknesses. For example I
know that Kyle is a great Producer and Video Editor. Our roles were James as
director, Kyle as producer, Jack as cinematographer, Ant for sound recorder,
and Reece as video editor, and I was sound editor and camera assistant.
We went for our first meeting and all did a
brainstorm, and came up with various ideas such as the cavern club where the
Beatles first played we thought that we could get some good footage in the
actual club of a band playing to give good cutaways, we decided not to do this
as we thought that a lot of other groups would be doing the same thing, and we
were right. As well as this we looked into doing the dock and the history of
the war and titanic, but then agreed it would have been too factual. Then we
heard something about “A peoples path” where people could place loved ones
names on a path running over 200 meters from the main cathedrals doors to the
road. Our plan was to get an interview with the religious leaders of the church
to ask them what love actually means to them, and what the think the public’s
perception of love is. In the end we ended up going with this idea, as it was a
lighthearted subject that isn’t purely factual and slightly more interesting
than a history of the docks. After we agreed on this idea we planned things out
such as filming permissions for locations and peoples interviews. All the
filming permissions for locations came through, but nobody wanted to have an
interview with us. Instead of getting planned interviews we agreed to try and
get interviews from the public on the days we were there. We researched the
busiest locations, and places that would look good on camera and relatively
quiet for sound. We found a street full of independent shops called bond street
which has some tattoo parlours and book shops and other small stores that
people have time for an inside interview in a different environment than
outside in the city. As well as this we went down to the docks where there were
lots of families there for us to interview.
For the actual trip we had got the train to
Liverpool and stayed in a hostel. Our first problem was that Reece was ill so
he had to miss the trip which made our lives harder for carrying gear around
and getting help with quick set ups and helping to get people to interview. On
the first day we used to recce out our locations so we knew our way around. On
the second day we were up at 6 in the morning to catch a sunrise we wanted for
the introduction for our documentary over the cathedral. When we got on
location I helped Jack set up camera as we were using my canon 550D and I had
recently looked into a software update called “Magic lantern” which give the
550D the features of a 5D or the Z1’s. But this new layout was confusing to
learn. So I helped teach jack how to use magic lantern and all of its features.
We had no camera issues after that. On the rest of this day and the next we
were getting people off the streets to interview but we underestimated how hard
it was to approach total strangers to get to interview them. To help us with
this we created a sign to explain what we were doing and to help us explain to
people we were approaching what we were doing, and more often than not people
came to us asking what we were doing.
The edit went smoothly, and we had a draft
video edit by a week after the Liverpool trip. Whilst the video edit was being
done I was naming each sound clip and labeling the ones that we would be using.
After this was done we had a rough video edit. I took this and attempted to use
soundtrack pro to clean out the sound. I had to look up tutorials on YouTube to
try and learn the processors of cleaning up sound and this benefitted me
massively. But unfortunately the only part of sound
design I could really do was to put a atmosphere track on. I spoke to James
about what else we could do but there wasn’t anything I could do that would
match the style or feel of the documentary. So after I finished replacing and
cleaning all the sound we were ready to present.
At this point I was very happy with the
feel of our piece, it was very uplifting and pleasant to watch, and all of our
colleagues agreed with us. However the feedback we got from Dom and Debbie was surprising,
as we didn’t really take into account things such as the changing pace of the
film that should have been consistent and some of the shots needed reframing.
We all agree with this feedback, more cutaways were needed to keep the pace of
the film the same throughout the film and some shots needed changing or
deleting.
After this project was finished we started
looking at dramas and had a look at several short films. We then got into
groups. My previous documentary group had talked about staying in the same
group for the final project to try and create something we were properly proud
of, with everybody in their strongest roles.
We had Reece as director, James as
producer, me as cinematography, Jack as sound recorder, Kyle as video editor,
and Ant as sound editor. Now that we had our roles we started brainstorming.
Our very first idea was to do with mental health, we decided that was too vague
so we looked into narrowing it down, we had autism, schizophrenia, split
personalities. After a while I realized I had not too long ago watched a video
simulation of somebody experiencing a schizophrenia panic attack from his or
her point of view. After watching this we talked about how we could do
something similar to that, but dramatize it. So instead of doing it from this
first person we do it from the third person and in a different environment,
where the main character has support from friend and how he survives in his
social network during this panic. We all immediately loved this idea and Reece
came up with some brilliant suggestions for how we could let the story play
out. The day after we met up in the library and discussed how we wanted the
story to play out and wrote a character description. After this was done we
gave both of these to Reece and asked him to have a draft script written by the
first week of the holidays so we could send it off with plenty of time to get
actors. Unfortunately we didn’t get the script until after the holidays. which
meant from this point onwards we were now a week behind everything. A week
behind getting actors, storyboards, shooting, editing and everything else. This
has had a massive effect on us all and completely changed the film from how it
could have been. However we made the best of the situation and all got the
script written together ourselves. After this I created a shot list and
storyboard over the next couple of days according to the script. After reading
the script I looked into the meaning of camera movement and what it means to
the audience. Because of this I had decided I wanted lots of camera movement
through a dolly, and physically following with a shoulder rig, in time with his
footsteps as it makes the audience feel more involved than if it was done
separately. Reece and James had loved what I did with the idea of movement and
the storyboard, I had shown them some test shots I did with my shoulder rig I
had bought and hired out a track and dolly. Everybody loved it. Everything was
going smoothly, the shot planning, perfecting script; we had a location and
shooting date. We had auditioned several girls for our one supporting actress
role, but we had nobody available for either of our male roles. We eventually
had to push shooting back another week, and even then only 2 days before the
shoot we found our lead male, who we were very lucky with as now him and the
actress suited the roles perfectly. Our supporting male we had confirmed only a
day before shooting. We were now ready for our shoot.
We had four days planned for shooting,
Friday through to Monday and we had our storyboards and shooting schedule, as
well as our lighting plan for each scene. Luckily everything was transferrable
from our previous location to our current one as the layout was very similar.
So nothing really went wrong. However on the day we were shooting our biggest
scene we had got dramatically behind and a 9-hour day soon turned into 12. This
was due to lots of changing of lighting set ups as they would end up in shot,
and we had to move a lot of stuff to get the lights in place. However the day
after that had picked up, we actually finished 3 hours early. We did have to
reshoot some parts to get new angles for the edit as well as some continuity
issues, apart from those two issues the shoot went very well and everybody had
a great time.
After reviewing all of the footage the
first thing I realized was how useless our supporting actor was. There was no
movement, no facial emotion, and no effort in his acting. We had agreed to try
and cut him out as much as possible, but this meant re editing the story.
Luckily Kyle had just enough different angles and shots to cover the re edit.
The only thing we need now is the separate sound recording of the voices in our
script, we used all the original actors but Ant is going to stick lots of
reverb over them to make them unrecognizable.
I have only just recently seen our final
visual edit and part of our sound edit. I feel this is going to be a very
strong piece, and I hope that people will get our story and what we were trying
to achieve. It has had colour grading put on to make the quality and colours
better as I shot completely flat to allow maximum flexibility for Kyle in his
colour grading. I am feeling good about this film being our final film of our
first year. However I want to have a chance to reshoot some parts of it as I am not happy with some of my
framing, but aside from that it is a strong piece and I cant wait to share it
to the world before I follow my summer project, which will be an extended
version of this mental health breakdown, but up to half an hour long to give
maximum flexibility for our character development as I want the audience to
have a full understanding of our characters, but five minutes just isn’t enough
to do that in.
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