After Easter meeting.

Throughout Easter me and James were waiting for a script that Reece was supposed to write. He had all the ideas and relative information such as the character profiles and a description of how the story would plan out. We were supposed to have a draft copy by the end of the first week. We didn't get anything throughout the rest of the holidays despite us asking. If i had the script i would have been able to have a draft storyboard and shot list ready by the time we came back, keeping us ahead of time and allowing more time for reshoots if needed and to be able to perfect our final edit. However because we didn't receive it until we came back after the holidays I feel what we received was very rushed and not up to standard. So me and James talked to Reece and actually rewrote, using the same structure he set out, the dialogue to make it much more realistic and consistent. over several days me and James did this and eventually came up with a good script which we got a lot of good feedback from. We did some adjustments and now had our final script, a week and a half behind when we wanted it by. This in turn delayed our rough storyboard and shot list, as well as not having any actors auditions because we weren't able to get anyone to audition without a script. We had a location and shooting date set for the week after, planned in the holidays to make sure we had it. Because of this delay we had to push it back a further week. Despite this delay we still weren't behind, we just weren't ahead anymore, which gives us less time for reshoots if needed.

Team meeting one

In this first meeting we decided to go through our ideas to try and get something together, we also ended up deciding on our story and developing our characters.
Our very first idea was mental health, however we all felt this was too vague so we decided to narrow it down to try and get something more specific. We ended up listing mental illnesses. We eventually came up with schizophrenia when i realised recently i watched a video simulation of somebody experiencing a panic attack. Then we thought about doing something along these lines, but dramatising it. We eventually agreed on this idea and started developing character profiles. We have the documents that we used to create these on James Webb's blog. After this was done we all talked about how it would play out in the story. We came up with so many different ideas and plot twists and different styles that what we had was more of a plan for a half hour short rather than a 5 minute one. So we put the majority of the ideas to the side to develop as an independent project in the summer. In the end we had decided to keep it quite simple to make it easier for the audience. After this session was done we sent Reece away to develop our script by the end of the first week in the easter holidays so James could send off copies of our draft script to actors so we could start filming 2 weeks after we get back.

Le Miroir Analysis

We were shown a selection of films in our first drama session with debbie, "Le Miroir" was my personal favourite of the selection that she showed us. I like it because it is an original idea, and i love how well it was shot in such a small visual space and just what you can do with it to reflect the current age in the story.

The structure of the film reflects the main theme - journey. It is a personal journey that a boy takes in his life. It starts off with him being a little boy and ends with him flicking off the light when he is an old man, signifying his death.

I really like the use of first person in this film, it really helps to make things more personal with the audience. Seeing as this is the only viewpoint we have, and there isn't a change of location, for us to have an idea of what age our character is before we see him in the mirror is the set dressing and props. So we see a shaving set when he first begins to shave, or a cigarette with wrinkled tattoos on his arm when we know he is middle aged. All the small things like that make a massive difference to the audience because the location is all one colour and not that important to look at, it is all about the props that are used to help create a new character each time he turns away from the mirror, and it works very effectively.

Overall I really enjoyed this short film, it was the most creative idea i have seen in a long time, and it got me emotionally involved with the main character, which was very important. I enjoyed the camera techniques used and how it was used to link the edits into one smooth motion.

Drama Brief and Groups

We received our new brief for our journey project the other day. We have to create a 5 minute film based around the idea of a journey, whilst only having three different characters and three different locations. For me I feel this is both a good and bad brief, it is bad because it is very limiting with the character and location limits, but the actual topic "journey" could be interpreted in a few different ways. This is good because it forces us to think outside the box, whilst still meeting these limitations. This will be a good challenge to create not just a film to pass the module, but to create something actually worth watching, for me this is the main aim of this brief, which personally, pushed me harder than actually just meeting a brief.

After we received this brief we got ourselves into groups, we were told not to do the same role as we did in the previous project, but we decided to stay in the same group as we did in the documentary as we were all very happy with how we worked with each other. These are the group members names and their roles:

Director - Reece Ronan
Producer - James Webb
Cinematographer - Me
Sound recorder - Jack Roberts
Video Editor - Kyle Piercy
Sound Editor - Anthony Wilson

We feel we are at least all in roles that we are well suited for, if not our best role. For me cinematographer is my favourite and most skilled role.

In conclusion I think that we have a challenging, but interesting brief, along with a group who work well together all in our strongest roles.

Sound Edit

Before I did anything with the sound I made sure that all of my sound files were labelled with the interview number, the day it was recorded and if it was a good take, and if not what needs doing to it. In soundtrack pro I completely levelled off all the sound so the levels are consistent throughout the film. I used keyframes at some points to gradually have the levels pulled up or down in certain points. On all of the outdoor clips all of the lows needed cutting out up to 100Hz to completely get rid of any wind on the mic, or low level traffic. On a couple of clips I had to use noise reduction to minimise any buzzes, I also eliminated some pops and clips from some clips. It is still there, but I minimised them as much as possible. After this I added in transitions where needed, overlayed certain clips, scrubbed the atmos tracks and used atmos tracks throughout. We decided we didn't want any music in our film just because it would contrast too much with the talking. One of the only problems I had with soundtrack pro was that it kept crashing, it took several days as I had to restart several times, until i saved just before export, and even then it crashed several times at export, it took several methods and new computers before export, we would have finished over a day early if it wasn't for soundtrack pro. The one thing I learnt from that is to just not use Soundtrack pro, and to learn to use another program such as logic pro. After this we were ready to completely export the film and put onto a disk. Luckily the final export went without any issue, and I am proud of what we have accomplished, even though there are small improvements we could have made, with the framing, use of space and time in the film, get better interviews. But we still have a strong documentary with an original idea.

Video edit - Assistant editing

As the assistant video editor I was working with the editor to edit any other footage that isn't related to the main edit, so I was responsible for the individual edits of all of the sunrise images and the sunset and the text, as well as being in charge of the exporting/converting raw footage and at one point I covered for our main editor. Really the only problem I had in this role was managing all of the data. We shot about 40Gb of raw footage in H.264 format, I researched what the highest quality format to edit in was (apple prores 422 (HQ))  However this turned 40Gb worth of footage into over 200Gb. this massive size does allow us to do anything in FCP without having to render. Even though it has saved me a lot of time without rendering, it has probably cancelled out in terms of spending hours copying data between different harddrives.

Liverpool Evaluation

Straight away we had something go wrong in terms of our group, one of our members was ill and couldn't come on the trip. Luckily he didn't have a major production role, he was our editor. But it would have made it so much easier to have another person with us to help support the group and attract people to interview. As I was the sound editor I was just going to be the camera assistant to support, but instead I was camera assistant as well as boom operator. It would have helped to have had that extra person to help.

On the first day we got all our gear out from stores and checked that everything worked, we bought plenty of batteries to support my camera if we ran out of rechargeable and for my top-light. After we had signed into the hostel we had done a recce on all of the locations we were going to use and double check that the locations where we needed permission to film were OK  Its a good thing we did that because it allowed us to get an idea of how to get to our locations and how to frame our shots. When we got back we planned out where we will be and at what time. As well as this we made sure all batteries were charged so we were ready to go for the sunrise time-lapse at 6.30 am the next day.

When we first started getting foxpops we struggled to get good footage and were nervous at first to approach people, but throughout the day it got better as we knew how to do it better. At the end of the day we looked at the footage on my laptop and decided for the next day it might be good to attempt to get footage in some shop, so me James and Kyle looked at some of the independent shops on Bond street to get some in-store interviews.

On the second day we left to get in-store interviews at about 11 and we finished around 2 with about 6 quality in-store interviews. I was very happy with the quality of footage and sound that we got on the last day.

Overall this trip was successful, however we may need to go back to get some cutaway footage. But all of our interviews I feel are usable.