Magic Lantern

Recently I was looking on some cinematography forums and I noticed somebody mention something called "Magic Lantern". This is a firmware adaptation originally developed for the Canon 5D mark II, to allow cameramen using DSLR's to have complete control over other functions in the camera that would usually be completely inaccessible. These features include complete audio level control, including turning off the cameras automatic gain control, more controllable ISO levels, aided focus, and continuous non-stop filming, useful for our time-lapses.

So even though installing this onto my camera voids my warranty I did my research and all of the reported problems with the cameras after the firmware was installed was a known Canon fault, so I decided to proceed regardless. After I installed the firmware I thought it might be important for me to get to know the ins and outs of this new system and how to use it at its best so I watched a short tutorial to find out what does what and how it is all used and I did test shots in the Sheffield botanical gardens until I felt confident that I could explain to somebody else in detail how to use it in confidence.

Overall I am very happy that I installed this firmware, it is a massive help for filming, the features are all useful and I think this will help us get better quality images on the Liverpool trip.

                                          Some of the features on magic lantern on my 550D

Pockets

http://vimeo.com/21776727 
I analysed a short documentary done for channel 4 called Pockets, it uses foxpops to see what the public of London have in their pockets and what it says about them. Throughout the film there is a very shallow depth of field, usually with the use of a focus pull to guide the audiences eye to the various focus points of the specific object. There is a mixture of sync and non sync sound, this could be because of how interesting the character is to look at e.g. if it is an interesting person there will be non sync sound to focus on the person. The underscore of music is very light-hearted and is used to keep the mood uplifting, even throughout the cutaways that are used for breathing space. There isn't a lot of talking in this, but it works because its stripped back to the complete basics, a simple idea constructed simply.

What we are taking from this is mostly how camera will be used, mostly the shallow depth of field for focus on the interesting colours and detail of the faces of our subjects, and the framing of some of the shots. I don't think we want the sound track as we want more people to be in our interviews we feel it might distract from the actual interview.

Team Meeting 2 - Choosing and developing an idea

After we had developed and pitched our treatments we had to make a decision on which idea to go with. We decided to go with the lay your love in stone idea, as we had seen a few other people pitch ideas about the Beatles  and more specifically the cavern club. So we felt like it would be better to be different and do something that is a completely different idea to everybody else's. Also the idea is a lot simpler to prepare for and manage.

This idea was partly influenced by another documentary we watched called "Pockets". I will be analysis this in a future post.

In this meeting we just started to get ideas on paper how we would prepare getting interviews for the public. We suggested getting permissions to film inside the cathedral where the peoples path was. and that we plan out where we should be at what times to get these foxpops e.g. Clayton square at 11 till 2 to catch people as they are going to lunch, the docks from 2 onwards to catch families and tourists. We wanted to get a sunrise time-lapse over the cathedral to introduce the film and a sunset over the docks to finish it to give the film a sense of time. At this time we also specified what equipment we wanted to use so Kyle (our producer) could produce an equipment list for us. We decided that we would be taking my DSLR as we have a choice of my fast lenses, and also I recently looked into downloading some new software for my camera to improve the  usefulness of it for filming (Magic lantern, there will be a seperate post on this later) and it is much more portable than the Z1's. Because of me producing the camera we collectively decided I would now be the main camera assistant to aid Jack in the use of magic lantern.

Team Meeting 1- Idea development

In our first team meeting between me, Kyle Piercy, Anthony Wilson, Jack Roberts, James Webb and Reece Ronan we wanted to talk about which individual roles we wanted to do, what stories we have looked at, and how we are going to develop two ideas for a treatment.
However before all of this we created a Facebook group so it would be easy for us to keep each other updated on how our roles are going, and to organise any future meetings. I have used this method to organise all of my previous projects, all the way back to 6th form, and it has never failed.
After we sorted out our main use of communication.

Brainstorming

The Beatles origins - The Cavern Club
For this we wanted to get an interview with the owner and any of the audience in an interview to see what it meant to them. We also wanted to use archive footage of the original club and get a history for us to show to the audience. We would be getting the newspaper article from anywhere in history. This idea was selected for one of our main treatments.

Liverpool transvestites - Apparently there is a large area of liverpool dedicated to transvestites  We were thinking of getting a night out with a transvestite and filming all the getting ready and heading for a night out with them and having it recorded. We decided against this in fear of unintentionally portraying them in a negative manner.

The Docks - We knew that the docks had a strong history to do with the war and the titanic, we were thinking of doing a history up to the present but decided against it as it has a very heavily factual base and
it might bore our audience.

Our final idea was directly influenced by something that we saw in a local Liverpool paper. At the main cathedral there is a path that for valentines day couples could donate some money to get their names inscribed on a brick of this path. We would be getting foxpops of people in the public to get their views on what love is, and what it means to them as a concept. We chose to do this as our secondary treatment as it is a different idea, and we thought that the other groups wouldn't have anything that is similar to this.

After we decided on which two ideas to do our treatment on we decided on roles. James said he felt comfortable being in charge with the creative decisions with the ideas we had and wanted to take on the role of director. Kyle offered to be the producer, Jack wanted to try camera, and Ant wanted to do sound recording, and Reece wanted to do Editing. Which left me to do sound editing. Luckily we all ended up doing what we wanted to do, so there wasn't any conflict. I wanted to do something to do with sound just because I haven't had much experience with it yet.

Introduction to Documentaries

After we got back from our Christmas holidays we were introduced to our next assignment - Documentaries. We first looked at different types of documentaries and looked at specific examples to attempt to identify the different types. These are the different areas of documentary and how they are defined:

Observational Documentary - This is where the camera is used specifically to observe a subject as they go about their business. The documentary maker tends not to get involved onscreen and usually uses a narration to get across his or her point.
Direct Cinema Documentary - This is where the director is continuously involved throughout the film, he usually does direct interviews to gain his information on camera.
Educational Documentary - Involves in depth research into a specific subject and is portrayed on camera in a simplified way to help the audience understand.
Poetic Documentary - An experimental form of documentary, often uses metaphores or experimental footage to indirectly get a point across.
Investigative Documentary - A journalistic approach to an in depth subject, usually through the use of formal, sit down interviews.
Collage Documentary - An approach to  documentary that uses a mixture of different media and archive footage.

After we were given these definitions we were shown a series of documentary films, i am going to analyse one of these.

Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul by Orlando Von Einsiedek (2010)
This is an observational documentary about how young people cope with the war in Afghanistan through the outlet of skateboarding. Throughout this film there are stunning visuals, with stunning composition of the landscapes are architecture of the country (which i never knew existed). To contrast this we see the negative side of the country affected by the war, and what it has done to the people. To support these visuals there is a soundtrack that supports what the main skater is saying. When he is talking about the war the soundtrack is very sinister, and at one point it actually blocks out most of the sound so we only hear the bass of the skateboard flipping, this provides a shellshocked feel for the audience which emphasises that current negative mood. Throughout the film we gain our information from the main subjects through the use of non-sync sound. This is good because it allows us to focus on the place, and the effects it has on people in general, rather than the specific person.

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.

Experimental Film - Production

With this film we did the production over two days and in several locations. The first was a very short day due to our actress not being able to get to the location until after dark. Because of this we relied entirely on tungsten light, which doesn't look as good on my camera than daylight, but with this we just decided to go with it due to the short amount of time we have to film. During the first location we filmed all of the house and office scenes bar one. This part went fairly smoothly, we got clean sound recordings as some of the actions don't match the soundtrack entirely.

The second day of shooting was much more complicated, we had four different locations, the city, train station, forest of Grindleford, and "surprise view", on top of this we had to make time for the final house shot which, for continuity reasons, required daylight. To make sure we had enough light by the time we got to "surprise view" we had left my house by nine in the morning, we had finished the city and train station filming by midday without any problems, things started to get more difficult when we reached Grindleford. The temperature when we got there was two degrees, which when working with metal tripods and boom poles can cause problems with very cold hands. We had to walk a couple of miles uphill and through woodland to reach our locations, they looked amazing, and look even better in the edit, but it was very cold, and we were starting to lose light by the time we got to our final location. It was fairly dangerous climbing down in the dark and cold, but luckily nothing went wrong on the way down.

In terms of technical problems there was only one with the dodgy boom pole messing up sound on some of the wider shots, and it was the first time using one properly, luckily the actress we had is a full time professional sound recordist so she was able to help us get around the problem. There wasn't any problem for the camera at all, we had spare batteries and SD cards for my 550D. Overall a great day filming, and well worth braving the cold for the amazing footage and recordings we got.