And What Did We Learn? – Final Film-TV1 Reflection

Last night the entirety of the film-tv1 movies were screened on a real cinema-sized view-ma-tron. It was incredibly exciting, seeing the piece I’d worked so hard on come to life, and seeing the honestly fantastic work that many other students produced. I was very proud to see my peers produce such engaging pieces, and even proud in myself for over-coming a fair amount of adversity.

That being said, I’m afraid the various adversities I went through form the bulk of my recollection of the subject, and these adversities seemed to plague me the entire time.

Let’s talk about how things progressed after the rough cut screening:

My group seemed to think that now, with the film being shot, the rest of the responsibility was my own. After finally managing to wrap up another ambitious project (my kfilm, which can be found in previous posts and includes 60 genre-study-focused clips (many of which feature myself acting the shit out of stuff)) I was left to spend consecutive days editing for around 8 hours a day. After managing to cut my film’s length nearly in half, and with only 4 days left until submission, my sound technician finally began helping me, and with her help we managed to entirely reconstruct every sound in the film. This is after hours of colour-grading, cutting, re-positioning… not to mention the time required to actually record the actors or the added effects.

All in all… I’m really disheartened with my groups participation, and after having formed what I had hoped were friendly, professional and sincere relationships, I was left in the endzone with days worth of hard work and no help. I found more help in other groups than I did amongst my own, and in the end I was the only one who even bothered to show up to the screening.
Perhaps I should have been more assertive, perhaps this was simply my destiny, but the last two weeks have been a hectic race to pick up the pieces of a group who seemed to suddenly and aggressively not care.

That being said, my personal journey was one of great learning. My familiarity with the sound equipment, the camera, the editing and special effects software and even with the experience of being on set has been greatly improved, and I believe myself to be a more competent media practitioner for all the experience I’ve had. Regrettably I feel my trust has been somewhat misplaced, and in the future will likely be… more guarded.

Having Robin as my tutor has been a fantastic experience, and I deeply respect him for not only his vast wealth of functional knowledge, but for his style of teaching and his fantastic demeanour.

Paul proved an invaluable resource for all involved, with his impossibly encyclopedic knowledge of all things codec, resolution and export. He also seemed to act as the cavalry for about a dozen different films, and as such should be revered for his all-around helpfulness.

Screening Calls.

We had a screening of our roughcut today. It was actually pretty positive, despite my anxious worry, and a lot of people commented on it being quite decent (if not a little long). We have to cut it down (into pretty much half), and the grading needs a look in, not to mention we need to re-work sound…
But it shouldn’t be too bad in the end. We somehow got what we needed, despite the shoot day going awry, and we’ve been given some helpful tips to improve the film and get it back on track.

Final Cut, Bro

 

This weeks lecture, staring final cut on the big screen up front, made me feel comfortable with my editing abilities.

This, though it may seem an arrogant statement, is because I knew all the functions displayed today. Better yet, I knew the keyboard shortcuts. My outside experience with editing can therefore definitely be said to be aiding my editing ability, and I’m glad to feel on top of things in that regard.

It did surprise me however that Paul doesn’t like linking and unlinking everything. The shift+L function has served me well, and though I understand the danger of it it has proved very handy to me. I’ll make sure to be much more delicate.

Shot Stuff

We finally shot. This past weekend we filmed our film, and I can’t imagine more going wrong.

The night before the camera decided that it would start trying to record to cassette. Which it couldn’t, being there was no cassette. I fixed it by digging deep into a series of menus, but that begs the question how it was ever screwed up in the first place.

We didn’t have a boom-pole. Awesome.

The jazz club across the alleyway (despite it declaring that it’s usually 9pm – Late and it was sunday and mothers day) decided to have a jazz performance, which meant that around 30 or 40 people were just milling about our shoot-location waiting for the club to open. Which was a sound nightmare.

So, while we waited for the crowd to disperse, we broke for lunch. Upon our return a car had parked in the very middle of our location. A parking spot very clearly labelled as ‘no parking’.

And then it started raining.

Despite all this, due to the level headedness and patience of everyone involved, we shot all we needed to (though not near what I would have liked to shoot) and managed to get some nice pretty shots in there. Hopefully our ten hour shoot day will have produced a lot of great stuff!

Now we have a nice long time for post.

A Rehearsal, Technically.

We had a brief technical rehearsal last night, practising the more complicated shots and figuring out what we can use the dolly for.

I feel like this was a very informative exercise, allowing me to converse with Ruby over what I’d like to see from her camera work. I’m slightly worried about her concern for operating the camera; I’m confident in her ability, just not her mindset right now. She just needs to have a little confidence and trust that I’ve got her back.

Candy seems to have a fair grip on what to do with the sound equipment, though I admit to a small worry that the audio wont be great when we get into the editing suites. This is purely because of our location: the middle of Melbourne. A soundy’s nightare, in truth.

There were a few things I feel that Anna could have been on top of a little more, primarily the more practical issue of organising a rehearsal for this coming saturday. The message was only sent out in the last day or two, and as such one of the actors cant make it. As there are only two actors, this makes rehearsal fairly pointless. I trust in the quality of our actors though, and we have done a great deal of the conceptual planning already, so overall I’m feeling confident.

In honesty, the more stressful part of this has been the approaching deadline. I feel like everyone would feel way more at ease if we had more time. We tried to move it back a week, but an actor couldn’t make it, which is a damned shame.

Ultimately I have faith in all the elements approaching the shoot. We even managed to talk to a guy who was parked on our location, and begged him to move for sunday. He seemed fairly receptive, but we might have to shoot around it.

Let he Who is Without Sin Cast the First Role

Casting!
Yesterday (our ‘day off’) we spent nearly five hours running through a total of 3 male actors and 3 female actors looking for those special two who would make it into our film. We had people pull out at the last minute, we had people simply not showing up, and we had people rocking up to fill newly vacant slots with only a half hour’s notice. It was fun, really, I enjoyed it, but it was very tiring.

We gave each actor an extract to look over before coming in, we asked them all about what they thought about the characters themselves, and even got them to do a cold reading of a different extract we had prepared.

We then asked two girls and two guys back (all of which were really talented, not to mention just quality people, which made our decisions even harder) and had them act out a third extract in a rotating pairing, to see how the combinations worked.

It was a long process, but very valuable, and I feel that we will have very talented people on set.

It’s now up to us not to screw it up!

Film and Tv – The Precipice

We’ve got a script, we’re scheduling auditions, we’ve locations in mind, we’re planning to storyboard, floorplan and timeline….
Well from here on in we just have to dive in and well… do it.

The entire process for making this short film has thus far seemed a bit strange to me, somewhat distant. Normally I would be involving myself in every aspect, generally taking on too much work, too much responsibility. But this time I felt it important to actually ry and dedicate myself to the role I was allotted: director.

This desire to participate only in the capacity my role has afforded me, in conjunction with my current technological woes (colour me computerless for the nonce), this has led to me feeling somehow further away from this production. I’m sure as production rolls along and my duties become far more required the connectivity to the project I’m used to will come back, but for the time being, I simply find myself somewhat annoyed at being hassled over things that don’t fit into my role.
Chiefly this is in regard to the organisational side of things: I’d much rather be told what, when and where; as is the nature of pre-production for a director. However it is administrative things that have been the bane of my experience with this – being asked to contribute to things that were meant to be handled by others. I am aware though that this is almost completely due to the hassle of not having a laptop: replying or investigating on a phone on the train home is infinitely harder than simply sitting down and hammering out a reply. I hope that as my duties come more into play, and my tech-worries subside, that I can correct my attitude and really contribute to the project.

Learn On Me

The recent lectures being given about technical aspects of film-making have really scratched an itch of mine: t’be sure I’m getting a bit tired of every lecture of every class being theoretical and involved with critical thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the ol’ deep thought, but it’s refreshing and informatyive to finally have lectures that talk about f.stops, or lighting, or composition, rather than having yet another lecture about what it means to be a media professional man, and how you can’t label ‘things’ maaan. 

I have found Robin’s lectures particularly informative, and I hope that I will be able to have more hands-on experience with cam-assisting, D.O.P-ing and cinematography in general.

Clown Trained

As an amendment to the reference I make to ‘Clown Train’ in my last post, it appears I was entirely wrong.

 

I heard through the grapevine that they wrote the script and had originally intended for it to be shot on an actual train (an incredibly bad idea, to be honest, what with it being an entirely uncontrollable public space).
However the bad-itude of this was pointed out to them, and they ended up filming in a train museum after closing, somehow gaining permission to use a train that was not only stationary, deserted and controllable, but also had alterable light sources. They got very lucky, though I’m sure there was a fair amount of work put into securing the location, and I’m impressed with the result.

Building Stories

How make am the story?

It’s awfully hard to just pull a story out of one’s mind, and even harder to pull out a good one.

But, university being the knowledge bomb it is, has given me a few ideas about ideas.
I now am confidant that, like tackling a small child, there are many different angles you can come at this.
And, for those of you playing at home, here are a couple of good starting points:

1. Concept.
If you have a bitchin’ concept, just make it work. Don’t shoe-horn characters in and cheese it out, but have faith in the idea and give it the love and attention it needs to grow into a fully-fledged story. 
This style of story construction has been the one I’ve normally gravitated toward, so it feels the most natural to me. Most story concepts that I write can be said to pretty much start with ‘Some guy’ or ‘Some girl’ goes and does a real cool thing, and I worry about the whos and whys later, after I’ve given the idea a little attention.

2. Character.
In class we were told to construct a character that stands outside and very separate to ourselves, and after completing this we were forced to pair up and construct an idea around them. This was a really fantastic task, as so often I make characters far too similar and boring. People have varied and complex lives, and the ways we are connected are often complex too. For this reason I revelled in the chance to explore why a 16 year old Mauritian girl would be hanging out with a 28 year old persian information trader: in having interesting characters an interesting story emerged, and I was very happy to have the chance to think in a different way.

3. Location.
Sometimes, you just have access to a great set. A prime example would be the short Film-Tv1 film “Clown Train“. To me it seems that they had access to a train, and by gosh they’d use it. What emerged was a psychologically intriguing mystery horror piece that left me feeling unsettled but proud, because they had what they needed to properly sell the context of the situation (not to mention great clown acting and a some solid writing). I think it is a totally viable solution to writer’s block to be just as inspired by places as by people.