Ideas and Concepts BAFI103 (Evaluation) - 25th November

Wednesday 25th November 2015

Course Module - BAFI103                          Ideas and Concepts                     Lecture - Dan P

My written evaluation for "SUPER 8 CITY" PROJECT. 

Prior to last week lessons, I started to edit together a rough cut for my Super 8 City project, this was made possible because once our film strips had be telecined, we were all sent a link to download our films and import to our chosen platform/piece of software to edit on. I got together our research, from my blog posts, I started to have a closer look at our shot list and storyboard, thinking about how to re-create some of the shots that we hadn't captured. I took a look back at the ONA film that I discussed within the first week of our ideas and concepts lesson. I think that the whole short film was eye catching, had a great music track, collage of people shopping around New York City, used a variety of different camera angles, pans, close ups to show the movement of the public and transport within the area. After watching this film over I was determined to create an awesome Super 8 Film, with a weird soundtrack, use colours consistently and have a few pieces of footage that would be blown out, stick in the viewers head as they watched the Film. 














Initial Ideas  - What we wanted to achieve (planning)

I started off today’s lesson by listening to all the audio clips that I had recorded in the space of last month, these included sounds of the park, birds calling, waterfront, and a lot of wind from around the City Centre. I had recorded all of this audio using the H4N zoom recorder with the idea of getting ambience from around the town as our initial idea was to film in Plymouth, with a particular area of focus on the Civic centre. Whilst listening to the audio files, I discovered that the quality wasn’t as clear as I was expecting. The next step that I took in the lesson, involved replaying the edited footage over and over as I thought that from seeing the visuals, perhaps I could start to re-create sounds in my head to fit the footage, add a mood to the project, which again would be enhanced through colours and saturation from the clips. After watching it through, I took a walk around the college to record different sounds using a directional microphone i.e. the shotgun mic, I recorded sounds like the vending machine, elevator, people talking, and even a kettle boiling etc. 

Placing and tweaking the audio tracks, recreating new tracks (editing)

I had a clear understanding of what sounds would fit; from today I can now understand that I have completely re-created the audio, to sound mysterious and bring the visuals to life. I thought that the sounds of the extractor fan and the elevator would work well with the shots of the buildings, as the first shot in the film is a panning shot, a high angle pan, rising up the face of an old structure, when watching this clip back, it gave me the impression that I was in an elevator, rising skywards. I started to gather a few more audio clips of machines, especially the elevator as I wanted to re-create the noises and sounds of the mechanics, perhaps I could change the levels of the sound. I thought it could accentuate the amount of power of the elevator as it traveled from the first to the third floor. Listening back to the sounds of the elevator, it sounded tinny and pretty echoey but I used this to my advantage, throughout the sections of the buildings I played around with the audio levels, speed/duration of the clips, making both the clips and sounds faster as the camera panned up and slower as it panned down, giving my overall project a different perspective.

Direct sound and video footage amendments (editing)

In changing the audio to sound like another sound I thought it became pressurized, gave the film an industrialization feel, with everything moving and cranking, using simplistic audio to enhance the movement of places and machinery. My favourite piece of audio recording was from the sound of a kettle boiling, going back to the edit I can remember that I had taken one of the water shots and reversed the footage so that it looked as if the bubbles, surface of the water was being sucked up across the screen. With this in mind I then played around with the speed and duration for the kettle sound, reversed it and changed the audio level by placing key points and dragging them down to create a curve. I thought this worked extremely well as it gave the impression that the water was slowly building up as the kettle boiled (fading in and out).

Another clip that I thought worked well was when there was a pan shot across a granite wall, I decided to take the noise of the elevator doors closing and again reversed it.  I then increased the sound by dragging the audio bar up a little, reversed the sound and started cutting segments together from when the doors opened, once finished and played back it sounded like the cranks, machinery on board a warship. I thought it made it sound unbelievably abstract and again links into the idea of industrialization, thinking about the brief that we were set, to make an abstract type film and be creative with the sound to reflect the visuals.

Colours

I played around with the colours for one of the window shots, it came out over exposed but I thought that this looked really cool as all of the windows were blown out, after I had studied it a few times, I thought it looked like railings. I played around with the white balance and the PARADE RGB colours that we were instructed on how to use in Stu’s lesson, Practical Screen-craft. Once I glanced at the shot several times,  I thought that the film grain was really detailed, it gave the impression that the clip was fading away. 

I also played around with a few of the water clips, changing the saturation and brightness to help bring out the reflections in the water, linking back to our initial idea. I can remember our lecturers stating its amazing how much of a difference little tweaks can have on things like the audio and footage of a film, I now understand what was meant by this. 

I wanted to leave some of the colours the same as they came out really nice and it looked realistic and I was afraid to add colour correction onto individual images as some might stand out and other shots could just look out of place. However, now that I have played around with the colours,  it has given the film a dirty/grubby look, linking back to my idea of industrialization. I thought that the sound enhanced the colours for the footage too, especially with the noise of the kettle, the colours of the water were changed slightly to make them seem dark and add more detail onto the ripples and bubbles as Jay pressed his foot into the water. 

Additional sound/speed changes and titles

Once I had edited and placed the majority of sound clips and video footage on the timeline, I asked Jay to have a listen with me to gage his views and opinions on what I had created. Shortly afterwards we tweaked the starts and ending of certain clips, replaced a few shots, experimented with more colour correction, which all helped to improve the outcome we were looking for, We then finally added our titles on, including the title for the film “City 8” and then our names and the PCA (Plymouth College of Art) end slide. 

Conclusion

What went well?

Overall, I was really impressed with the final product that myself and Jay had created, I felt like I had achieved a different perspective on how the city looks and feels, how everything moves. Thinking about what specific things sound like and in re-creating interesting audio I was able to create a satisfying abstract film. After letting a few of the students view our film, I discovered that everyone had a different perception of the whole video which got me thinking that this sort of film could have been used as a segment in a Stanley Kubrick or a newer Alfred Hitchcock film. Looking back at the end result I still can’t believe that through all the problems that arose, we still managed to create a really good Super 8 Film for our Super 8 City module, I really enjoyed the whole experience, especially working on a different medium.

What I felt could be changed or improved for future projects?

For future projects I would like to approach the edit in a slightly different way, by cutting down the raw footage to a minute, then starting to view the content and arrange the clips into sections, water, buildings, designs, colours etc. I would then get a clear idea as to the sorts of sounds that could be used to give my films a different perspective. 

Depending on the sound that I want to collect for any particular project, I will now think about using a directional microphone for recording near-by sounds but I will still use the H4N zoom recorder to capture ambience. 

We were unlucky with our project because the weather was too sunny on the day of our filming, we wanted a lot of cloud coverage. The sunny weather meant that we had to change the locations pretty sharpish and we weren’t able to utilize our initial idea of reflections in the water but we still managed to get a few of our proposed shots i.e. panning shots of buildings, the pole reflection, water bubbling and various shots of the money centre’s windows and architecture. Throughout the shoot, we kept thinking about light conditions and how shots could be pieced together but it was just too sunny and we wanted it to be a lot darker, besides it rained for the rest of that week. 

I would like to explore the camera setting a lot further for future projects, playing around with the light metres, focus, iris, frame rate etc. 

References

All of the images above have been taken by myself, screen grabs using preview on my Mac laptop - November 2015 - Images from our film City 8

ONA. (2014). Super 8 Short Film . [Online Video]. 2014. Available from: https://vimeo.com/92069466. [Accessed: 25th November 2015].