Editing and Montage Evaluation - 18th May - BAFI105

Wednesday 18th May 2016                             Editing and Montage                        Dan Paolantinio

Written Evaluation - Spring to Life

For my “Editing and Montage” module, I planned to create a tonal and rhythmic montage, which will portray a variety of different elements of flora and fauna throughout the spring season. I would like to capture the glorious spring colors to make my piece eye catching, when it is edited together I hope that it makes the viewer feel happy and admire nature a lot more through the bright psychedelic colors.

At first I had the idea of editing my footage within the camera using camera movements as transitions, shakes to fade and pans to skip in between shots. I had a go at editing this way but I didn’t like it, I felt like the takes needed to be made longer to reflect the spring season, or the time it takes for nature to change.

The soviet montage research that I carried out through existing films and the group presentation got me thinking about the importance of analyzing the way that shots can be perceived. I thought about taking all the techniques and camera movements like long takes, pans, tilts, zooming in/out manually using these effectively to capture different angles of the landscape, focusing on how the wildlife and nature interact with their surroundings. This lead to my idea of repeating some of the clips, I felt like this would enhance the perception for viewers instead of just showing the clips once.

I was pleased with how I tackled the edit; the way that I renamed the clips before they were imported into Premiere Pro (nothing got lost). The shoots took place early morning and late evening. They were a huge success, especially liked the long take at the end of my edit which portrays the sunset, taken upon Dartmoor, the camera continuously zooms out, giving a sense of time passing, we find ourselves watching the sky as it is being revealed more and more, frame by frame (sped the clip up in post).

Finding the music for my piece was not an easy task, in total I must have created 3 different edits of the same project but with 3 different songs for the backing track. I chose to use “Silent Partner” as I felt like the music was a lot more upbeat, the pace suited the movement for nature, I was able to edit to the beat to help build suspense and tension to the shots where the lambs head-butt, look up at each other as well as various other shots. Listening to lots of different music tracks at the time, this got me thinking about the possibility of speeding clips up, slowing them down, focusing in and out, these ideas came from the way that the French new wave film “Breathless” was shot, it was in black and white, consisted of fast-paced montage clips, long takes and various types of camera movement unlike a film like “The man with the movie camera” where the camera was fixed onto a specific point, acted almost like a type of surveillance camera in order to capture the action and movement in front of the lens. However, taking these techniques into account, I wanted to opt out of black and white, as I wanted to keep the beautiful bright colours of nature to make my piece both eye-catching and give a happy and calm feeling for both the footage and viewer.

The idea behind the camera shake was that I wanted to make it feel as if time was passing, my title of course was “Spring to Life” and so I was creating a jump with the camera to create anticipation for the viewer, make the images stand out and get the viewers thinking about why I had done it. However, after my tutorial with Dan I made a lot of changes towards the shake at the end of my film, I am much more pleased with the look of the shots once they were adjusted and sharpened using color correction, only very slightly to enhance the edges of my subjects.

Towards the middle I put a few shots of the camera moving until it spots a baby lamb on the top of a hill. This idea came from “The man with the movie camera”, the idea of the camera springing onto the top of a tripod, filming from the viewers point of view (Kino-Eye), thinking about the way that we see movement in everyday nature.

The idea of the color and tone for my piece was that I wanted it to be bright green, make nature stand out, as if they were a point of concern, like a campaign poster. I think that I achieved this by re-editing the end of my film multiple times to make it as bright as possible, bright orange with a gorgeous sunset.

The blurriness towards shots linked into the idea that many people take nature for granted, but the blurriness made the clips stand out and repeating the clips a few times over aims to change people's perception of the images in front of them.

If I was to create this project again I think that I would have to shoot my footage at a different location, I would use a different camera, maybe an additional piece of equipment like a fig rig to move around my subjects, get some funky POV shots, making the narrative more like a journey to see nature.

I have been thinking about completely reversing my idea, shooting another season like winter through the snow and mist. Instead of having bright colors to make the viewer feel warm and calm, I would be using blue and white colors making the audience feel cold, frozen, could send shivers down their spines. I would like to explore more with the use of long takes and how I could edit two or more images together to give a different feel, a technique like juxtaposition.

Overall I really enjoyed this module and I was very pleased with my final product.

Here is a link to all the blog posts with the label Editing and Montage! http://lukecurnopca.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/BAFI105%20Editing%20and%20Montage

References

Man with a Movie Camera, dir by Dziga Vertov (Eureka Entertainment), 1929.

Moving Narrative Evaluation - 18th May - BAFI102

Wednesday 18th May 2016                              Moving Narrative                                Alistar Gall

Written Evaluation - Bloody Stake Out

For this module I had to create a 6-10 page self-contained script, correctly formatted. I decided to research into existing scripts to help format my script, in my case I referred to “The American” which was a screenplay written by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel “ A Very Private Gentleman” by Martin Booth. 

I participated well within the lessons and the exercises that were set. They enabled me to create a protagonist with a goal i.e. Paddy wants to find out what his neighbor Cameron was up too. I then created a protagonist with a setback i.e. Cameron was always on the move, acting shifty and carrying black sacks, a shovel and rope from his house to his car. From the character bio’s I was able to create a dramatic situation using Aristotle’s theory.

I thought about how the beginning, middle and end could be storyboarded for my short film script, possible camera angles, sound and additional dialogue for the content which were developed as the exercises went on i.e. dramatic situation, monologue, 2-3 page script as well as a presentation which I thought was useful as it helped to engage my peers with my idea, deciding around what I could add to make my content a lot more interesting for the reader. The mood Reel helped me to visually portray how I wanted the scenes to look and feel – wrote my script with words that could be seen and heard.

I tried to bring the reader into my scenes as late as possible and finished them as early as possible to make them want to carry on reading. The majority of dialogue can be found at the end of my script, where the protagonist and antagonist finally crossed paths.

Reading back on my character bios I have noticed that I have developed my final script a lot when compared to my first drafts, I have changed the ages, even tinkered with the characters descriptions. I feel like the reading of “Walk the Line” script has played a part in the style of my writing as I feel like I have set my main characters apart, given my script a sense of loneliness, just like in Walk the Line where Joaquin Phoenix’s life continuously goes from good to bad due to the excessive drug taking and drinking, while he’s on tour with his band, he becomes further apart from the other main character Reese Witherspoon.

I now understand how much crafting that a screenwriter would have to do; it takes a lot of time to generate a correctly formatted script, a lot of proof-reading to make sure that everything has the correct punctuation; grammar is the key to a good script as well as the format, a perfectly formatted script will be given a lot more attention unlike a sloppy script - “The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything.” – Ewan McGregor.

On reflection I think it would have been a good idea to get one of my peers to proof-read the script, as feedback has been the key throughout this module to develop my scripts structure.

Here is a link to all of my blog posts for Moving Narrative BAFI102.
http://lukecurnopca.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/BAFI102%20Moving%20Narrative

References

Walk the Line: (2005) directed by James Mangold. 20th Century Fox

Admin (2015) 35 Screenwriting quotes from the masters. Available at: https://screencraft.org/2015/03/28/35-screenwriting-quotes-from-the-masters/ (Accessed: 18 May 2016).

Editing and Montage - Editing - BAFI105

Monday 16th May 2016                            Editing and Montage                     Dan Paolantinio

Over the past few weeks my aim was to finish my filming, start the edit and think about my decisions within the edit, possibility of creating an edit decision list to make my choices a lot easier when I come to the edit.

My chosen genre for filming had to be nature, I used the location where I work, Buckland Abbey, I wanted to focus my shots around spring time, trying to capture the glorious colors, the sunlight as it beamed over all the flora. I wanted to feature the cuteness of new born lambs in my piece.        

I can safely say that I have the filming complete, the edit is done to the best of my ability, I am very proud of the edit, I chopped and changed the images to the way that I set out, I have found a great piece of music as a backing track for my project, I have cut the jumps, shakes and focus pulls to the beat of the music, I like to think that it helps to build tension and atmosphere up to the parts of action within my piece i.e. the flowers swaying in the wind, the lambs jumping etc.

Today I have started to write up my written evaluation, I have been watching the piece back over and over again, I have asked other students to watch the piece nd let me know what they think, I wanted to gather an understanding as to what people would pick up on.

I feel as if I achieved the Kuleshov effect, I used two images simultaneously in order to show the relationship between the lamb and its mother, I thought that this worked really well and when viewing back a lot of people thought that it was a great way to show time passing as the young would grow up and have it's own new born.

(Once a copy of my film had been made, I decided to create another version of my piece but changing the end shot to give it a different aspect, I opted out of the idea of repeating the end and inserted a wide angled shot which zoomed out, pulling back to reveal the night sky with a gorgeous sunset).

Interview Test - Sound Recording

Wednesday 4th May 2016                            Sound Recording                    Lecturer: Dominic Deane

Interview Tests

We were asked to get into groups of 4, take 3 different samples of audio, record them with 3 different devices, my group opted to use an IPAD, the zoom inbuilt microphone and a C4000B additional microphone.

We were asked to generate 10 different questions to do with sound, I generated the majority of them, these questions were to be the words spoken when recording.

Here are the questions that were generated, we managed to make 8.

Interview Questions

What’s the difference in quality between a WAV file and a mp3 file?

Answers: mp3s are much smaller file sizes, mp3s are quicker to download and convenient when downloading test tracks. 

What might stop recording on location, soundwise? - A field of England – Helicopter as an example.
Why do people using large noisy drills often wear ear-muffs?

What would be the best type of microphone to use for vocals? - And Why?
What is the importance of using a pop shield?
What's the advantage of using a variety of microphones? 

What’s the best audio software to use to sync these audio files together? 

What In terms of sound is the difference between America and British movies?