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.