Week 8

This week I decided to just film. Not so much worry about what the footage will end up doing or how it will work in the editing room but to just film. I feel it is very important to just get a start on my project. I decided to select one of my proposed scenes, which was my parents sitting around watching TV. At first, in my mind in terms of framing I had always pictured it as rather symmetrical, with the TV down the middle splitting the frame, while also acting as the key light source. However I found that the lens wasn’t wide enough for the camera to be placed relatively close behind my parents, so I decided to go a lot further back, into another room actually, and shoot on a very long focal length. What I found from doing this was that although, I couldn’t get both my parents in shot, I found I could frame very nicely if I just focused on one of them as the subject. I eventually got to the frame of my father watching TV, where I decided to include a lot of the household objects in the frame, which to me, doubled up to give the frame greater depth as it added layers of dimension. It was something that I felt was very in tune with Ozu’s framing, which is fitting seeing as how the theme I set out to achieve with this project was family.

After I had got a frame the I really liked, I next worked towards figuring out the lighting. At first, all the room lights were on, and, while this looked pleasing, I began to experiment with turning on and off the many different lighting configurations that were available, as my living room is directly connected to the kitchen without any walls. Eventually I turned all of the lights off except a small kitchen light and the light from the other room that I was actually shooting from. This left it so that it appeared as if the only light source was appearing from the TV, but in reality there was actually enough light coming from behind the camera to light the back of my father’s head and his hands.

I have yet to edit any of this together as I will need other footage to match this with. Next week when I have other footage filmed I will see how this works in conjunction with editing in a black screen.

Week 9

This week I spent time with my nieces so I decided it would be a good time to get some footage of them. I had shot a lot of footage of them, from them watching TV, to them eating ice-cream to them drawing, to them brushing their teeth. I think that I got mostly decent footage, but I was extremely fortunate to get footage of them playing with a flashlight in the dark. This was by far my favourite thing that I filmed, as the colour of the light against the complete darkness of the room lead to some very interesting lighting dynamics in the footage. I think that the constant switching between complete darkness and the light shining will somehow fit well into how I edit this with the black screens in my final project.

I haven’t editing anything together yet but I will begin to edit the footage shot this week with the footage from last week.

Week 10

This week I have decided to make a significant addition to my project. I have decided to add in an audio conversation that I recorded with my father about a year ago. Originally I had recorded this audio with the intention of making a film very similar to how this current project is turning out: scenes from my family with my father providing a voiceover. Now I can use my father’s voiceover for my current project. I also think that this works well in conjunction with my exploration of black screens, as I think that the result of my father speaking over a black screen will turn out interesting. I also shot a little bit of footage this week, the most notable being my mother cooking and preparing some food, as well as footage of my father sitting at his desk working. I think that it would be best to wait until I have gathered sufficient footage before beginning editing, as right, when attempting to edit, it feels too sparse and disconnected. I would rather have the feeling of enough footage, which would help me conceptualise a through line with my editing and have it be more focused.

Week 11

The major piece of footage that I shot this week was a family dinner that we had at home. I had many different options for what to film during this event. I shot everything from master shots of my family all sitting at the table to my father and sister talking to each other to my mother preparing food again. The most striking scene that I shot was a shot of my father talking about his life while drinking wine. I was really interested in the content of what he was saying, and after deciding I was going to mix in audio from a recorded conversation I had with my father, thought that the relationship between what he said in the solitary audio and what he says diegetically in this scene might turn out to be interesting.

On another note regarding the audio, I decided, somewhat out of circumstance, to just use the low-quality on board mic to capture audio for the scenes that I filmed. I had made the mistake of not using my Rode Video Mic Pro for all the footage that I had shot, so I thought that it would be better to keep the audio low-quality and consistent rather than to have some scenes capture high-quality audio and others to capture low-quality audio. Furthermore, the lack of need to set up the microphone meant that I had more flexibility and mobility with capturing scenes on the fly, which is a trade off that I don’t mind.

Week 12

This week I finally began editing. I pretty much spent the entire week editing and refining my project after having a more clearly defined idea of what it was going to be. It was very a relatively smooth process, one where I could clearly recognise what needed to be changed from iteration to iteration. The biggest challenge for me in the editing process was deciding when to cut to and from black. This is a really tricky thing as there are not real signifiers for when you should cut, and it is almost a purely instinctual decision. It felt like because there I could literally cut at any time, the fact that I had all the options in the world actually meant that I had no obvious options to cut. Eventually I decided to just go off of what felt best. A lot of times this would be by listening to solely the audio and cutting where I thought I expected a cut to take place.

Week 13

This week I focused on refining the rough cut that I made in Week 12. The only thing that I decided to reshoot after having a rough cut of my project was a scene where my parents are sitting around the living room with the sunlight streaming through, with nothing but complete silence. I reshot it as the previous footage I use was very poorly framed, with the ceiling in shot and the two subjects (my mother and father) having very uneven spaces within the frame – overall it was a very flawed and imperfect shot. I reshot it this time with a certain composition in mind, my mother and father sharing equal parts of the frame, with the TV splitting the frame down the middle, quite similar to what I imagined the ‘Parents watching TV’ scene to originally look like that I talked about in Week 8.

Collaboration

Although I worked alone, I still had to collaborate with those who appear in my film, most notably my father. The first act of collaboration came from those who appear on screen in the film. For my mother and my father, I didn’t really give them any directions, but rather just filmed them doing their everyday activities. My nieces were the same as well. I was very fortunate that they were not camera shy and acted naturally in front of the camera, not acknowledging its presence much. The opening shot of them playing with the flashlight was perhaps the only thing where I had some form of direction, and even then, all that was was telling them to continue doing it, as they were already doing it before I had even begun filming. Overall in terms of filming, the nature of my content did not require much on set direction, as I wanted to capture people being themselves, my family being how I see them, and to interfere with any direction would interfere with the authenticity of what was filmed.

What I think was more in line with the concept of collaboration was recording audio of my father speaking about his life. I found I had to guide him so that he could best explore and speak about the topics that I wanted him to discuss. I learned throughout the conversation that I had with him that sometimes I had to wait and let him run out whatever topic he was on, even if it was a digression and not directly pertinent to what I thought would suit the film, but in doing so, he might say something unexpected which would be better than anything that I had planned or had in mind. Although keeping this in mind, I also had to know when to end a certain digression and ask him a question to let him begin a new line of thought. This conversation with my father felt like a very collaborative process as we had to both sculpt and shape how to get the most interesting conversation we could together. It was an aspect of collaboration where, although I was not the primary subject, I still played an active role, which was the role of the listener. I took away the idea that the listener is not always a passive subject, and can steer the conversation with more control than you would think.

Summary

I think that my final project answered a lot of the curiosities I had about my initial research question, the experimentation that I had with cutting to black and black screens in general turned out some very interesting results. I am glad to say that the final project turned out a lot better than I could have ever imagined, and that it made direct and appropriate use of black screens.

The big turning point and change in my project was when I decided to include the audio recording of a conversation that I had with my father. This helped the project progress from just being a bunch of strung together technical exercises to something that had some real emotional and thematic value to it. In the process of this addition, I also believe that I began exploring something else just as deeply as the study of black screens and could be another research question: the study of my father, his life and my family. I became just as interested in this other aspect of my process, and I became even more excited when I realised that I could blend these two interests together, to allow the black screen to inform and accentuate my father’s story and vice versa.

I became interested in forming a narrative, and knew that the through line of this narrative would be found in my father’s audio, and what I would select from it. At first, I gravitated towards the very dramatic aspects of his life, really searching for the things that I knew would capture or shock an audience, something entertaining. My father’s life had been very difficult, and initially I wanted to capture the immigrant experience through him. So it was all about his struggle to try and build a life for himself when he moved to America. But slowly, as I began to listen to all the audio again and again, and to look at the footage that I had shot over and over, I realised that I wanted something different. I began to not find these very dramatic parts of my father’s life as the most interesting things that he said, but instead I began to really hone in and listen to what he was saying whenever he talked about his family. Whenever he talked about his childhood, or the first time he met my mother, or the first time he had kids, for some reason that stuck with me a lot more than stories of him wandering through California homeless or his feelings of alienation from American society. I realised that I didn’t want to paint my father as an immigrant that had made it in America, I wanted to paint him first and foremost as a man who had struggled, a person who contained flaws and a lot of virtues, as my father and as a person.

So with this in mind, I wanted to touch on the four bits of conversation I had with him that really interested me, and that also fit into the theme of family: his childhood, when he met my mother, his experience parenting and his views on death. I began to form the narrative not just with the audio, but how the audio fit into whatever image was playing. The very first shot in the film arose out of convenience – I was exploring black screens and the scene contained a very obvious dynamic between light and darkness, so it fit into the form I was experimenting with. The scene also worked on a thematic level and created a juxtaposition between how my father was describing his broken childhood and my nieces playing without having any apparent worries.

Before starting this project I thought that the black screen would accentuate the beginnings and ends of whatever image it bookended, but the biggest thing I learned about black screens while making this project was that there was meaning and emotion to be felt while the black screen was actually playing. I realised that it made the audience consider what they were looking at, even if it was a pitch black screen, with a sort of intensity. I think I came to this realisation because of the effect that only a black screen and audio produced, it really made you listen very closely to the words that my father says, and from this I realised that even when there was literally nothing but a black screen playing, you still paid attention with a sort of intensity. I acted a little bit like an inversion of the black screen serving as bookends for the image – once a rhythm became established, the images became bookends for the black screen. This realisation that the black screen could carry as much excitement and meaning as the image put me at great relief, as it laid to rest my worries that when the black screen would be playing, that people would switch their minds off. I feel that I have very sufficiently explored what I had initially set out to do and even explored other areas that I found just as interesting as my initial question.

I recently finished reading ‘In the Blink of an Eye’, the book on film editing written by legendary editor Walter Murch. In the book Walter Murch describes his belief that film editing, and cuts specifically function in the same way that a person blinks, that a person will blink as a way of separating, distinguishing or ‘cutting’ thoughts and information. Murch says that people do this subconsciously and intuitively, that when listening to someone, they will blink at the point where they have processed the information. Murch compares this to the way that people watch movies, that they intuitively apply the same process when watching a film. The point that someone blinks while listening to someone during a conversation, is the same point at which they will intuitively and subconsciously feel that a cut should take place if that same conversation was to be put on film.

It is an extremely interesting idea and it made me think about this concept in relation to the aspect of film that I am looking to investigate in this studio: a black screen.

If a blink of an eye is a cut in a movie, then what is a black screen? Does a black screen mean that I have shut my eyes, or that I am asleep or could it even signify death? When I think of the experiments that I do, abrupt cuts mid-action), the way that the unexpected cut seems to rip the audience out of the moment seems to indicate a sort of death. Much like a popular theory regarding the ending of The Sopranos, where the black screen at the end signifies a death that “you never see coming”, the cut to black in my experiments as well as in Haneke’s Code Unknown seems to mimic the experience of an abrupt death. Furthermore, the abrupt change from black screen to image feels almost like a rebirth, but not in a way that would happen naturally and realistically, where you are first blinded by white light and then slowly acquainted with your surroundings, instead it becomes like a sort of gasp for life, a second breath that gives the image a fresh sense of vitality.

I am interested in investigating black screens. More specifically, transitions to black, whether that be a fade to black or a straight, abrupt cut to black. I want to gain a perspective on what a black screen can mean, whether it can be the end of a movie, the end of a character or even just a transition. My interest came from watching a movie, “Code Unknown”, where it was essentially a bunch of separate story lines, all done in single takes that were separated by an abrupt cut to black. It was a really interesting concept as it completely changed how you would view the scenes compared to if they were just edited conventionally.

The cuts to black were usually placed right in the middle of the action, often at the emotional height of the scene, and it felt so much more impactful than if it had happened once the intensity of the scene had died down and it had used a fade instead. It also seemed to accentuate the beginning and ending of each scene, it gave it a sense of finiteness and life. That every new scene you were watching had a time limit, it had a distinct sense of beginning and end, and after watching the movie for a while, the expectation that came along with knowing that a scene was going to cut to black changed how you perceived what was coming next. The surprise factor of the concept faded away and you began to concentrate on these very self-contained moments, bookended by cuts to black.

So what I was thinking of doing was to follow the same concept, to film a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes, and to see how a separation by a cut to black would change how the scenes are viewed, as well as their relation to each other. They may not even have a story to it, there won’t be any driving motivation to launch a narrative, but instead scenes that have been distilled into moments.

For subject matter I have decided to, instead of having a straight story, to instead pick a theme, and to have every scene fit into that theme. The theme I have chosen is family. The shots can be anything that will capture the feel of family, or home. This can be my mother cooking, a family gathering, or even my parents sitting around watching TV.

Although I am taking the concept from ‘Code Unknown’, I want the tone to be completely different. The subject matter will be very warm, and comforting, which is in large contrast to the very bleak and depressing subject matter in Haneke’s films. I think that despite how the black screen seemed to deliberately distance the character’s lives from one another in ‘Code Unknown’, the unavoidable distance also felt like a way to really make you pay attention to the relation of one scene to the next – and this strangely felt like some sort of unifier. It seemed to fit into the theme of family well, as it is a very large and universal idea, something so big that you needed something like a cut to black to really pay attention to the small moments.

In class we did an unusual writing exercise where we wrote down a lot of different things that interested us. It was very strange at first because I increasingly began to wonder why I was doing this, why were we writing things that seemed non-consequential, daily actions that interested us? How could a door opening, a window closing, chopping an apple with a knife be interesting?

Then I started to think about it in a different way. I remembered my favourite film, ‘In the Mood for Love’, and the famous slow motion sequences set to moody violin. What I noticed about these sequences, about what was actually happening during these moments, were that they were extremely ordinary moments.

I came to the realisation that the most cinematic moments in the film were also the most ordinary moments – walking into a room, down a staircase, waiting for noodles, eating noodles. Why did Wong Kar Wai find these moments so interesting? I really don’t know why but they work somehow. Maybe it was a way of balancing the tone of a scene – during the films most heavy and emotional content, Wong Kar Wai shows a large amount of restraint, the most emotional moment of the film isn’t lathered with sensuous camera moves and slow motion, it is a static shot that succeeds a musical moment to create a deep, lonely silence. Both moments feel just as cinematic as the other, it didn’t matter what was actually going on in the scene.

I had to change my definition of what being ‘cinematic’ meant. The man driving a car around for an hour and a half in ‘A Taste of Cherry’ is just as cinematic as the Normandy Beach landing in ‘Saving Private Ryan’, as is a door opening, a window closing or chopping an apple with a knife.

Recently I have been re-watching The Sopranos, and it has gotten me very interested in the idea of episodic writing. On a side note, I was very surprised by the show on a visual scale. For some reason I had always thought of television, especially back then when long form dramas were starting to become really big – as a medium where the creators place all their efforts into the writing of the show – leaving the visual aspects almost as an afterthought, that it was only until more recently that shows started to pay a lot more attention to the visuals. However, when I watched The Sopranos, I really did see a distinct visual style. David Chase happens to be a full blown cinephile, and it comes out in the decisions that he makes both as a show runner in general and when he actually directs an episode. Although sometimes overbearing, it is nice to see a show care enough to shoot close-ups in extreme angles, to vignette frames or freeze the frame.

What I was really taken aback by was, of course, the writing. Pretty much every episode from a writing standpoint felt very strong, and it got me to think about what the writing process is like for a long form TV show. It was interesting to me because I started to think about the differences between shows (and writing) that focus heavily on either plot or character/story. To me, although there is a healthy balance of plot and character, The Sopranos really does feel like a show that focuses more on character. I had not realised this the first time that I had watched The Sopranos when I was very young, and I find it very interesting that the show was so immensely popular given that, not in any bad way whatsoever, not that much actually happens in terms of plot.

It’s interesting because usually these shows end up gaining a very specific audience, one that is more dedicated to the show and would push away a casual viewer. I had finished watching Mad Men not too long before this, and that was a show that, unsurprisingly given Matthew Wiener’s involvement with The Sopranos, was very heavy on character as opposed to plot. When I hear things about Mad Men, it always seems like the type of show that has a more specific dedicated fan base, and one that people sometimes can’t get into because ‘nothing happens’ in the show.

What I am trying to say, and what is really so interesting to me about The Sopranos and it’s reception is that, essentially it is a character driven show that takes a lot of risks – something that should result in a tailored and niche audience. But that’s obviously not that case, it’s one of the most popular shows of all time. So what is David Chase’s secret? How did he get people to tune in every week, how does he get the casual average TV watcher to sit down and watch a 20 minute, highly stylised dream sequence that asks more questions than it does provide answers? Maybe I’m trying too hard to find an answer to something that really is simple, because as David Chase said – “I just wanted to make something entertaining”.

Last week we did the expertise exercise. My group and I had chosen to use and play around with a dolly track. I had never used a dolly track before, so this was completely new to me. It was exciting, but it made me realise how much I had to learn about the filmmaking process. The exercises that we tried out were very fun and turned out pretty well. One of the exercises that we did was a lateral tracking shot of three subjects. It was interesting to see the different ways that this could be done – either the straight forward way of literally tracking laterally, or by moving the dolly track further back from the subject to instead try panning across and imitating the dolly movement. We found that the first method of actually moving the camera along the dolly was much better and smoother.

Another exercise that we did was a dolly move that went forwards. At first it was just a simple start from Point A and finish at Point B which was closer to the subject, but we later thought that it would be more interesting and make more sense to have a second subject move towards the first subject along with the camera. When we changed the exercise to this it made the exercise more dynamic and it also made focusing easier, as we only had to set the focal length once and did not require a focus puller for it.

Lastly, we did a simpler, static shot exercise that focused on lighting. This one was very interesting to me as gaining a high proficiency with learning how to light a scene with purpose is something that I strive for.

Overall I found the expertise exercise to be very rewarding, feeling as if there was something gained out of the scenes that we shot, even if they were on a very small scale.

Recently I watched Yi Yi by Edward Yang, and I thought that it was relevant to the camera exercises that we had been learning this week as one of the things that stuck out most to me in the film were the frame compositions and the lack of close ups.

The whole movie is filmed in a very simple, peaceful and unobtrusive manner. Edward Yang a lot of the time seems to set his camera down somewhere and let the scene play out. However, I don’t think this makes the film or the image boring at all. When watching a scene from the film, it felt as if Edward Yang had carefully framed the image beforehand, and worked the blocking of his actors to move and breathe within this very simple and quiet frame. To me, it came off as a very simple way to film. However, the whole movie is not just static shots. There are several instances where Edward Yang will move the camera, however, the movements themselves are very simple and do not draw attention to themselves. Most of the time they were very small pans or slow lateral tracking shots.

The overall very simple aesthetic of the movements and framing made the camera feel very omnipresent, almost like a third person narrator. It always kept its distance and acted a lot more as an observer than an intruding force. This was further extended as I realised that by the end of the film, to my memory, there were very few close ups throughout the three hour running time. I thought this was very peculiar and interesting as it is rare for a film to stray away from using close ups, but again I began to think about the camera as an observer, as something that tried to give the audience as large and even of a perspective of all the numerous characters in the film as possible.

I did like and connect to the style, but I wanted to know why it worked in this film, when for almost any other film this slow, simple and distancing visual style would make it feel very dry. That’s when I realised that the style and form of the film was in line with the content of the film. The film has a very broad and even, despite following the lives of an average family in Taipei, epic story, with numerous characters. With all these numerous characters I felt that Edward Yang made a large effort to have the audience connect of feel a sense of empathy for each and every one of them, and that’s why it was important to present them as honestly as possible, the good and the bad, to show all parts of them, and a very fitting way of doing this would be to show who they are, present them in a frame, and to just let them live and breathe in that space, along with other characters, other people that come into their lives.

From the first two weeks of classes, I had learned about the basics of recording audio and the basics of framing and composing a shot. The practical exercise of recording audio made me realise that I really know nothing about recording audio. I began to understand just how much depth and complexity there was to recording even basic audio. I also became more aware of deliberate soundscapes after watching a scene from “In the Line of Fire”, where I began to notice how every sound in the scene was exaggerated and carefully considered. It made me begin to think about planning out how the audio, and the style of the audio should be during pre-production. It also made me aware that I should be making a lot of pre-meditated decisions about how I am going to have various audio set-ups during pre-production, and to understand the location that I will be filming at and how to accompany an audio set up for the situation.

I also had a practical exercise with the Sony EX-3. I was not there for the first lesson, so I did not shoot any of the scenes from that class. I was, however, at the second class where we went through the footage that was shot on that day and analysed it. We went through aspects of the footage such as white balance, exposure and composition. I found I learned the most by understand why certain shots were underexposed or overexposed, as that is something that I don’t have a great understanding of. I also found the white balance exercise interesting, as again, I don’t have a strong understanding of how to have a correct white balance, and I thought that it was very helpful to have a practical way to correcting white balance (using a piece of paper or something that is white).

I chose this studio because it seemed like it would be a very practical, hands-on studio. This really appealed to me because I feel as if I am lacking in understanding a lot of the technical aspects of filmmaking. Something else that was really important was not only the learning of technique, but the application and thought that went with it, the ability to learn how to be able to make the form support the content, or even the other way around.

To be more specific, one of my desires would include to just in general gain a strong proficiency with more professional cameras. I have a small amount of experience in handling cameras, however they are often for personal and home use, which can be limiting. My desire to want to become proficient in being able to use more versatile, complex cameras comes from a desire to want to understand lighting. I think that the advantages of using a more complicated camera comes out mostly when it is matched with an understanding of cinematography and lighting, so I feel as if I would get the most use out of learning about cameras if I become very proficient in learning about lighting and cinematography in general.

I would also like to learn about other aspects in filmmaking that I would probably not push myself to  learn outside of the classroom such as audio, as it is a very hard thing to understand well and I think that I would learn about this aspect of filmmaking a lot better and with more motivation if I had some form of guidance to go with it.

I am not sure if this is something that is specific to this course but I would really like to gain some sort of experience with directing actors. This is something that I think is fundamental to filmmaking and something which can only really be learned by doing. I hope that by having some experience with directing actors that I would improve my communication skills and know how to better express what I want in something that I create.