The exercise we did in class on the A3 paper really made me think abut what I wanted to do. Its good because its gotten me to write down what I want to do but its also made the process a lot harder because now I’ve realised that theres too much i want to do. I really want to experiment with lighting and make a music video out of it. I also want to practice script work and work on screen dialogue. I was thinking i could do this though some small sketch comedy videos or just one. I also really want to just experiment with camera effects like this kind of video 1 . Indecision sucks because I don’t want to start anything fully until I’m happy with what I’m doing. Times running out though and i need to decide on something soon before we get to week 5 or 6. I just want to make something which will further my understanding of filmmaking.

A recent project I’ve been working on is a video for St Catherine’s Rowing club. I’d made another rowing video a few years ago which has done quite well in the rowing sphere. For this new project I was asked a while ago but at the time I didn’t feel like I had enough time to film and edit a perfect piece so I agreed to just edit footage they had collected on their IPhones. It wouldn’t make a film true to the slick and stylistic form of a normal rowing video but I wasn’t in the position to do everything myself. I back flipped on this idea however because I’d still be associated with the low quality footage even though it’s clear I didn’t film it. So then I went into a lull period where I did, but didn’t want to make them a rowing video.
I think the moment when I realized that I wanted to make a new one was when I watched quite a few new High school rowing videos. Since I had made my video there had been a massive explosion with the number of videos being made. The cameras people are using have phenomenal quality and are extremely expensive (you can tell the videos where daddy’s funding was involved. There are now a number of 4k RV’s (rowing videos) online which steps up the process of the RV. The production value is so much higher but the execution is not revolutionary.

I noticed a few trends. It was either pop music or an intense orchestral movie score which sounded like it had come off a royalty free site. A lot of them used the same songs which kind of reflected the videos originality. None of them really tried to challenge anything which I was surprised about. Flume-esque voices and juicy beats isn’t all a rowing video should be. These videos were formulaic but true to ‘the rowing videos’ form.

This want to challenge the preconception of a rowing video spurred me on to make the St Cath’s rowing video. I had a few songs in mind which were very different to the classical tunes you’d hear. I was tossing between a song I had been holding onto for a while Subliminal ‘Touch’ and a newer song which I was loving at the time Black Merlin – Tanksport. Both songs had the darkness and intensity needed for the video but I chose Touch instead because it was shorter and I knew that I wouldn’t have enough footage to do the complete song of Tankspot. The industrial low frequency pulses and the exact grunginess I was needing for the project. Using this song broke the form of the typical rowing video style allowing me to explore the edit.

I only had one morning to film the video which meant that I wouldn’t have a massive catalogue of footage to work with. One problem I ran into was the darkness of the morning but it actually helped the video develop a style. I was amazed by the light reflection on the Yarra. I made sure to show this off in the video. I had no control of lighting the subject only the framing. I could have bumped up the ISO and lowered the shutter speed but the quality would have severely diminished. Silhouetting the rowers was the best approach to tackle this. I didn’t realize but the lens had small splashes of water on it so some of the shots look blurry even though they were in focus.

I have a love hate relationship with editing. Its great when everything works fluidly but this is often never the case with any of my projects. In this rowing video I hit a massive wall because I didn’t think the music was working with the footage. I was half way through and couldn’t really turn back. I persisted with one of difficult parts (the under the bridge shot) and eventually finished it. I wasn’t happy with how the rowing action wasn’t in sync with the music and I couldn’t get it to work very well. With most projects I edit for too long then get bored and annoyed because I’m so sick of it.

I’m considering doing a music video this studio but I’d need to find a song and get permission to use it before I start filming it. I really need to hurry up because indecision is my worst quality and when I start to get behind it’s a bloody push to the top.

For this part of the process I decided to edit two of the three expertise. One was the paper folding and the other was not really an expertise at all but I thought it would be good practice to edit it. I didn’t really understand if I was doing the project right i thought it could only be three shots with no repeats and no more than two cuts. So I edited the protest footage in three shots and two cuts. I selected shots that made it feel like we are looking onto a policeman perspective from a distance. I wanted to create the effect as if the CFMEU rally is surrounded by police “everywhere they go”. By overlapping the field recordings of the chanting and its echo it kind of gives this feeling. To bridge the three shots together the audio was exponentially faded in and out over a long period so it didn’t seem too choppy. The chanting is panned out as the new focus is on the helicopter in the sky, then back to the ground where the music slowly rises as the policeman walks past the band truck. To then intensify the meaning in this project I tried out what it would be like if there was a song playing as the scene unfolds. The first song by A Man called Adam makes the whole event seem comical. The next one by Fatima Al Qadri Endzone is actually a song made from field recordings form the Wall street protests a few years ago. It makes the edit seem more intense with the slow beating drum and the alarm bells. Art of Noise Moments in love heightens the way we see the policeman who now seems ‘cool’. It feels like something is about to unfold. So with this expertise I was trying to show how music can heavily influence the way on screen images are interpreted.

The second expertise in the basement was also another experimentation. I did some fast cutting between shots so it was almost like watching a cooking show on TV. Having these cuts to such precise actions means its pretty hard to compressed which I attempted to do. In the end I toyed with reversing the shots. The first example shows the folding starting at the end and working forward. The second video shows the folding at the beginning but each shot is reversed; starting at the end of the shot and playing backwards. I wanted to test if it was still easy to follow such specific actions even when the time displaces the actions. The actions in this sequence were actually vital to the cutting because of continually.

In an attempt to reach some sort of epiphany I locked myself away in the dungeons of RMIT’s editing labs to think of ideas for this course. I was there for a few hours blasting music (awesome speakers for it) drawing and messing around with some ideas that i had. In class a week or so before we were made ot write down locations we liked and people that we thought were interesting. This got me rally thinking about what i wanted to make. Bellow is a franticly written passage I wrote on my phone as i was making my way from Uni back home. If its any context to what I was listening to it was this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH4lkK-vSco&t=1324s

Anyway heres what i wrote so I wouldn’t forget.

Trying to thrust myself into a creative mood
Went to the labs underneath building 9 and blasted music drawing whatever came to mind
Through doing this I wanted to unlock certain ideas and from this develop something into what I could do for this studio
Listening to enigmas flowing albums which morph from one song to the next means a certain train of thought can be passed on slowly through out an hour.
There are no hard cuts or interruptions I found myself drawing rounded line faces, black pen, which morphed into more abstract images of lines
Getting out of the labs, taking in the outside stimulus I had odd feeling of the people who surrounded me everyone was off on their on ways back from work or university.
It was 5:30 and the temperature was 27 and humid.
Listening to dawn of midi feels like the world is ending and everyone is oblivious to this.
Its so weird being deprived of stimulus in the black studio room flooded with heat and sun.
Then to listen to music again cutting out the environments sound
How would I capture this in video
Everyone in their own bubbles
How can I make a mosaic of things which forces the audience to freeze?
The music’s hollowness
The themes: Do I want to make something like a continuing music video

So after this time in the labs I was really hoping for some kind of epiphany but if anything it made me more conflicted than ever. I wanted to made a Music video that uses lighting to give off weird effects, with maybe the theme of ‘the world ending’ or something. Its a bit ridiculous that last part.  I want to make something which is Enigma-esque that kind of flows. If im going to do a music video though ill have to get onto finding music to use then

Although its early on in the studio I really want to know exactly what I want to do for the final piece. It’s about the process of making not the destination or final piece. I’m usually not that good at Uni because its all about reflective writing which I’m not great at. I need to find something I actually want to write about and something I’m inspired to actually do. I really don’t want to bullshit my way though this studio so its vital that I pick something I actually want to do. In the past everything I’ve done has been very layered with music. I love doing this because it builds something which I could never do without cool sounding music. the problem with this is copyright. If I’m going to do this project properly i need to get actual permissions. With some of these songs it might be very hard because they have been long forgotten. If i can get permissions early for songs i will but it just makes it all harder.

Something that Pauls talked a bit about is how student films never really work, especially if they are dramas. I really do believe this to be true. Ive never actually seen a spot on student drama film. Its really non existent and definitely not true to form. I would kind of want to challenge this and see if it is somehow possible to get away with a student drama. But I also understand that Australia doesn’t always produce amazing dramas, which is maybe reflected in low budget Student films. This is why there are so many popular Australian comedies and not dramas because they are simply too hard. Australian films are usually mixed genre and are never pure drama because we dont really see ourselves as serious enough to make anything that is overtly serious. (Disclaimer what I’m saying is obviously not entirely true or measurable)

It might be a bit rich coming from a media student but it is evident that student films are saturated with all the same themes and problems. Its kind of weird to think that we have such good access equipment but no one fully capitalises on it. I really don’t know what i want to do and i dont even know if what i make will be any good. Ive got a lot to think about.

What makes any film great from good relies on many factors involved in its production. The production phase of a films development is vital because this is where the moving image is created. The lens transfers the ‘3D’ light from the surrounding environment and focuses onto a 2D sensor, transferring the light input through the processor and into code. Digital cameras work in this way. The reason why I am talking about this is because the ‘image’ is what makes cinema, cinema. The aesthetic quality of an image can act as a vital tool to help progress plot. For example an independent film made in 2016, which uses a 35mm film camera, could heighten the production value to indicating to the audience the film should be seen with an artistic lens. Then maybe a high budget film such as Transformers may decide to use an IMAX 3D Digital Camera. The filmmakers may decide they want the audience to feel as if they are in the world of the film by making the quality of image as high as possible.

Over the past 10 years the boundaries for film students to form higher quality images is blurring with professional looks. The advancement in digital technologies and DSLRs means it’s cheaper to produce that warm fussy cinema look. When you compare the quality of mid range video cameras now to 2007 there has been a massive jump. Being at RMIT also means that we do have access to some great equipment which doesn’t hurt our poor sorry university debts.   Despite this equipment I’m still kind weary on using the big camcorder cameras. They feeeeel excessive and it seems as if they don’t produce the kind of image you would expect from something that big. Last year in the studio Go out and do good work I used the Sony EX3 camera (which we have been using in class) to film some interviews and record field work at the Queen Victoria Market. The image seemed to look good and I really liked how the camera ‘just worked’ without having to make too many adjustments. One aspect of it which I loved was the auto focus which would be able to follow moving targets.

When I got back to editing the footage I was actually kind of shocked because a lot of it was quite grainy. I checked if it had been on the wrong settings but there was nothing wrong. Another thing I found annoying was that all the files were tucked away in annoying folders, unlike the type of filing systems DSLR cameras usually have. I understand that these type of professional cameras order in this way because it’s ‘more professional’ for large-scale workflow but for student projects which I was producing this was not true to form. Also doing interviews with a big bulky camera often would put people off from wanting to be interviews because it legitimised me away from it being a student project. As if I could have been making something for the news.

I ended up completing the project using a canon 6D because it gave more of a documentary aesthetic with the soft shallow focus lens. With projects in this course I will try to master the camera now because if I want to progress in a professional way I will need to learn how to use cameras I do not like.

On my way to class I noticed something was very different with the types of people on the tram. Instead of business people, Uni students and tourists the tram was packed with construction workers; CFMEU members. Getting off the tram and walking up past the baths the distant sounds of a protest slowly rose. Shouting and cheering echoed though the city. Knowing we were filming on this day I really wanted to try to capture this kind of feeling of powerful cheers and echoes from megaphones. Our group was stretched over 3 projects during class. I scrapped the initial idea of ‘observational’ expertise with the selective focusing of sound. I was busting to film the event because of the rarity of actually having a good camera while something like this is happening. It was kind of intimidating having to record all these blokes with a massive TV quality camera. After recording a bit of the rally we left to then record the pen flipping. The environment where we film this was not a good choice at all. The shade under the tree meant that it was impossible for the non-shady parts stay correctly exposed. Framing these shots on the tripod was very important or else it would lose correct exposure balance in the background. The next expertise was in the basement and of the paper folding. It was a pretty easy shoot as we only did three different shoots so we had three angles. The camera footage was good but the sound recording on the external mic was pretty average. Shooting down there does have good light but not if you cant control it. The area we were in didn’t really allow for a lot of light manipulation which meant the shots looked quite plain.

In the audio recording exercise we went over to the RMIT tram stop to build up the sound recordings for the expertise video. We didn’t really have a great understanding of what the exercise was actually about so the idea was ‘observational expertise’. The idea was that the camera was going to record from a balcony (like at building 80) onto the street bellow. As the camera pans across the crowds. Lights, trams and cars bellow the sounds we hear over the video almost replicate our ears in real life as we selectively focus our attention. We took turns in swapping equipment and roles. It was half way though when we realised that maybe we were doing something too hard to achieve for a small project or not quite what the exercise was expecting but id consider doing this type of thing for my project later on in the course. We ended up collect a variety of ambient sounds from the Melbourne Baths area. We got close to cars and trams to record the engines or squeaking. On hearing the sound in the editing suits a few days later most of the stuff we and recorded was very clear and sounded like it had a great amount of depth and heaviness. Id never really used this type of recorder before but it’s a really great tool especially for controlling multiple channels with ease. The Zoom H4n is great but the functionality of the recorder we used (forgot its name) was so easy.