Cloud Man

Promotional still

Blurb

Cloud Man gives a glimpse into the harrowing life of an aspiring comedian trying to leave his mark on the ever growing Melbourne and Australian comedy scene. Following the personal life of Chilean/Australian comedian Matthew Vasquez, Cloud Man provides rare insight into rarely publicised and fascinating thoughts and lives of up and coming comedians.

Production Screenshots

Written Reflection

In my interview for Project Brief 3 Cloud Man, I set out to produce an intense and somewhat melancholy interview with obvious comedic undertones. I drew a lot of inspiration for this piece from Louis Ck’s show on FX Louie, which often portrays themes of sadness and absurdity for comedic effect.

While filming my PB3 I spent a considerable amount of time working out how I could subtly include comedic elements to lighten what I knew was going to be a very harrowing interview. I believe my piece was successful in portraying such comedic undertones and through my consistent use of close-ups, colour contrasting and high camera position I believe I was successful in adding humour into this piece.

The pre-production phase of Cloud Man proved to be quite damaging for the project as I severely under planned the shooting schedule, despite having a detailed plan for the interview itself I only had a vague idea of what and where I wanted to film for the shots I was planning on using during scenes when Matthew was answering the interview questions. Even though I was successful in filming a number of these shots without much planning, I could’ve varied array of such shots. Another result of my lack of pre-production was the interview’s poor audio quality, during filming I was much more focused on the Matthew’s delivery and camera position then on the sound clarity and hence ignored checking the audio quality of the piece.  This resulted in consistent background noise for every sequence involving Matthew.

During the production of this video I successfully built on my Premiere Pro knowledge, especially around the treatment of audio in a project, something I looked past during the production of PB2. As I did not anticipate background noise being prevalent in the majority of my filming material I had to quickly learn how to use functions such as the ‘denoiser’ as well as learn how to ‘denoise’ on the free audio program ‘Audacity’. Despite devoting a large amount of time on fixing up the audio during the video I eventually decided to revert back to the original footage, as my attempts to cure the audio distorted Matthew’s voice and also impeded on the feel of the interview. During the process of trying desperately to fix the audio as well as getting Matthew to re-record some of the answers I realised the inherent importance of pre-production and deep attention to detail when filming.

During the production of PB3 I made a number of learning discoveries that will benefit my future pursuits as a media practitioner. Although my main learning discoveries being incredibly simplistic and somewhat obvious I believe that my costly lapse of attention to certain elements of pre and during production have taught me a painfully valuable lessons when it comes to any sort of production. Having learnt it is crucial to pay close attention to detail while in mid-production and that planning is essential will help me in any future media production whether in audio, video or radio.

AG