WHAT DID I GET OUT OF THE STUDIO

 It was really obvious during the semester that everyone in the class was learning an amazing amount about filmmaking and shot construction. My moment of clarity came very late in the semester, just after I had finished my group shoot with Alex, Jack, Aria and Helena. My friend who is in Jimmy’s studio, asked me to help him on his short film. On the ‘set’ I noticed a million things he neglected and or just didn’t know he had to do, all of which I remember learning through the semester, I personally think I saved his short when teaching him what a shot log sheet was. After that shoot, and the number of small things I noticed, it hit me that I learn a great deal in the class.

COLLABORTATION

It was honestly amazing how well our group collaborated together. Unlike my uni collabs that feature four week no-shows, seens on Facebook messenger and constant fears that your partners have deferred for the semester, our group worked incredibly well.

Despite being a collaborative effort, I feel that our shoots would not have been nearly as good if we didn’t have Alex in our group. Despite not being the producer, Alex put her foot down and organized dates, equipment hire and politely forced me into forcing my friends to let us use the house. Throughout the shoot she was the one to keep an eye on the time and the all the needs of the cast/crew. Although it was a collaborative group, it was obvious that Alex was the foundation and driving factor in our successes.

I thought that the group jelled in an amazing way, despite all of us having differing style, narrative, lighting, acting etc preferences, we all dedicated ourselves to Jack’s vision and work together to try and film it. I thought our first shoot with David in the bedroom was an great example of this, after every take we would all spit ball little ideas about framing and pacing and as a group we would merge the ideas into the next take, we all had a great chemistry.

I honestly can’t think of a single example of one of us getting stressed (except being stuck in traffic trying to return the equipment and subsequently locking my keys in my car…) or angry with any other group member. I even remember David telling us that he was surprised about how well we worked together. A vivid moment of group cohesion was when I broke news to the group that there was a slight chance that Michael wasn’t going to be able to make the shoot. Instead of the group getting annoyed, or worried, Jack told all of us that he thought that the shoot would work with just David and we all started spit balling ideas about how it would work. This was hands down the best university collaborative experiences that I’ve ever had.

PRE PRODUCTION

 We were not as organized as we would’ve liked at the beginning of our pre-production, I nominated myself as producer, which turned out to be a silly decision but great learning curve, as I had no idea about how hard it was to find a good location, actors, time etc. Luckily Alex, who I’m assuming has worked on a set before, basically held my hand through the process and steered the ship. Thanks to her constant reminders and acute organizational skills I managed to find two actors (also thanks to Paul), lock in my friend’s house for the set and shooting times. I thought that despite us leaving the shoot to the last minute and some worrying lack of responses from Matthew the actor the day before the shoot, I think that our pre-production was done pretty well overall.

From memory, I feel we could’ve had a better shot list and probably should’ve allocated more time to recording wild lines and atmos, but apart from those minor scheduling issues, it was all pretty smooth sailing. I also wish that I had a better knowledge of my car’s size. I stupidly assumed that not everything would fit in my car and left the reflector board with the techs, which meant I had to drive back on Wed morning and pick it up. Which was both a nightmare with the traffic and the wind which nearly blew me via my de facto reflector sail onto Victoria Parade.

DAY ONE

I thought that the first day of shooting went absolutely perfectly regarding our lack of time to organise the shoot. We all got there sort of on time, and my friends left the lounge room in a deplorable state which worked perfectly for our set.  Seeing that I got our two actors mixed up when emailing them, which was honestly quite an easy mistake to make as they were oddly similar in stature, David was due to come at 12.30pm. This meant that it gave Aria and the crew time to shoot some establishing shots while I went out to get a costume for David, seeing that I may have asked him to bring the wrong clothing…

Paul’s actor specific fear mongering tactics during class meant that I was hesitant at first about David the actor but he couldn’t have been a nicer and professional person. He was super keen on the idea and film and his takes were all really great. I thought that our set up of Helena on sound, Jack directing, Alex on the logsheet, Aria framing and me lending my eye/clapping worked really well also. It was amazing how focused and efficient we were with our shots. I also noticed after the shoot that we barely had a disagreement and not once did one of us call cut during a shot. This level of group cohesion was something that I feel not many of us would’ve had during any of our other group projects.

At the end of the day, when looking through our shoots I noticed that all our establishing shots of the house were blurry. Which worried me but I knew we had time on day two to shoot some more. We spent a lot of time trying to shoot the tracking dolly of David leaving the house, which I thought looked excellent! Was a serious testament to Aria.

DAY TWO

Unbeknownst to me, my friends at the share house had a mini party on the night of Day One. This became clear when no one answered the door when I knocked. Luckily I am quite an intuitive person and decided to break into the house, only to find a number of my mates who had crashed in our set (the lounge room). I quickly moved them all to the spare room before the others rocked up. I thought that this was probably my greatest achievement as the producer.

While trying to re-shoot the establishing shots, neither Aria, Jack or and I could work out why and how the camera wouldn’t focus on a long shot on the white weatherboard house, we all assumed it had something to do with the light reflected on the white weather board but couldn’t work out how to fix it. Despite a number of our other establishing shots of the house looking good to a number of our trained eyes, they again like day one, came out blurry. This was very annoying.

Apart from that, the shoot went really smoothly again. Our second actor Michael, was also great to work with and we got through all the shots plus some extra ones due to Michael having some ideas about his character. One of which was smoking inside. I am personally not against smoking but I was a little hesitant to let him smoke in the room despite the group being keen on it, knowing how much my friends’ bond is, but we got the go ahead from one of my mates in the house at the time. I thought that our packing up schedule was also perfect, as Aria and Jack packed up, Alex and I recorded some extra wild and foley, as we were both a little worried we didn’t have enough. As it turns out we were right!

EDIT 1

After putting off starting my edit for a silly amount of time, I finally decided to start the arduous process of merging all the shots. This practice became extremely stressful when I realised that my download from google drive hadn’t picked up every file. I’m still not sure why that happened. Due to my house internet speed not hitting above 10mbs download speed, I had to take a late night drive to RMIT to download all the footage again.

I decided to try something different in my first edit and try to portray a simple yet incredible whimsical story of a house mate leaving due to the other house mate playing music too loudly. Whilst editing the first sequence I quickly realised how silly the idea actually was.

I feel that if we had one shot of the many speakers in the house it would’ve made this edit so much better. Whilst editing I couldn’t help but feel the music was coming from an intangible source instead of speaker like I intended. I thought that my use of the cutoff feature on the audio when shooting David’s and the outside scenes worked really well, but It couldn’t shake the feeling that it looked and sounded weird.

In my edit, I wanted to try and use the grade to depict the two housemates, blue being the for the messy housemate, and yellow being for David’s character. Looking back through my grades and the overall edit, nothing really made sense, instead of portraying a housemate angry at all the mess and noise, it played more like a music video for my friends song, who after showing him the video, admitted that he in fact hated the track. I personally agree with him.

I did my sound mix in this edit with some really good headphones, which didn’t help my mix in the slightest. Instead I realized that the headphones were much more receptive to bass than my computers speakers, which meant that all the scene where I wanted the music to have an echoed effect didn’t work at all. I think I managed to fix that problem in the end though.

I debated with myself as to whether I was going to upload the short seeing how incredibly silly it is but I thought it is a good example of my quickly improved grading skills compared to my final edit.

EDIT 2

I decided to actually honour Jack’s script in this edit while still adding my personal preference of silliness. I expanded on my grading theme of Edit 1 and wen’t for each room having a different colour, this time due to me spend way more time on each grade, I feel it actually felt natural.

In this edit I also experimented with adding colours mattes on top of the grades, I wanted to create a warmer vibe for David and cooler vibe for Michael. I was really proud of my one grade when David comes to the door to confront Michael. The only thing about that particular grade is that I couldn’t manage to fix David looking grey, I think it had something to do with saturation I’m not entirely sure…

I really wanted to make the mail to represent the tipping point of the relationship, but after watching the finished product, I probably could’ve picked something a little messier. I also probably shouldn’t have chosen such cheesy V Files type music that my friend made. I feel it didn’t work at all.

Another annoying thing I noticed was that there was much too much contrast on my finished version, which meant that a lot of the shots looked really grainy. Although I was going for a darker look with Michael, I feel that it may have looked a little over the top.

I personally feel I nailed the colour grades with Michael, I had a nice purple colour coming from the window which worked perfectly with the mood and temp of the frame. I think this is probably what I’m most proud of from this semester.

When looking back at my edit, I feel that the music and pacing was probably much too tacky, but in terms of the style of the short, I thought that I nailed it. I am really pleased with how all the shots look and I’m definitely going to go back to this edit and try and fix up the sound and pacing in the summer.

EDIT 3

After writing all these reflections, I decided to go back and try and sound mix again, if you look closer at the first cut of the Edit 2, the sound is really inconsistent. I also noticed that some of the foley was too loud and the background music was much too quiet. I obvisouly spent far too much time playing with the colour pallets and grades to notice the sound.

After starting my third ‘sound-mixed’ edit, I quickly realised that I wanted to start the edit again, which is what I ended up doing. In this edit, I decided to take a completely different approach and just document the motion that we shot. I wanted to create an action sequence of sorts, which I ended up doing. In this edit, I opted for no music, which I think worked really well.

I tried to battle the humming sound found the in the lounge room but I have found in the past that getting rid of noise distorts sound too much, making everything sound weird. Instead I decided to use the humming sound and tried to associate that sound with Matthew’s character and setting. Which I feel worked pretty well.

In terms of grades for this edit, I decided not to do anything drastic like my previous cuts and instead go heavy on the temperature and saturation, with the latter being my new favourite feature. Although the simplest, this is probably my favourite of the cuts. I think that it really expresses the actions and movements of the two characters which having any gimmick. I also went for the shots that I liked the most, which I feel made for quite a nice looking edit.

In all three edits, I decided not to do anything crazy with my cutting, I feel I definitely could’ve experimented in my first cut but I thought it’d look to silly. In retrospect I feel that I have scared myself off using other cutting techniques in other semesters, I’ll hopefully start using them again over the summer. I didn’t even have the courage to add a wipe into any of my edits which is quite disappointing.

All in all, I feel that this edit would be the best of the three, although I still like the original idea and using my friends music in general, I feel that our groups shots aren’t the shots for that level of aural experimentation.  On the other hand, my friend now technically does have a music video, or at least half a music video, that song goes for roughly 9 minutes…

Final Thoughts

• Small Things was probably my favourite class from my whole uni experience, I entered this course with the intention of learning how to make films and this class was the perfect introduction. I think it is a testament to Paul that in the space of 10 weeks I have learned how to boom, grade (still need an ungodly amount of improvement), frame, white balance etc.
• I have already started planning shoot two shorts over the summer and it is all due to the fact that this class taught me how the small but integral things about film making.
• I feel that I could spend a whole semester learning about all these small things that we learnt but it was quite amazing how much we all learnt!
• At the start of the semester I never would’ve thought that putting clips/audio into neatly arranged bins would be as enjoyable as it was.Lastly, shout out to my friend who works at a smash room for letting me use her picture of some smashed stuff for the poster.

Friend’s short

I honestly think this would’ve been amazing if he was in Small Things. If he knew about exposure, white balance and the basics of framing, although I think that a lot of these shots looked good, especially the car tracking shot, this would have worked out great. Still a great effort for someones first time.

He used a camera was that basically an SLR and I think he forgot to turn off the auto focus, rookie mistake! Also, the acting from a number of the people in the short was verging on hideous, I’ll put my hand up for that.

There are little a millions of examples of where he could’ve done little things to make this so much better.