The short piece I compiled for Project Brief 3 focuses on my good friend and neighbour Lucas. The audio was recorded in a half hour interview conducted roughly a week prior to filming. My close personal relationship with Lucas made it possible for me to ask questions I knew would evoke interesting responses – about his deep spiritual beliefs, divination abilities and music making process. From this bank of audio I edited the vocal track in GarageBand, increasing the reverb and delay to add gravitas. I was hoping to add royalty free music but this ultimately proved too difficult, as was thus abandoned. I think I was successfully able to team the audio with relevant footage (found and original) and time the breaks in the voiceover to the cuts in the edit.
The found footage I hoped to fit seamlessly into my original content. The only place it’s jarring is when Lucas is speaking about his spiritual upheavals and painful past, and there’s a very grainy shot of someone smashing a guitar which I found on archive.org. I chopped and changed this footage somewhat to create drama and though it’s very different to the other footage used in that it sticks out, I actually like this effect.
I ended on footage I took of Lucas on my phone recently at a party, the only original lo-fi footage in the film. I think it creates a slightly different feel, and I edited it in iMovie to look especially grainy, juxtaposing the clean, sharp Sony MC50 footage.
I added texture to my piece by filming close-ups around Lucas’s Preston home, including pre-existing media, such as the photographs, drawing and posters on the walls. This combined with the footage of his furniture, decor, book collection give an accurate impression into my friend’s life.
Using iMovie I edited some of the footage in my film to have a particular hue, usually a yellow tinge. This was purely for the aesthetic purpose of continuity but I think it also suits the overall tone of the piece.
By and large I’m very happy with my film and have learned a lot about this process and about my good friend Lucas.