For my third Project Brief I was tasked with shooting and editing a 2-3 minute film based around an interview with a subject of our own choice.
This has by far been the most intellectually and emotionally challenging Brief so far. I wanted to choose a topic that was important enough to me so that I wouldn’t slack on it, or have any excuse but to give it my all.
On the 20th of February last year, I lost my best friend to cancer, and from that day forward I haven’t been the same person. Losing Ricky helped me to refocus on what and who really mattered to me, and since his passing, I have remained significantly close with his family whom I love very much.
I wanted to give Darren and Connie a platform by which they could express their sentiments about their son, about the hospital system, about cancer, about their thriving Ricky Taylor Foundation and mostly about how far they’ve come in the year since.
As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, working with Adobe Premiere Pro CC and film as a medium is not within my area of comfort, but I found through this Project and the use of Lynda.com, I was able to expand my knowledge of editing and the way that it affects the overall mood of the film that I’m creating.
I went with a very sorrowful piano track to complement the general mood of the film, but moreover, that piece has a certain rhythm to it so that the visual and the audio contrast with each other harmoniously.
I selected red as an accent theme colour because that was Ricky’s favourite colour as well as the colour of the Foundation logo.
Nonetheless, I did have some technical difficulties with the ZOOMH2N that I used to record the dialogue from the interview.
In an attempt to make my interviewees as comfortable as possible while discussing such a sensitive topic, I placed the microphone a distance from Connie and Darren, thereby allowing the camera to pick up some background distortion. I understand that being in front of a camera with microphones in your face can be particularly intimidating, especially for people who aren’t used to it, which is why I decided to steer the interview in a more casual direction, whereby Connie and Darren felt comfortable and the dialogue didn’t seem hostile. While the sound is subtle with the background music over and the dialogue masks it, it is still present and I now know for next time that ideally I would have the microphone closer to their mouths.
Overall, I’m truly proud of this piece. I feel that I really did Connie, Darren, The Ricky Taylor Foundation and hopefully Ricky proud also.
Enjoy.