Tag Archives: character

PROJECT BRIEF 3 REFLECTION

The collective production quality of each project was significantly better than last project. People obviously benefited from using the high quality cameras at our disposal. Each project was different from the last, and I give credit to those who tackled quite serious subjects with people other than close friends. It can not be easy.

Chloe Abbot’s project on Fraser, an aspiring fashion designer and tattoo artist was very clean and specific. It conveyed information in a visually pleasing format. The background music complemented the black and white footage well, and was cut in and out when required.

I think it could have been improved by providing more information, particularly on what Fraser is doing at the moment to get further into the fashion industry. After viewing, I felt compelled to learn more about this. Chloe says she is in the process of constructing another edit for Fraser’s label SIRAP.

Chloe’s blog can be viewed here, and her portrait of Fraser can be viewed below.

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– Gabe

PROJECT BRIEF 3 – SEDGWICK

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I felt a lot more comfortable with Project Brief 3 compared with PB2. I’m going to put this down to the fact that PB3 allowed me to depict someone else’s character. Instead of me being judged, my friend Sam will be judged, right? Or was this task just setting us up to be more critical of other people’s filmmaking ability? Either way, the shifting of focus allowed me to create something that I liked, rather than something others were supposed to.

I’m happy with the found footage I used within the short. The retro vinyl advertisement slides in nicely with what I have filmed. It not only relates to the sound from the short, the colours make it visually pleasing. And because almost all of the found footage comes from the one source, there isn’t a huge variety of picture quality. I think if there were more than a few sources of footage, it would lose the sense of rhythm and flow I believe it has.

I’m not so happy with some of the sound in the interview; I had to do a lot of cutting with audio files and fades in and out to make it sound decent. As it was filmed on my balcony with a variety of mics, unwanted sounds such as traffic were picked up. When the sound matched the footage of Sam on the balcony it was good, but it was when the audio was placed over the top of other visuals that it sounded out of place.

In terms of producing portraits, I think a key discovery would be that b-roll footage is always good to have. There are a lot of places you can just slip in a bit of footage to show characteristics rather than tell them. Although not all of mine was used in this project, it’s handy to know for next time.

As a media practitioner I found using public access footage to be really useful and is something I want to explore further. There are heaps of cool and weird bits out there that will certainly serve a purpose in my media making over time. I suppose more generally, using Adobe Premiere Pro has got me thinking more about pre production and the actual filming side of filmmaking. i.e what I need to film to ensure it looks alright during editing.

Sam’s music can be found on his soundcloud:

– Gabriel

PROJECT BRIEF 2 REFLECTION

Overall I am happy with what I produced for my second project brief. There’s plenty of stuff that could be altered, but I managed to convey what I wanted. There’s no doubt there is too much going on though. I struggled to cut down all the footage I had into the space of 1 minute. I think by the end of filming I had roughly 20 minutes of footage and 100 photographs. Although it was nice to have this amount of material to work with, it just made it harder to select which bits had the most meaning. I need to learn to be more focused with my approach.

Going around the classroom, everyone seemed to do a pretty tidy job. The quality of the footage varied quite a lot, but the basic principles were all in place. Playing mine out loud, I probably needed to adjust the volume levels a bit more before exporting. This was something I experienced a bit of trouble with. Over the next few weeks, once I update my computer, I plan on spending a lot of time filming and editing to boost my skills and get them up to scratch for project brief 3.

– Gabriel

TUTORIAL DISCUSSION – SELF PORTRAIT

We’ve been asked to compile a self portrait made up of a variety of mediums. The catch (like the one below) is to do it without explicitly providing an image of ourself. I suppose the idea behind this is that a person’s identity online can be vastly different to their identity in real life. I guess it’s just a chance to be weird and creative too. Which is always fun.

It will be a challenge capturing character traits, but it will test our ability to think outside the box. My music background says the audio clips should be my strong points, but I can almost guarantee these will be the most difficult of the lot. Some serious thinking will be required for sure. My early ideas include recording a rehearsal, recording a commute to uni, or recording some piano. These are all things that audibly represent my day to day activities and hint at my character build up. But, they aren’t the most original… Visually, I might literally use some smoke and mirrors to capture some mind-boggling scenes. Who says I can’t be a magician? I just hope I don’t lose my mind over it.