August 2015 archive
Take telephone scene as an example,
1. You can show both side of the characters talking and cut between them when they are changing lines. In this way audience can see and hear at the same time, it’s a easy way to understand what is going on
2. You can just show one person’s face for the entire time, and keep the other one off-screen. But we can hear the voice of the other one. In this way, audience will be interested in what the other character’s interests, motives, is he/she alone, what is she doing?…
3. You also just show one person’s face and voice broken by pauses. In this way, audience will keep lots of attention on the character’s expression and behaviors, and wondering what the other character said according to the character’s behavior.
sound shapes our understanding of images
Sound is the background of our visual world. ‘Chris Marker demonstrates the power of sound to alter our understanding what’s onscreen in his film, Letter from Siberia’. He shows the same image with different soundtrack, it turns out there is a big difference of what it brings to audience. ‘The audience will construct the same images differently, depending on the voice-over commentary.
sound direct our attention
When we hear something, we will think immediately about what happened there. In filmmaking, if the sound appears, then it cuts to next shot, we can see the answer, sometimes it is not what exactly we thought it is. Then we will think again. ‘Horror and mystery scenes often use a sound of an unseen source to engage audience’s interest, but all types of scenes can take advantage of that possibility. In addition, sound gives a new value to silence. A quiet passage in a film can create almost unbearable tension, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the screen.
reference: Bordwell,D & Thompson,K, FILM ART AN INTRODUCTION, Sound in cinema, pp.266-270.
She met someone and they went on a date. This guy takes her to his favorite restaurant. He is talking all the way about this restaurant and it took him long time to find it. He seems to not remember where is it very clearly. It is a small, crowded smoky vegetarian restaurant. Then they ordered. the guy is trying to do everything for the girl, pick up the menus, pull some water in to the glasses… Then he starts talking again, about this about that, and he is very sure about everything he said. He is aggressive. The girl is listening and nodding. She tries to talk some and gets interrupted by his excitement of what she says. After a while, she just stops trying because she doesn’t feel good about feeling. But she is trying to be nice and polite, that she doesn’t really liked the place, feel comfortable listen to this guy talking non-stop. When the waiter passing the food for them, he said,’ this must your first date!’ The guys smiles and ask’ why?’ The waiter ‘cos you are trying so hard!’ After they finish, they go to get payment. The guy says ‘you know why i like this place the most?’ The girl looks really confused ‘why?’ ‘Aha, it’s because of the payment, you can pay whatever you want. Okay I’ve put mine, now you put yours!’ After they say goodbye at the train station, the girl is like’ Phew! Omg!’ Then she walks alone home.
Character: A young girl (I haven’t come up with a right name for her), she goes to a foreign country to study and live there all by herself. She is a happy, positive and strong girl from deep inside. But at the same time, she is so young, she hasn’t seen much of the world, known how to deal with different people, she know she is going to get through all this on day, but just not yet. she is weak, terrified and excited at the same time of the unknown world. She is a completist, sometimes she is too hard on herself and sometimes on other people too, that’s why people found that she is not that easy to get along with sometimes. She is aware of that from some degree, and she is working on it and getting better than before. She has this passion for life but sometimes she gets shy. She is complicated.
In this week’s class, we did a whole practical exercise on audio.
Microphone Input Panel
There are two channels connected to camera, channel 1, the silver left one and channel 2, the black right one. When connecting them to the camera, hit status, and scroll to audio, adjust the audio level, channel 1 to -10 and channel 2 to -20, and choose audio select manual and audio in external. Choose line instead of mic on camera when connect audio.
Front Panel Controls
Adjust fine control button to PK, and you can adjust the course button to make the audio level between -10db to -6db and hit 0db but not over 0db. Switch it to center when recording. When you connect boom to the mixer, you need to twist the button to ST. Switch it to RTN when connecting it to camera. Switch it from mic to 1k can do the test tone, and you can adjust it on camera about audio level. There is a BATT button that can check the battery. We usually use it till it goes flash. When plug the head phone in, the side with line go with the left ear.
Then we had a go through about audio settings, when you have some camera movements, a good way to do it better is look for the spot and move camera around before the real shooting to get a good sense of it and to make yourself feel comfortable and confident about it. When hold a boom, to avoid recording the noise outside, you lean the boom a bit to avoid recording more noise.
In documentary films the person, place and events shown to audience are real. They exist or have existed. For example, in Forbidden Lies, Broinowski, the director insisted to go to find the hospital where Norma’s friend, Dalia, (As Norma claimed) who is killed by her family in an honor killing in Jordan. All documentaries do is to present factual information about the world. There are lots of ways of presenting in documentary, for instance, filmmakers can just simply record events that actually occur during the process, events that spontaneously occur, using visual aids like charts, maps, etc. For instance, in Forbidden Lies, when Norma sits on a chair, reading her book, based on a ‘real story’, Broinowski records the entire process-the process of filming Norma. Audience can see the filming sets, cameras, tracking dollies and hear Broinowski saying ‘action!’ Sometimes animation and comic can be used as well. Comic is used to show what happened in the court 11 years ago in The Thin Blue Line. What’s more, stage. Stage here is an important and common way of representation in documentary. Same location, the person doing the same thing, all the director will do is to ask the person wait for few seconds then he/she can frame it up. This does not mean there is something different here, the only difference is when the person does the thing regularly there is not a camera placed there and happens to shoot the entire process. However there is another kind of form of staging that involving actors. For example, in The True Blue Line directed by Errol Morris played back perfectly the murder scene in 1976 Dallas, Taxes. This documentary includes plenty strong evidences and logical conjectures like ‘mixes interviews and archival material with episodes performed by actors’. ‘The jittery reenactments of television true-crime shows are shot with smooth camera work, dramatic lighting, and vibrant color. The result is a film that not only seeks to identify the real killer but also raises questions about how fact and fiction may intermingle’ (Bordwell & Thompson 2013, p.353). From the examples above, it is proved that staging events will not make a film fictional or fake, it is just the fictional way to show the truth to audience, in fact staging sometimes intensify the documentary value of the film, and enhances the film’s reliability in some degree.
Documentary can be expressed in many different ways, there can be some fictional elements, there is no fixed rules of that is how a documentary is made. There are some conventions, but this does not conflict with the finding new ways and more progressive, dauntless way of finding the truth. Truth is there, it doesn’t come to people actively and it doesn’t say anything about itself. It all depends on what people discover, how people think about it and do people believe in it. Documentary is all about the truth, however sometimes the way of presenting the truth is hard to find. The truth is always hidden, so the way of presenting the truth has to be smart enough, at the same time objective enough because the truth never changes and it never is guaranteed by anything.
Reference: Bordwell, D & Thompson, K 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th edn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, pp. 350-353 & pp.433-438.
In week3, we went out to shoot still frame videos about a place. After shooting we need to write down all the parameter of each 30 seconds’ shooting. For our group, we chose to get some footages of Old Melbourne Gaol or something near it. Finally we get four footages, the shot of the gate, the wall with door and window of the gaol and the open window that is blocked by a tree and with a view of far distance building. We felt that a place can be so different and beautiful than we thought when it’s on a frame. I think recording a place without any sound, and putting some music or monologue is one way to make a documentary film, at least I think so by now.
The aim to write down all parameter is to get an awareness about lighting (I think). Gain, white balance, colour temperature, f stop and ND filter, all these parameters are about lighting and colour. Paul said that he prefers to call white balance colour balance. There are several kinds of colour temperature, 1600k-candles (very yellow), 3200k-film lights, 4000k-fluro, 5200k-sunny, 5600k-cloudy, 6000k… Gain is usually on ‘low’, and white balance is usually on ‘A’. When there is not much sunshine, ND filter is not that much needed. ND filter is like a sunglass to the camera. When we do this we paid attention to lighting, choose the spot where there is a good light, and do the white balance there. And we did lots of thinkings on framing, we are trying to get interesting composition, for example, the one with shooting through a window. Also we actually removed something from the frame to make it look better. When I did the shot of jail wall, I used my phone to frame up and found that it looks better for me to shoot it at a flat level.
When we doing the shots, we worked like a team, a director, a director of photography and a camera assistant. Director is the one who comes up with ideas, DOP is the one who operate the camera as the way director wanted, camera assistant is the one who helps DOP.
In this week we document a place for 50 seconds. Before the shooting, we went through exposure, focus, and how to set up cameras on tripods and some safety rules. Based on what I learned last semester I am pretty familiar with these settings and rules. Here are some new things that l learned, when setting up a tripod, it is better and more convenient to use the first joint. When setting up the tripod, it is more like a one-person’s job, when there are two people there they might pay attention to different areas, and hands might get chopped badly. We kept shooting, we went to the basketball court and documented some events over there, like people sitting and chatting, people playing basketball,etc. Different from drama, the shooting of documentary is more like recording what is there without any rehearsal or staging. We are just recording this place, what are people doing here. So when we shooting, we are trying to find more interesting angles to show the place more to viewers. For example, one of us was shooting people sitting and chatting neat the basketball court, when she shoot this, she want to put the tall building with scrawl on it in the composition. We went out to record six different sounds to show what kind of environment you are in. We record the sound of coffee machine making coffee, the sound in an elevator, the sound of beeping at student hub, the sound of people walking and so on. All of those sound are like the symbol of different places, different environment.
When we look at the work we’ve done, we found that frame is the thing we can improve a lot. It seems like there is a basic rule for framing, tight it up or make it wide, and it depends on the objects that you focus on somehow. One thing about audio, the lead actor or the interviewee is always on channel 1. And when you do an interview, always record the interviewee’s answer first because this is unknown. The interviewer’s questions can be recorded anytime after the interview because it’s prepared and changeable.To find the nice frame for shots, we can check the location in advance and use our phone to make the frame. A mobile phone is a very convenient and good tool to do that. We can easily carry it from any angle we want.