Paul and I talked through my second shooting and editing of ‘that’s my jam’ today. The thing I discover the is how to transfer the message to audience in a better way and how to make a comedy more comic. In post-production, we could only deal with the clips we shoot before, so we usually need to shoot more than planed to give a bigger room of changing in post-production. In editing, the editor is aware of what is happening, what will happen next, however audience know nothing until they see it, and audience has a short memory of what they are watching, so you need to give them signals of what is happening. For example when Tan is dancing, Phoebe walks in and watching him, finally Tan found himself watched. In this shoot, I have a cut of Phoebe watching at the end, this would makes audience wonder when she comes in, audiences becomes a bit confused, and is she watching Tan. So to avoid this, I should have a cut of Phoebe watching or even walks in and watch while Tan is dancing, before he finds himself get caught. To make it more comic, I can even have Phoebe walks in earlier while Tan is looking around. To do so, I need to make the frame more tight, and choose a suitable background-make audience don’t know where Phoebe is. Then Phoebe appears in the same frame with Tan while he is looking around.(only the background matches and their eyesight angle, never look at the camera) Also, audience needs more details, what is a character doing, they don’t miss any details. For example, when Tan is opening music, he hit his phone twice, I don’t have a shot of the screen, then audience would wonder why he hits phone twice, what is on the screen. And comic never ends in a close-up.

Another thing I learned is getting ORGNIZED

What I can do is establish a big project, every time I did a scene, make a bin for it, like that’s my jam, room scene, stair scene… In thes bins, put all the footages, music and sequence. When editing, if I need to do a second editing, never do something on the first sequence, duplicate the first sequence, then rename it as sequence 2, then I can do anything on without being worried because I still have the first sequence. In this way, I can always look back what has changed in the second editing, make some progress, discover different ways.

This semester is nearly over. During this semester, we keep make things, write about and reflect on it after we made it, do researches related to it. In this semester, I learned a lot about filmmaking, directing, camera operating and how to be one of the members in a filmmaking group, also I was reminded all the time of being an independent filmmaker, express your style in a special way you found.

mix cut of shooting exercises

Generally about filmmaking

Filmmaking is a big and complicated concept. Before I am attending this studio, I don’t know too much about it, all I have is a general and blurry idea about filmmaking. When I’m doing this subject, I realize gradually that I am in filmmaking, I am one of the members who come together to make a scene. There are director, director of photography (DOP), camera assistant, sound man, boom holder, actors in a small filmmaking team. These positions are necessary in a small team of making a scene. As a team, every one has a job and every one needs to stick on it, be really concentrated on it. Doing well their own jobs make the entire team more efficient. Also good and timely communication needs to be established as well. To work as a team, everyone should talk about their own opinions or advices that make the scene come out better.

Filmmaking is not only a cooperating thing, but also a technical thing. How to operate a film camera properly, what to do with audio kits, how to make a connection between camera and audio kits, how to hold a boom, so it will be in the perfect spot that record the best quality of sound, how to deal with the mixed wire when packing up… These questions appears one by one during the whole semester, all I need to do is to deal with it, get over with it, learn everything related to these stuff, also practice, practice and practice. After plenty times of practicing, I am quite familiar with these technical problems.

There is a big awareness that you need to keep in mind all the time as a filmmaker, safety and risk. As a filmmaker, we should always be aware of that and keep a serious attitude about it. Every time we want to shoot a scene in anywhere, we need to ask for permission first if it is needed. Then all we need to do is write a safety report that concludes all of the shot lists, the description of these shots. Also the risk and safety problem might occur and the solutions. And mark them by the level of risky. A first-aid box and the numbers of hospitals and ambulance need to be prepared in advance.

I am aware of that we are just doing a university subject here, all we’ve been through this semester is not enough for a professional filmmaking team. But all we did here is keep learning and experiencing, keep making progresses and improvement on ourselves. Also nowadays there are lots of independent filmmakers, they make films in their own way and style. All we need to do is to find a way to express ourselves’ style of making film and expressing self.

Pre-production

From lots of practices during this semester, I realize that pre-production is a significant part of filmmaking, it is the outline of what you will make.

Shoot list

Without a shoot list, everything just seems to be disordered for me and I don’t know what to shot first, what to shot second. The shoots that you imagined are different when you actually shoot sometimes. There are lots of ways we can use to make a shoot list like drawing a blackboard, writing down the shoot list. For me, storyboard doesn’t really work, so every time I spend lots of time to make my shoot list more specific and detailed. It includes different shot angles, shot size, perspectives, compositions, framings and so on.

Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene is very important for a scene, all it does is to make scene prettier. My shooting experience tells me to observe the shooting location carefully before choosing it. Location is important, when you choose one, you need to have a general sense about where you will put the camera, is there enough room for support team, does this place look crowded when everything is set up, how is the lighting, too bright, too dark… You need to think about these kinds of stuff when choosing a location. About lighting, natural lighting is always no good. I once read a sentence which said ‘all of the natural lighting in films is not natural’. We can change lighting in editing, but we’d better to make it good when shooting as well. To do so, we can borrow extra lights equipment and use a reflector board. The background setting is another thing. To be more sensitive and critical about it, frame it up, looking from a frame, get rid of everything unnecessary and ugly. Framing is like a filter to background setting. Of course we can also add something in that is suitable for the scene. If it makes the scene more attractive, even the item itself is not pretty. Speak of framing, when checking the location, we can just use our phone to frame a bit, take some photos, have a general sense about what kind of framing will be used in shooting. When it comes to actors, costume and make up. These two things will influence the first impression, so they are important. They are reflections of characters’ personalities in some degree.

What else in pre-production

• preparation of stage property
• good contact and communication with team members, send them script, shoot list, safety report and set up schedule
• good communication with actors, tell them how they are expected to be, also give the room of improvisation

Directing

A director is the author of a film, he/she is the leader of all the members in the team. Even though filmmaking is a process involving plenty of team workers like DOP, sound man, actors and support team, but the film is expressed in the way the director want it to be. So directing is hard work because he/she needs to establish communication with everyone in the team. Sometimes conflict happens, sometimes common sense happens, but in the end, everyone is on the same page of processing the film.

Director & DOP

A director is the lead of the film, then a DOP is the lead of the camera. DOP operates camera in filmmaking and this is an important job because the way camera moves is the way how this film is presented to audience. In all my shooting exercises I am both director and DOP. Every time I was filming, I thought about what kind of shots do I need here, wide shoot, close-up shoot, in which way it will transfer the message to audience better? What kind of shot is better in this situation, how the camera movement here represents character’s personality? This kind of communication needs to be done between director and DOP. DOP must be very skilled with camera, from his/her perspective, he/she might find other ways or even better way to bring this shot to audience, at this time communication is required again. All I need to do here is be more skilled with camera by practice again and again.

Director & actors

In all my shooting exercise, I didn’t work with experienced actors once, so maybe there are some differences when I actually work with real actors. However everyone can act, so I believe there are must be some common problems as well. My practices tell me sufficient communication needs to be done between directors and actors. Before the shooting, director needs to talk with them about who are they, what do they want, where are they, what are their motivations… During the shooting, sometime actors are not in the right mood, then director needs to remind them of that, how do they these words, in what kind of tone, how the connections between actors be presented… However sometimes actors has their own thoughts about how to express this character. Then they should talk with director about it and director should also give the room of changing and improvisation.

Camera coverage

How a scene is covered nicely is the subject I explored for the whole semester. I have deeper perceiving than before.

Single shot-‘being invisible third person’

a great idea about single shot is to pretend camera as the invisible person in the scene when shooting, everything audience saw on the screen is from the point of view of ‘invisible person’. This kind of way of shooting make audience more curious about what is happening, or what will happen next? It makes audience feels like they are standing right in the scene.

Panning-two kinds of panning

Based on my shooting exercise, I found out there are basically two kinds of panning. The first one is panning aimlessly, to get the big environment around characters, audience will pay more attention to what the characters are talking about. The second one is when one character is talking, pan to the other one to show his/her face expression to audience. In this way audience would pay more attention to what they are talking, what would happen during the talking, what is connections and relationship between characters, intense? happy? excited? terrified?…

Tilt up/down-coming with a surprise

Usually tilt up or down comes with a surprise at the end. When camera tilt up from bottom slowly, audience will make a quick judgment based on what they’ve seen. Even though they haven’t seen all of the information, they will think what is in their imagination. So the effect of a tilt-up is to surprise audience, show them something totally different from their imagination.

Over the shoulder and point of view-dialogue

When shooting dialogue scene, we usually use over shoulder shot to keep audience perceptive about the existence of characters and the connections between them. ‘Over the shoulder’ is just a typical angle, actually there are lots of other angles we can use like from arms, a part of face… Another great angel is from one characters’ point of view to shoot other characters’ expression. In this way, a special connection between character and audience is established, when audience sees and hears what the characters see and hear, they will feel the same way the character feel.

Tracking-move like character moves

For example, when you are tracking a drunk person, you can shake the camera a bit to make audience fee the way the character is going through.

Close-up shot follows by a wide shot-continuity and explanation

Usually a close-up shot is followed by a wide shot, this is because a close-up shot has a very tight frame, there is much less information audience can get from the shot, however if it is followed by a wide shot of the continuity action, audience will understand what the character is doing, where is the character, what will happen next… If the wide shot is missing in the scene, then audience will get confused by what happens next because they don’t see the connection between action to action. Speak of explanation, sometimes different shooting angles on the same action will also explanation a lot to audience. For example, when you shooting someone from back, all we can see is he is moving, but we don’t know what exactly he is doing. Then a shot from his side, or front will tell the truth.

Static zooming in or out

Zooming in or out is usually terrible, it is hard to have a very good zoom. It is unsteady and not smooth. However static zooming is nice, at least in the scenes I’ve watched. I watched two scenes before about static zooming, one zoom in and one zoom out. The zoom in example is a couple is lying in bed and talking, the man is talking something horrible and the woman doesn’t believe him at first, and she gradually realize that what he is talking about is real. The camera starts zooming in very slowly and steadily while the woman becoming more and more upset and shocked by the man’s words. Finally camera stops zooming when it is a close up of woman’s face with tears on it. At the same time of camera zooming, the sad and soft background music enters. Another example, starts with extreme close-up of human eyes, all audience can see is a pair of eyes, with no emotion in it. With camera zoom out gradually, the eyes looking around with panics, then we can see it is a male character, there is a stick tape on his mouth, he can’t talk, his hands are tied backwards, he is kidnapped! Finally audience gets the message.

Editing

The most important thing about editing is not to confuse audience and make the scene look better from color, audio effect and after effect. If the lighting is not good enough when shooting, there are still chances to fix it when editing. Also sound effect can shows what dialogue cannot show, for example, when someone get caught and feel embarrassed, audience can see character’s face expression which says he/she is embarrassed, also we can add a funny and stupid sound effect to make the atmosphere more strong. Choose the right time spot to enter and end the background music, usually when something else happens the music need to stop immediately, then audience will aware that something happened, coming out from former situation and get into next one. It’s like an alarm for audience. The timing of cut is also important, audience don’t want to spend their time watching the same, repeated actions, so give it a brief show, move to next action. There must be continuity between cut to cut, like I mentioned before, a close-up shot followed by a wide shot, a shot of actions from back followed by a shot of action from side or front. However sometimes jump cuts are better in some situation like dancing around. When someone is talking, a cut to their face would better than a wide shot.

For my last shooting exercise last weekend, I shoot a single shoot. My idea is to shoot from camera’s point of view. There is no dialogue between two characters, it’s all about action. So during the shooting, I followed the female character who is very distracted and walks around a lot all the way, there are few camera movements, the thing which lead my camera is her eye contact with the other male character who is in the same room with her and doing the word puzzle. So I followed her all the way, and every time she moves, I was like the another third person in the room, I track for her movements. When she walks back and forth, I just simply, slowly and narrowly move the frame. When she walks to the table, grabs her bag, takes her phone out, and puts it back in, I tracked her all the way. During her walking back and forth, she stops a bit and look at the guy who is looking at her, then my camera firstly stops moving, looking at her, get her face expression, then turn to the guy, then come back to her. When she makes a phone call from the telephone on the table and she looks at him, the same camera movement, but this time get more face expression of him because she hang up the phone and walks away once she looks at him. Finally camera goes back to her and that’s the end.

In second time of editing, I paid attention to some aspects Paul and me talked through before, like audio-sound effect, timing, continuity and different type of cuts and so on. The most thing I found is that the timing of cut is important in editing, the spare shots are not good and usually confuse audience in some degree. An editor needs to be very sensitive about the timing of cut and try ti make it simple, understandable, and cool. To get rid of the spare shots, when editing, you can pull the progress bar to make it more detailed, and you can catch the perfect cut you want from a slower progress bar. If there is some spare time during cut to cut, it is odd to watch, you can try by yourself, it’s like the actors are waiting for his/her line, a bit intentional, but this is also related to actor’s performance which I will talk about in next paragraph.

Communicate well with actors is also important for a director. The two actors in my scene are my friend, and they are not professional which means I need to talk with more about their characteristic, what kind of personalities I wish them have, what kind of ways I want them to show it to audience, what is their motivations in this situation, what kind of tone, gesture, eye contact or body language they can add to express ‘themselves’ in a better way. Also, a director needs to remind them of imagination, to tell them this is not acting, it’s for real, put yourself in that situation and relationship, not just reading the lines to each other. From two shooting exercises, I realized that I need to keep reminding them that kind of stuff. Actors usually need to know what they are doing, who are they, where are they, who they are with and what’s the relationship between them and others… Anyway, director should have good and frequent communication with actors, and lead, inspire and get common sense with them. However if I am working with people who are experienced in acting or who is a professional, it would be different and better. I’m looking forward to working real actors in future.

About audio

when shooting, the conversation between two actors is recorded, but it’s not the only sound recorded by the mic. The noise in the shooting location is also recorded. To get rid of the noise as possible as I can, I did the adjustment on the whole track of sound, so that is why the sound is pretty small in my editing. The noise is still there, but not very obvious. I record the sound in addition, when I put it in, I found the sound and the video don’t have the same rhythm. So it does’t work eventually. This reminds me that next time if I have to record sound in addition, let the actors look at their performance and read lines at the same time. (Is this the only way? what other manners i can use?) In this way, it will be much better, I guess? About the audio continuity, there are some shots in it, actors are not talking, just some body movements, then I unlinked the audio and video, and get rid of audio, this make audio continuity bad. It just sounds not that natural, it’s like noisy, then suddenly quite, no sound at all, then sound again, I mean the sound besides the dialogue, the noise the camera caught naturally. Is the only way to avoid this problem is to record sound in addition?

I was one of the actors for Tan’s shooting. In his shooting, he used dolly, and I never used it before and I learned something about it.

We ran into some problems during the shooting-the track irregularity. The tracks cannot be connected very well, there are some small gaps between two tracks and we tried to push it in, it just got stuck. Then Simone suggest to put some sand bags on the bottom of tripod to make the camera more steady. And it worked! However camera still not steady enough. After that, Simone suggest that we should use the red rope to make a connection between tripod and camera, that is what the red rope for. Then when shooting, pull the rope down as much as possible. Finally we make the camera steady as much as we can.

What’s more, something about framing.

Tan was shooting a walking scene. Simone and I are walking, I’m in front of Simone, and we have a small conversation, Tan want me to walk off after listen to Simone’s last sentence. But somehow there is no enough space in the frame, and I always walk off a bit earlier than he wanted. And we are walking really slowly. After few shots, we watch the clips to make some improvement. And we just find out that Tan’s frame is not tight enough, there is much space unnecessary around us two. So we suggest that tight the frame up, then I can have more space to walk off. Finally it gets much better.

This time, I changed location to shoot the same scene. This time I pay attention to few aspects, continuity, framing, mise-en-scene.

The mopping shot

In this shot, I still did the tilt up shot, but when editing, I will just cut from his feet and mop to his face. Also, I shoot it in another way, first a close up shoot of his feet and the mop, then a wide shot of he mopping the floor in the kitchen. This way audience gets really good explanation.

The dancing shot

To get more and natural jump cuts of dancing, I kept camera rolling all the time he dances.

The get caught shot

After he sees Tash, there is a cut back to his medium close up shot of him saying’ I wasn’t dancing…’ which is missing in last time’s shooting.

This time, whenever I frame up, I will check the background and remove everything unnecessary or not pretty.

After talking to Paul, I have more and deeper perceive on editing.

1. About tilt camera up

Usually, tilting or panning through the all object, it comes out a surprise. For example, when I tilt the camera from ground level, and audience can see it’s like a man’s feet, however when audience see object’s face, it’s a woman. That is where tilt is well used. In my editing, there is no need to tilt all the way. What I can do is cut directly to his face.

2. About continuity

In my scene, there is a dancing part. Before dancing, Prospero go to turn on the radio first, then I cut it to a close-up face expression of enjoying. This way confuses audiences in some level. All audience wants to is what he will do next, so a cut of he walking away from the radio and starts dancing would be much interpretative. Also when he dancing, more jump cuts are needed, small, short and quick jump cut would be better. This reminds me of shooting the dancing scene all together, just keep the camera rolling. In this way, it will be much easier for later editing.

3. About background music and sound effect

When Prospero is caught by Tash, he gets embarrassed and turn the music off. About this shot, I stop the music when Prospero turns it off. However it comes out not that good, a bit misleading and unnatural. The music is like a sign, what I mean, is when he starts dancing, of course, the music fade in, then when he gets caught, the music should stop immediately, in this way, audience get the message of something happened, some one appeared… If keep the music on, audience may not be aware of that something is different. Also, sound effect, when Paul said that you should add a sound effect here, I suddenly realized! I never used one in my former editing, so I almost forget about it. I forget how many comic elements can be added to it if I add a sound effect just at the point where he gets caught.

4. About mise-en-scene and framing

This concept is always in my mind, I guess I just hasn’t got critical about it. Framing is like a filter, when you see it from a film camera, when you have picked up your framing, you need to get rid of everything uglily and unnecessary. Be picky about the lighting, composition, background setting, background blurry, frame tightness, etc.

I chose the script of ‘That’s My Jam’ and shoot the first scene in it. Also I did some changes on the script. I planned shooting in my friend’s apartment. The location is picked, my friend’s apartment. Then I need my support team which is made up by a camera assistant, Lisa, a sound person, Niel, one of my friends, and two actors, Tan and Phoebe. I bring the jar of jam and a mop as stage property. Phoebe talked with her roommate about using their chicken in advance to make sure they are agree with our shooting. The film camera, tripod and audio kit are also ready to go.

In pre-production, I did sufficient preparation to make the shooting process smoother. For example, I wrote down the shoot list one by one, then wrote everything could occur in this shot and different ways to shoot this one. Also I tried to draw some storyboard, but it turns out that storyboard doesn’t really work for me and I was confused by myself’s drawing ^^”. So I give up the storyboard and make my shooting list more detailed and specific.

Even though I did sufficient preparation, but still I kept bumping into some problems. The location, turns out the location is much smaller than I expected. There is not enough room for a big tripod and actors moving around. Because of that, I cannot get the angles and framings I wanted originally. So next time, check the location more carefully. Also I ran into some camera setting problems which is pretty silly. When I look back, I thought of that we’ve gone through that in class. The answer to it is on the sheet of Z7 instruction. However we struggled with it for a long time, even think about shooting the scene with my own camera, canon 700D. In the end, I called my tutor and he asked me to turn up the Z7 instruction and finally I found the answer. So next time check all the settings first, not sure about some? go to the instruction first.

The shooting process is effective in general, everyone was doing their job well. And we finished the shooting in exactly four hours. Because of the small space, I found that handheld is much easier and more convenient than using a tripod. You can be more flexible about the height level. For example, when I was shooting the conversation, camera should be at their eye level, the chicken is very crowded and it’s impossible to put a tripod there, so I handheld the camera and sit on the table, in this way the height level seems alright. Also I learned something about camera movement, do not hesitate, be prompt!