For this Project Brief I decided to have my good friend, Avatar as the subject. He calls himself a ‘futurologist’ and is one of the most interesting people I know, so I thought I would be able to create something pretty interesting about him.
The footage was all filmed one evening at his apartment. After capturing a few stylistic shots around the place (candle, buildings etc) I basically just asked him to talk about whatever he wanted for awhile, thinking I would go through and pick out the best pieces. Being as he is, he rambled on for quite a long time so I was left with a lot of audio and decided to have his voice-over throughout the clip, switching between visual shots of him, things in his apartment and found footage.
I feel like the thing that needs improving the most is the audio. While filming I didn’t realise how prominent the background noise was while Avatar was speaking and in retrospect I should have used the lapel microphone to cut this out. I feel like the voiceover is a little jumpy as a result, so I ended up including a found music track in the background to try and draw attention away from this.
The aspect I’m most happy with is probably the visual aesthetic, especially the sequence of side-by-side shots. It took me quite a long time of fiddling around on iMovie to get this to work seamlessly, but I’m really happy with it as I challenged myself beyond simply having those images in progression in order to create a more interesting aesthetic.
Throughout the completion of this brief the key thing I learnt was that it is necessary to obtain more footage then initially thought. Towards the end of editing the clip I found myself with not much aesthetic variety in the clips, as I only filmed the one interview with Avatar. This is where the found footage came in but without it I probably would have struggled to keep it interesting. Overall I think my technical skills have improved a lot since the last brief, and I look forwards to improving them even further.
