Author Archives: jackfahey

Show and Tell (Blog Post 6)

In wednesdays class we had a little mini group presentation and gained some feedback from Hannah and a few of our peers. This unfinished video is all I had to show because I needed to do a lot of reshooting the day before and didn’t have time to edit it into the piece. But I got some incredible feedback about how to end the piece from hannah which I think will really tie it together. She suggested that I end the sequence by completely uprooting everything. Make it as chaotic and unintelligible as possible. I think layering the videos and toying around with the opacities will help out with this.

I also showed the group the video that was in my last blog, and the layering/opacity effect in that film seemed to be a positive mentioned by a few people. So I think that effect will definitely play a part in that final sequence of my finished edit.

On top of this, I think I need to work on keeping a uniform time for each wide shot. Originally I was going to just import them and leave them unedited, but to really create that cohesive feel between the shots of nature, I think I will edit them down to all be exactly 30 seconds. Hopefully this will help me to create a sense of uniformity across the piece that will make the complete lack of such a feeling at the end feel even more impactful. I’d also like to experiment will really playing around with the sounds at the end of the film. I think creating that completely confusing, dissaraying sequence visually will disrupt the audience’s attention and ability to notice, and throwing in random train station sounds and clips jumbled together will bring it together.

 

Experimenting with Editing techniques (Blog Post 5)

So for this piece, we used 4 different film techniques to create a quick edit with the footage we collected. I’ll go through how these techniques were used and how I intend to implement them.

Metric Montage

Obviously this one is massive for me. It’s really important that my piece has a very steady, even flow throughout those wide shots. I like the way, in this piece, everything is exact and even, it creates a great juxtaposition with the disrupting nature of the actual content.

In my final piece, I really want to play with this. I think its going to help the pacing a lot to have those steady, 30 second intervals of quiet shots. That structure, hopefully, will help with the break down and complete confusion at the end of the piece (more on that in my next blog post!)

 

Superimposition

This I hadn’t really considered at all, but I loved the effect in this short. I think it helps create that confusion because the audience don’t know what to notice and what to focus on.

For the actual short film, I think I will gradually introduce this into the film and ramp up that effect as it gets closer to the climax of the film to help break down that structured format I will set up throughout the first 2 and a half minutes or so.

 

Colour Adjustment

Although I love how this effect, I don’t think I will use it because it channels the audience’s attention. It gives them something to focus on, and I definitely want to avoid that. I want the audience to really struggle, and have no idea what they are meant to focus their attention towards.

 

Graphic Match

Similarly to colour adjustment, I think matching movement/shots graphically helps the audience too much. It works in the long still wide shots, but other than that I’ll probably try to avoid this. I don’t want any technique that aids the audience by channeling their focus to one specific point.

City Symphones (Blog Post 4)

So before filming this coming week, I wanted to touch on why I chose to shoot at Royal Park, and then also discuss Scott Macdonald’s work and how it impacts my film.

As I said in my previous post, I chose Royal Park for my assignment. I did this because I think it has the perfect scenery surrounding the train station. There is a big park, a golf range and lots of green/leafy trees to shoot. There are also some great views of hills/cliffs/looking back at the city that could really add to the piece. Convenience is also pretty important in case I need to do reshoots, and its only 1 station away from my house.

Something we talked about in class today also quite struck me. In Macdonald’s “Avant-Doc: Eight Intersections” he talks about the lumiere brothers and their “City Symphones”. This is sort of along the same lines as my assignment, and something I definitely continually think about exploring for my next and final assessment. Exploring city life through avant-garde filmmaking is a really interesting way to document a society. Rather than just producing a standard documentary talking about the city and its history, thinking more creatively about how you represent a city, town, suburb or anything can really help to build a narrative behind your film. Why are you cutting here, why are you including that shot, why is this clip important, why is that sound integral etc. Hopefully my piece can build upon this, and reflect something greater about the area its depicting. Its obviously reflecting upon the nature of industry/man imposing itself upon the natural, but I hope it also says something about us. It invites the audience to actually notice nature, something I think we really do these days, and it shows the man made trains as harsh agents imposing themselves upon the audience, limiting our ability to notice anything other than the trains themselves.

 

Reference

MacDonald, Scott. Film Quarterly; Winter 2010; 64, 2; Performing Arts Periodicals Database pg. 50

A Recipe for Disruption (Blog Post 3)

I designed this recipe with one main goal first and foremost: Replication. I wanted it to be incredibly precise, easily understood and easily reproduced. Since I am trying to focus a lot of my shooting around techniques used by James Benning, and trying to let my camera and filming constraints do a lot of the editing for me (in order to remove some subjectivity from the piece) I wanted to make sure the shots I collect could be done by anyone. And that if another person went along to Royal Park Station (which by the way is where I have decided to shoot) they could come away with very similar, workable footage.

Visually, its very straightforward. Every shot is timed and there will be plenty of footage to work with (fingers crossed, the shooting is happening this week over the mid sem break). I think these shots will all ensure I get the kind of feel Im going for. None of the wide shots will include any of the station, I will get a combination of greenery and sky shots which will be a nice contrast, and I should get plenty of rapid left to right and right to left train movement to use for the quick transitions.

In terms of the audio, I want to make sure I really capture the elements around the train station because I want to embed them throughout the piece, very quietly, in order to just give the slightest hint to the audience of the location, but have it be quiet enough that it might just sound like background noise. So I’ve made sure to put in that I will capture all the man made noises that would occur there…for example the myki sounds, the loud speaker talking about train run times, the noise the green button makes when you press it for information etc.

Caulfield Streets and exploring Priming (Blog Post 2)

 

This is the first exploration into the themes I have been exploring with this piece. I chose a very quiet street juxtaposed with a loud main road just nearby. I’m just beginning to piece together the idea of my project, I want to prime the audience to feel confused and create a very disjointed viewing experience. I used exactly 20 second shots throughout the first part of the film, and then the last few clips are all 1 second in duration. I like the incredibly sudden shift in tone from slow, long, wide shots to rapid, quick cuts. The jump in sound really sells the change in feel as well, I had to edit down the sound of the wind/atmosphere of the wide shots, so a better shotgun mic is definitely worth using for the final piece to cut that stuff out. The quieter those shots are, the better the transition will be.

I think for my final piece, I’m going to do a nature vs man element. The long, wide shots will be of something natural (scenery etc) and the quick cuts will be industrial. I was given the idea of using a train station for my location, which I think is good. Having the trains also imparts that movement shift that is present in this video from the cars which I think also helps transition from the slow to rapid cuts. I’ll just need to scout around for a good train station that has scenery, because I don’t want anything in the long wide shots that would hint at the true location being the train station. I think all my shots will be facing away from the train station to achieve this. And I think the use of the tripod for my actual piece will really sell the feeling in the wide shots. I need those shots to be perfectly still so using a tripod for those will be very important.

Priming and Noticing (blog post 1)

For this assignment, I’ve chosen Priming as the word I am going to explore noticing through. For me, Priming is the exposure to one stimulus which influences a response to a subsequent stimulus. I think I’m going to focus specifically on the audience for this task. I haven’t really thought through the process yet but I want to focus on priming the audience to feel a particular way throughout my final piece, namely discomfort or confusion.

Something I want to incorporate into my film is a shooting technique used by James Benning in his film Los. Filmed around Los Angeles with a stationary camera/tripod, all 35 shots in his film were exactly 2 and a half minutes in duration. This idea of letting the camera do the editing for you is very intriguing to me. Along a similar vein is an exercise we did in class today. We had to do 5 shots purely duration based (we did 10 seconds) and then we had to do 5 shots where something within the frame dictated when to start/cut (we did when someone began walking up the stairs).

For my assignment I think I will use a bit of a middle ground between the two (our piece and Bennings’) and shoot for around 30 seconds per shot. Obviously I’ll need to refine the duration constraints once I’ve established what Im actually shooting, but I’m definitely intrigued by the idea of constrained shooting.

Benning and Silke Panse in their interview “Land As Protagonist” also discuss this notion of disregarding the idea of a subjective narrative in order to “see something that is not them”. I’m definitely drawn to this idea and, like Benning, will use a tripod with static shots throughout my piece and in those longer 30 second shots. Perhaps juxtaposing that with rapid quick cuts in order to create that sense of unease in the audience that I am aiming to prime.

Reflection

We’ve finished! First things first, we had to change one of the locations. My initial choice was too difficult to get to and shoot within the timeframe we had, so I shifted it to another place on my first brainstorm we did in class, Alexandra Gardens.

As it stands, I think it the recipe we made worked well, though it wasn’t fantastic. The audio recording seemed to be a bit tacked on, and in practice it wasn’t conducive to getting many good audio files. Perhaps that was just because I wasn’t imaginative enough when trying to write down the list of things I would hear while watching the video, or perhaps the steps themselves need some tweaking. I’m leaning towards the latter though, because the list of visual elements that stood out to me while watching couldn’t have come any faster.

So what worked well in the shooting? , the specificity of the list is really effective. It’s a very detailed step by step procedure that made it incredibly easy to follow, and replicate. That was important, because I wanted to ensure that the footage captured at both locations was as similar as possible, which we definitely achieved. There was a really good number of wide shots and close ups to vary it up, and the videos edited together really well because of this I feel.

What didn’t work? Well as I said, the audio could have been more comprehensive. Perhaps if we had a more thorough exploratory phase for the audio recordings. Maybe rather than thinking things up, if we just recorded everything we can hear while sitting in the space. Perhaps that would have been more conducive to gathering the recordings. I also think we probably should have grabbed a tripod, because occasionally there was a bit of shake in the shoot.

As for the actual edit room, we sort of stumbled into an idea that I think worked really well. We decided to bring the two places together by editing them into each other. We wanted to put the two spaces inside of one another by layer the videos on top of each other and editing parts out so that the bookstore appeared to be in the park and vice versa. I think, limited editing skills withstanding, that the actual concept really is something that could be interesting to further explore in my next assessments. It creates a rather surreal experience for the audience while watching, especially in the shot with the shelf and the city as a background. It really looks like thats the view from the window of the bookshop which I think is a really strong effect as it isn’t really noticeable. Audio wise, I actually really like the music that was playing all the way through. Its just the song that was playing while I was shooting in the bookshop, but I think it really blends the two spaces together. Having the music from the shop playing and the audio from the park playing right the way through definitely helped to merge the spaces into one, coherent, surreal location.

Development Post 4

In order to maintain consistency across all shots for this project, and to ensure we collected enough footage, we created a “recipe” of what to shoot/record. In the first draft, Hannah noticed that it was incredibly visuals focussed, with no mention of what to do when recording audio clips. I thought this showed a real bias in my filmmaking preferences that I hadn’t thought about, but is now obvious to me considering how I always think about film. I tend to notice striking visuals, interesting camera angles etc. This is probably because cinematography and direction are what Im most interested in career-wise, however I still definitely need to work on incorporating audio into my planning of projects in the future.

The first part of the recipe is straightforward… Namely, what I need to have physically with me on location. We decided to use the same camera for our videos which will hopefully keep it consistent.

 

The method is where it became very visually driven. Originally, steps 10-12 were not on the list, which would have made for purely visual recordings. Hopefully we have added enough audio in that will enable us to get some great sound recordings as

well, as initially it would have limited us to basically just using the sound we captured while shooting video.

 

 

In terms of actually editing whatever we get after our shoot, I am thinking that we will still stick with our contrasting elements idea, though we think its probably best to just wait and see what kind of footage we get, and what kind of ideas jump out at us in the editing room.

Development Post 3

This Post is just an Idea of the kind of overlay we could use in our project, if we decide on having voiceovers. I think having this play over the top of visuals of the football oval/surrounding parks could create an interesting experience. The audience would be seeing the physical space I have chosen, while hearing me talk about my emotional connection to it, rather than just describe the place.

It would be interesting to see what the audience notices when certain things within the shot (and some extraneous things mentioned perhaps not even in the shots) are touched on and given emotional significance.

I miss the rush. Before I even go outside. The adrenaline. The later in the season the better. There isn’t really a comparable feeling in everyday life. Its cold out there, I could be terrible, what if they’re better, what if I get injured. So many thoughts race by, but the only one that lingers is “what if we lose”. Nothing feels worse. Is it strange to be driven by that? I love winning, but I hate losing more. Once I’m on the field, it all just falls away. The crowd is there, but you don’t really hear them. You still feel the adrenaline,  but you aren’t thinking about winning or losing anymore. Not really. You’re just playing, and that’s what I miss. For an hour or two every week, nothing else matters. It just consumes you. The only thing that you think about, is getting to the next stoppage. Keep running. Run harder. Don’t drop this. Good lead. Great hit up. The moment you’re in is all you focus on. Your lungs feel like they’re going to burst but that doesn’t matter, because you need to keep going. If we won, it made my week. I’d feel great. If we lose, it hurts. If it was close, it takes days to get over it. If we lost a final, it took weeks.