Tag Archives: Assignment1

Something I’m relatively familiar with after a rather haphazard production process for my shot film last year, taking a bunch of footage and trying to piece together a film in post can produce some brilliance in some instances, but it can also be (as in this particular instance) a painful and difficult process. I really struggled to find a narrative that could drive the piece forward, and to find good reasons to cut. I didn’t want to just cut for the sake of it, I wanted my edit to have some form of purpose if I was going to try and emulate Frederick Wiseman.

After a few failed attempts at creating some semblance of a coherent timeline in premier, I decided to employ a technique I used frequently last semester in my non-narrative film-making taken from Los, one of James Benning’s films. I just picked a number (5 seconds) and cut every shot at that moment. This isn’t how I was going to have my final edit, but I thought maybe some kind of interesting cutting rhythm might come out of it. I started to sense a sort of two-and-fro with the swings and the card game and so I settled upon those two things being the main parts of the piece. The film starts out with just 5 second cuts on the pieces creating a steady, monotonous rhythm (something perhaps felt throughout a lazy day at the park). Then when the card games start playing and the boy on the swing starts moving, I started cutting whenever someone either a)shifted their gaze (as if to cut to whatever they were looking towards) or b) whenever something either entered or exited the frame. I felt that this created a sense of being at the park, looking around at the other people and things, always being drawn to something moving.

For the audio, I tried to keep a lot of the swing and child sounds throughout the piece to tie it together, the audio cuts a lot less than the visuals do, with a lot of the swings audio being consistent throughout the short film. This was partly because a lot of the captured audio was unusable, but I think it gave it a bit of a through-line, which is important when a film’s narrative is being created through visual cuts, rather than an actual plot line.

Shooting these 10 second clips of artificial light sources was honestly out of my comfort zone. I felt really odd standing around filming mostly motionless light sources whenever I did it in public. I suppose that’s a good thing though. It’s always useful to bend what you’re comfortable with in film-making.

It’s interesting what the phone does to focus attention. Often times, I found myself drawn to the shadows/what the light was hitting rather than the actual lights themselves. The overhead lights on the train and the kitchen light with the COLLINGWOOD ST sign in them were prime examples of this. Even though the entire purpose of the exercise was to focus on the thing that I would usually ignore (artificial light sources) I still found myself not actually focusing on the lights. Though the camera was squarely on the lights, the entire time I was filming I watched other things like subtle movements and reflections in the window nearby, or flickering of another light source in the background.

Upon re-watching the video, I would often notice things that weren’t really “there” (or at least detectable) when I was shooting. This is most blatant in the audio. The sounds of the traffic is obviously something that draws the audience’s attention in the video of the traffic lights. The sound of the train jolting and the sudden beep of the doors is another. But even more subtle than that is the creak of a floor board at the very end of the Hallway light video (around 50 second mark). The video of a bathroom light that starts around the 2 minute mark also has a very loud fan in it, that is barely noticeable in person, but the phone speaker picks it up and elevates it to the point where its really difficult to focus on anything else in the video.

As for the actual film-making process , it’s very…different. It’s going to take me a while to break out of the preconceptions I have concerning what a “film” is. I have never really considered experimental film-making as part of “non-fiction”. I always thought of it as just sort of its own category until now. I never really thought I would enjoy this kind of thing, and even though I was a bit uncomfortable while filming, I did actually surprise myself in that I enjoyed watching it back, especially the clips filmed outdoors. I like that it was still daytime when I got those shots, because there’s something oddly interesting about completely focusing on small, artificial light sources, while there is still the light from the sun illuminating the entire shot.

One last thing I’d like to touch on is the second last shot in the film (2:10-2:20 in the film). It was the only shot that had a camera movement in it. I think this is because it was the first shot I took chronologically. I’d actually only just woken up. I liked the idea of shooting the light first, and then bringing in the natural light for contrast. I thought about re-shooting it and getting just a stationary shot, but then just sort of decided that wasn’t really in the spirit of the project and kept the original in the video.

When I hear the word nonfiction, the first thing that springs to mind is high budget, well produced documentaries. Which is interesting, because in terms of my own consumption of non-fiction media, documentaries wouldn’t really be near the top of the list. I see things like news articles, photos, social media etc much more frequently than the amount of feature length documentaries I’ve watched. Still though, that stands out as the pinnacle of non-fiction media within my head.

In our studios so far, I’ve interacted with much more experimental nonfiction media. In his nonfiction collation, Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields pulls together quotes from hundreds of pieces of nonfiction, and groups them together in terms of central themes. Several immediately leapt off the page and seemed to have a form of almost inherent meaning. I don’t even know why, but number “130 act naturally” kept coming back to me. Perhaps just because it was short and easily remembered, but maybe because subconsciously it resonated with me.

This is the kind of media that I hadn’t really even thought about as being considered “nonfiction”. Narrative-less, experimental expression. Incredibly subjective, and completely different to any two audiences.

Leviathan, a 2012 film by directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, is another example of experimental non fiction that we looked at in our first studio. One shot from the portion of the film I saw really stood out to me. A camera, bobbing in and out of the water facing the front of the bow as it tore through the ocean. It just looked so incredibly cinematic. I immediately imagined it as the opening shot in a blockbuster, feature length film and wanted to try and recreate that shot myself some day.

Perhaps that’s the most important part of this kind of nonfiction. Everyone resonates with something different in these pieces of work, and those subjective responses can be used to draw inspiration from and develop new, different media.

Reference

Shields, David (2010), Reality Hunger: a Manifesto, New York: Knopf

Before this studio, I’d never considered noticing as an active practice. It was never something that I devoted much thought to, if at all. Much like breathing, or walking; noticing, to me, was obviously something I do almost at all times, but an action that never really requires consistent, conscious effort.

I simply thought noticing was becoming aware of something. But it can be much more than that. And it can be a much more active, conscious process than I initially thought.

Prior to our first few classes, I hadn’t really thought about how what I notice impacts my film-making. Obviously as a filmmaker, you try to control what the audience notices within any given shot. However, I hadn’t thought about what I notice. When I am setting up a camera or choosing somewhere to shoot, what things do I notice that shape my decision making? And how could I interpret similarities in what I notice throughout a film-making process? Perhaps even more importantly, how can I ensure that the audience notice the same thing I do? If I’m trying to bring the audience’s attention to a particular part of a shot or something within the shot, what is the best way to draw them in? What do people inherently want to notice, and how can a filmmaker use that to their advantage?

Noticing is not simply one action, but it is a collection of practices that enable us to learn from, experience, and inform our future actions (John Mason, 2001). It is something that can be honed and practiced, rather than something that simply happens to us. While it’s true it can be reactive, say suddenly shifting and intently focusing on a new, unexpected noise or flash of light, it can also be proactive; in that we can deliberately attend to something and actively focus our attention on a desired object.

Reference

Mason, John, Researching your own practice: the discipline of noticing, (p. 29-38). London: Routledge Falmer, 2001