In my goals for this semester which I wrote 12 weeks ago, one of the things I said was that I wanted to expand my technical abilities. I believe that I did this. I taught myself how to use adobe premiere in order to get rid of noise in interviews that were recorded using the sound from the camera. I learnt how to colour grade, and I believe that I have also become quite proficient in premiere (previously I used Final Cut 99% of the time). Sound was a major area in which I wanted to improve, and I believe that I achieved this. Furthermore, I wanted to work on a project which I was excited about. The superstitions documentary was something that I was passionate about making. I initially said that I wanted to work on something which could allow us to deviate away from the mainstream and tune into something a little more abstract. I think we have touched on that throughout working on this project, however I think there might have been too many of us in the group. I think by interviewing subjects separately (due to availability issues), it took away from our emotional involvement in all of the interviewees themselves. And I think that might be seen through the editing. Our disconnect can be seen in how the footage is recorded and the even in the b-roll footage. I think for such an intimate topic, we should have had a more intimate group. That being said, the course gave us a great opportunity to choose the people we wanted to work with, and also the topic of what we wanted to explore, and I think that it has been an amazing opportunity for us.

CAFE COLOUR GRADING

Stage one: colour to black and white

Stage two: increased brightness and contrast

Stage three: blue highlights increased

FLOWER GRADING

Stage one: tinted colour video to a less contrasted and saturated level.

Stage two: increased brightness and increased contrast.

Stage three: fully turned down saturation to black and white (to suit the b-roll footage theme).

When I cut together my abstract audio, I was really excited to work with the video footage me and Ed collected. We managed to get on the roof of building 8 (were we even allowed up there? Who knows…) and we got some really awesome footage of RMIT and its surrounds from an amazing and unique vantage point. The camera was incredible to work with because we could zoom in all the way up to a subject sleeping in the court yard a couple hundred metres away. I really LOVED editing it because as I started, I know it would have this eerie/voyeuristic feel to it. The fact we had recorded strangers without them knowing (again, were we allowed to do this? Doesn’t matter because we did) made for candid, but creepy footage. Each video ran with a theme, and that theme was basically high angle, roof t shots. I found that as I began editing the video together, whilst it did have an overriding theme of being on a rooftop with a lot of sky footage, the shots were still slightly unrelated. So give it some sort of body, I decided to use the slow zoom out shot of the guy sleeping in the court yard as a reference. All the other footage was edited around consistent cut aways to this shot of the guy. That way, while the shots seemed to not make sense, there would still be a reference point, and people could track the progress of the zooming out on the unaware, sleeping man. When I edited in other shots of people walking through the Old Melbourne Gaol gates, I made that footage black and white. For every shot in between the reference shots of the sleeping man, I tweaked with speed and whether the footage played forwards or backwards. All the shots were usable and I really liked that when I put them together, there was a very eerie, sniper like feel to the abstract film. I edited the audio after I edited the footage, and this was the part that I was least excited about. I feel like Ella and my audio wasn’t really the best to work with. The sounds did slightly vary, but they weren’t unique like our video footage. We had a great track of truck hydraulics which only featured during the reference shot of the sleeping man, and so in itself acted as a constant like the video. The other sounds were good, but not as great nor distinguishable as I would have liked. However, adding them to the visuals made the overall video very disorientated and confusing. But I really enjoyed working with the footage and trying to construct something out of various other pieces that felt like they didn’t (or couldn’t) belong together.

In the lecture we screened a short film called ‘End of the Line’ – the film shot in Broken Hill.  Please describe in 300 words or less if you think they achieved what they set out to do.

Whilst watching ‘End of the Line’, the short film shot in Broken Hill presented a lot of different opinions and perspectives of the townspeople and their view on life in their small town. My first impressions was that the film was quite off-putting and disturbing. I believe that the film makers set out to create a profile of the people within a rural town and to confront the audiences with the responses they received. There was great use of cinematic techniques employed throughout the film, including eerie sounding music, long takes of desolate landscapes. In the filmmakers approach to visual design, they claimed that they aimed to “take advantage of the natural landscape of Broken Hill and Silverton that we will be surrounded by.  The aim is to emphasize the beauty, the vastness and the harshness of the land.” I believe that they did this quite well. They coupled footage of the land with statements of the interviewees, and at times, they came across to be quite haunting. The old womans comments on death and her approach to dying are an honest (but still disturbing) commentary of what she believes. She is telling the truth. The footage of the harsh, barren land is also a truth. Bringing these two elements together should be nothing but raw honesty, un yet the manipulation through editing done by the film makers alters our interpretation. Many may not see it as beautiful as they are unable to look past the eerie and creepy confrontation on the screen.

Select from one of the readings and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you. 

“There’s a lot of drama in ordinary experiences.” – Frederick Wiseman

When I was trying to come up with a concept for a potential documentary, I kept thinking that I couldn’t do certain things because they would end up too dry or too boring. I thought about the documentaries that I really liked watching (Blackfish, We are Legion etc) and compared their subjects and interviewees with the ones I would potentially have in my documentary; I kept thinking that the ideas I generated were not interested, exciting or dramatic enough. But in the reading, Wiseman states that ordinary things can still be quite dramatic. And this lead me to think of the Humans of New York blog, where photographer Brandon asks ‘ordinary’ people simple questions which prove to have the potential to result in extraordinary, touching responses. I realise now that we aren’t making a feature length documentary investigating and revealing certain secrets of different topics. We are making a 5 minute documentary, and in that time, it is possible to find a small amount of drama in something simple and ordinary.

“The basic paradox is that nowadays the documentary needs TV for its survival unyet it is TV that is killing the documentary” – Pawel Pawlikowski

I found Pawlikowski’s point about television and documentaries interesting because it talks about how there is a need for producers to fill spaces on television with shows, and how because of this, ratings need to be heavily considered. In order to hake audiences happy, documentaries need to appeal to a wide audience, and generally to do this, cameras are set up in places of high interest e.g. prisons, and customs. There is not a lot of room for an experimental documentary. Now that I am reflecting on the television shows I see everyday on TV, I now realise that a wide selection of them are lacteally documentaries: Border Control, Hoarders, Embarrassing Bodies etc. Why do I like watching them? Because most times someone is getting in trouble, has something awkward to admit or has a really fascinating obsession. Most of the stories unfold the same way, however. There is not a lot of creative or artistic direction I believe. But there are a lot of viewers. However, a documentary which could be beautifully filmed and really aesthetic and meaningful won’t get many viewers or will only appeal to a certain audience. I find that really interesting.

Listen to the audio you recorded in Tute #1. Write a paragraph or two about your recording from a technical and/or “poetic” perspective.  Consider:

What these sounds evoke for you.  What associations they have. 
Do any of your recordings suggest images?  What might they be?  
Do any of your recordings suggest the possibility of other recordings?

Listening to the first track that me and Ella recorded, I noticed a lot of technical flaws which we could have avoided. For instance, the recorder could have been placed directly next to the hydraulics of the truck to get a cleaner sound; there is a lot of background noise happening, and I remember us standing about a metre or so away. The sound definitely evokes the idea of robots/technology, as it is quite distinctly a machine generated sound.

The second of our sounds was at the RMIT cafateria, where we recorded the sound of a barista making a coffee. Coffee making has some distinctive sounds which can easily be identified by the listener i.e. grinding coffee, the pouring of liquid and the warming of the milk. I believe this sound clip could easily be identified as a coffee grinder and milk steamer, however the sounds are quite repetitive. The warming of the milk goes on for about 30 seconds and it can be quite boring to listen to.

Some of our more ambiguous sound clips were the ones we recorded at the gym. I think we didn’t experiment enough with the gain, for in one of the clips, we were trying to record the sound of the wheels on a exercise bike. The repetitive hissing that the turning wheel makes can be heard, but it is drowned out by the talking of the people as well as the music played over the radio. A really confusing sound clip was the one of the gym fan. It doesn’t exactly sound like the wind outside, and so will be hard for listeners to picture the source of the sounds. In that regard, I think it could work quite well as background noise.

The last two were my favourite. The first was at the hairdressers, where two ladies were dying the hair of a customer. We got up really close to the brush they were using as it dabbed the colour on her hair. The squelching noises came out really good. Whilst they are quiet, they are unique. I also really liked our recording of the road crossing. Everyone knows the sound that the machine makes after you have pressed the button and are waiting for the green man to come on telling you it is safe to walk. The recording is basically anticipating the sound of the ‘go’ signal for pedestrians. The slow beeping noises build up to the moment when everyone can eventually cross the road, and I like how there is a feeling of the tension being lifted.

Listen to the first 10 minutes of Glenn Gould’s radio documentary, “The Idea of North”. The idea of North 10min.wav or Files are here (experimenting with different sizes and file types). If possible, use headphones.  Record your impressions in a paragraph or two.

The opening voice of the lady is layered with another voice of a man who seem to be talking about a similar topic. Then another man’s voice cuts in. The reoccurring word which always comes through is the word ‘north’ and so lets me know that they all share a common experience of being in the north. I find listening to all these voices unsettling, confusing and really annoying. For instance, the woman is talking about a beautiful sunset, the lakes and the ducks and geese. She paints a beautiful image but I struggle to paint a serene picture in my mind due to the busyness of what I am hearing. The voices intercutting and overlapping each other create a feeling of restlessness. Most of the speakers sound older, their voices having a slightly raspy sound. When the narrator comes in, relaying his story, the voices are still talking in the background, but at a lower volume. Eventually the background speaking dies down and it is nice to finally hear some soundscapes happening. Eventually though, the background noises escalate to a very distracting level so that the lead voice of the documentary struggles to anchor itself as the main focus. So perhaps it isn’t? I don’t think these distracting noises and levels were an accident. I think they were all intentional, which makes this documentary a very different one; I can see it frustrating, confusing and deterring audiences from listening to the entire thing.

In 200 words or less please outline your goals, desires – what you want to get out of this semester. You will review this later in the course. Many will rethink this dramatically by the end of the course – this is a good thing.

This semester I want to experiment with documentary film making that isn’t necessarily mainstream. I want to be fearless enough to test out different approaches to the way an idea can be explored. I want to work with people who have similar interestes and goals with relation to the final project and I want us all to work collaborativly to produce a piece we are all very proud of. I want to expand my technical abilities. Last semester my group struggled a lot with audio. I want to focus a lot of my learning on how I can improve audio during all aspects of production. Sound has proven to be a critical part of all film work, and last year it was largely disregarded by my group. In pre-production, I want to put emphasis  on planning out the types of sounds we will include. By the end of this semester, in post production, I want to not just abandon audio because it might be too hard. I also really want to work an an idea that not only teaches the audience of our doco something, but also me in making it.