Author Archives: lucywadelton

PB3 – Capturing Life

I found this project perhaps the most challenging of all three. When we were given the brief, it definitely excited me. I brainstormed some ideas about who I wanted to interview pretty much straight away, so that process was very easy. However, as it got closer to the due date and the actual filming and editing process, it was a lot harder. I think this is probably to do with my limited experience in this kind of movie making. I did watch a few examples and the ones on the media blog helped put things into perspective. I was very stressed though, if I am honest and I was having one of those messy thoughts kind of feeling about the whole thing (which I only get when I’m really confused and doubtful about my abilities). I think most of my anxiety about this though, was just the overwhelming workload I suddenly had piled up. This wasn’t because I’d been lazy or anything, I had been sick and suddenly I had all these assignments to do. I had fun looking for found footage and I actually got in contact with the National Film and Sound Archive Australia to get permission to use some of their stock footage.

Once I actually got stuck into the filming though, I felt more at ease. I obviously was comfortable around my own dad, who was the subject of my interview, so that was fun. We got all the interview part down in about an hour. He just answered the questions naturally, I got a few different angles and that was that. Some of the ‘action shots’ is what I call them, took a bit more time just because I did a few takes, but even that was very straight forward.

I talked to Seth, my tut and organized to borrow a lapel mic and a regular rode mic for the interview. I wanted to have a back up rode mic for all the ‘action shots’ and use the lapel, as it captured sound better, for the interview part. I used my own DSLR for the filming.

Overall, I think the project went well, considering it was my first attempt at documentary style film making. I think I was not very good planning everything, I had a very brief list of shots I wanted and a list of questions as listed here:

Questions

  1. Name and profession / brief introduction
  2. How did you first get into photography?
  3. What do you love most about it?
  4. Tell us about the Northcote Hysterical Society
  5. What Camera do you use?
  6. What process do you go through post-production?
  7. Tell us about your current project?

Shots

  1. Found Footage (to go along with whatever relates to his topic, especially when talking about photographing houses and things in the 70s)
  2. Front on traditional interview (in front of studio backdrop)
  3. Close up, profile angle interview
  4. Action shot #1: sorting through film/photographs
  5. Action shot #2: Taking photos, in the street, getting ready etc.
  6. Footage of the studio (establishing, interior, him on the computer)
  7. ATMOSPHERE RECORDING AUDIO

I was very happy with the filming process overall and sorting through the footage didn’t take long either. The actual editing part, though, was my weakest. It took me a lot time to wrap my head around how I wanted it to start (the introduction etc.) and I didn’t even have a title until today. I’m still not convinced the ending transitions well, but I think I did my best. In the future I would allocate more time to planning and maybe consider doing some more research on the film and editing techniques that work with the project brief.

Capturing Life from Lucy Wadelton on Vimeo.

‘Capturing Life’ Teaser

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‘Capturing Life’ is a short interview piece with celebrated photographer and painter, David Wadelton. The interview focuses on his photographic career, most notably the establishment of ‘The Northcote Hysterical Society’ – an online archive of Melbourne’s northern suburbs during the 70’s as captured in the eyes of the artist. Mr. Wadelton also discusses the process of capturing ordinary life that other people may normally overlook and photographing them in a way that revitalises the mundane.

I Will Survive

Anybody love a good 70’s classic? Gloria Gaynor? Anyone?

I’ve spent a lot of my week at home. Scratch that – a lot of my week in bed. Whenever anyone empathises with me I just say ‘I WILL SURVIVE’. I actually haven’t been to Uni since Monday, which sounds crazy, except I only have 3 days in a week anyway. I was weirdly nauseas on Tuesday, recovering Wednesday and then my chronic illness decided to knock on my door Thursday morning – or rather – knock on my train carriage as I was mid-commute to my 9:30am Workshop. And then to top it all off, Friday my body thought a cold would be a really good addition to an already stressed out Lucy. So it’s really been fun! (I really hope you can sense the sarcasm).

While all that has been going on, I’ve been trying my hardest to manage the workload that’s all due next week. I’ve done a very rough draft of PB3, almost finished by Cinema Studies essay and slowly been working on blog posts. I churned out 4 in one go on Monday, but then was hit with illness for the rest of the week, so those 4 weren’t so impressive anymore, just the bare minimum for the week.

One thing I did do through the week was attend a Top Secret Research Program. Basically I got paid to analyze and critique advertisement and media that hasn’t been released to the public yet. I obviously cannot tell you anything about it aside from that, but I thought it related to my course in some distant way. It was really interesting looking at media that way, it reminded me of year 12 and when we used to analyze elements of media campaigns. Things like codes and conventions in order to attract target audiences. An enormous amount of effort and talent goes into things that we just ignore or not give a second thought. Even things like pop up animated ads (which we were shown at the research place) which usually I’d not even see because of adblock. Made me actually appreciate the work that goes into these things, but won’t change my opinion on clicking next whenever I see one!

Narrative Structure

Okay so I may or may not have been chronically ill Thursday morning during my Workshop, but I was told about this exercise by my friends so here I am. We were supposed to do this so that we might ‘consider and analyse the narrative structure of your PB3 portrait piece’. It’s just a few questions I’ve answered about my project. I skipped one or two just because they didn’t apply to my particular piece, but it was good activity to really get me thinking about it regardless.

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ of your portrait? My portrait focuses on the artistic career of my interviewee, David Wadelton. He is a painter but I focused specifically on his photography for this project. I wanted to focus on his photography because of his unique style. I suppose you could say the ‘controlling idea’ is to do with capturing a moment in history or noticing elements of our environment that you would usually take for granted – because this is what he does in his photography.
  1.  How is your portrait film structured? Though still a working process, I’m primarily using face-to-face recorded interview for my project. This is the base narrative, so that I can experiment with cutaways, display his photography and also use found footage to help enhance the conversation while my interviewee narrates it.
  1. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? I think the thing I want them to get away from it is how much the world and our environment can change just through our life time. My interviewee talks about documenting Melbourne in the 70’s and how in many ways it has completely transformed since then.
  1. How is your portrait being narrated? It’s being narrated by the interviewee, so that the focus is entirely on him and his work. I chose this method because it is the most self contained, all footage is of him and recordings as well. But it also means focus won’t be detracted from the interviewee if you heard my voice or another person narrating.
  1. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? The role of the found footage is actually pretty crucial, I’d say. Without giving too much away, I gained permission to use stock footage of Melbourne in the 60’s and 70’s to overlay while my interviewee discusses his photographic archive of the same era. It works really well to help enhance what he’s talking about, I think.
  1. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point? No.
  1. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum? It’s hard to say when it isn’t completed, but I think the use of cutaways and a few different angles helps to keep it interesting and maintain a flow that is engaging to the audience. I hope to use audio as a good momentum, having little to no silence but a steady flow so that it isn’t too much in one go.

 

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It’s Recording!

In a workshop a few weeks back we were told to get into pairs and practice recording interview style with borrowed equipment. Although I didn’t end up using the H2N Zoom in my PB3, it was helpful to test out the overall process.

I did this project with my friend Amber and we went into the RMIT Library and surrounds to ask each other questions. This was the result. We encountered a few problems right off the bat – firstly that the class had spent so much time trying to figure out the mic that we had about 10-15 minutes to complete the actual thing. It was also difficult finding an area to record that was both quiet, and that we wouldn’t be disrupting people by talking in. We hid in a corner of the library, but even then we must have frustrated everyone near us (hence the whispering in some parts). It was also kind of difficult to avoid making additional noise, like cluttering and movement etc., especially when we kept accidentally recording things. There’s a lot of ‘it’s been recording the whole time!’ and shuffling around.

Going through all the audio tracks was interesting for that, many conversations that I’m sure we didn’t even know we being recorded and a lot of 3 second snort laughter. Overall though, that activity was a lot of fun in my opinion. You can probably sense the humor in our voices, we weren’t really taking it seriously and it was hard to just make things up on the spot knowing you were being recorded.

 

Ignoring Media

I went into the city today to borrow the mic from tech to do my interview (yes, I am aware I’m very behind and I am very STRESSED about it). Again I caught myself noticing media around me, mostly because I don’t usually come in on Friday’s and so there wasn’t anyone to talk to, to and from campus. In the Melbourne Central underground there’s these huge Plasma TV type things along the wall of the train tracks and they kept playing different ads while I waited for my train home. It was so distracting, but I found it funny that the sound was muted every time an announcement was made, only to be put back on straight after. As if anyone’s actually listening – or watching for that matter! That’s how I feel about a lot of the media (advertising kind) that is up around the city. Everyone’s too busy going places and doing errands to notice that some corporation has paid $$ to have their billboard hand painted along a building wall (although I notice that every time, there’s a new painted movie poster every few weeks, it’s insane!)

Survival Guide

Guess whose trying to desperately catch up on work she’s behind in because she got sick for 3 days in a row!?!?! Yep! It’s me!!! A few weeks back we were given the exercise in the workshop to interview each other and create a clip that was a ‘survival guide to your first six weeks of University’. So much time was spent trying to figure out the mics and the camera (Song MC50 video camera, which I’ve never seen or used in my life) that by the time it came to actually filming, we were very short on time. Not only that, but we (myself and Samantha) were short 1 team member – who was away sick. We needed to have a bunch of different shots; things like establishing, action shot, cutaways, etc. We tried our best, but with limited time and only the 2 of us (while other groups had up to 4 members) it was a struggle! Other difficulties were finding a place that was quiet enough to film. Lots of people kept walking past us during shooting – not only were we shy about talking in front of the camera when others could see, but it was just plain disruptive for everyone involved. We did achieve a good shot for the interview itself – a plain white wall that was well lit and easy to colour correct in post-production.

Anyway, without further ado…

 

How To Survive The First 6 Weeks of University from Lucy Wadelton on Vimeo.

Do you need conflict?

As a follow up from the blog post I made about narrative, I wanted to think about conflict within a story. Does it give the story its drive? Is it crucial to making a good story? I’m going to go with yes, in most cases, if not all. When I try to think of films without some kind of climax, I not only find it hard to think of any, but the ones I can imagine are ones I hated. These are films like Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ which, to my recollection was boring and had no story whatsoever.

Even shows and movies that are particularly low-key, or appear that nothing really has changed from the start to the end, have some sort of subtle 3 act structure. I’m thinking of shows like The Office – overall, what happens? Not a lot. It’s just about boring every day work life. But each episode has a theme and within that theme there’s some kind story that has a conflict and resolution.

Narrative

Brian talked a little bit about narrative today, specifically about what narrative is and why it matters. I’m just going to summarize the information I jotted down during the talk for starters. In it’s simplest explanation, narrative is a story. It’s a way of structuring meaning to form a – you guessed it – narrative.

Key elements of a story include controlling idea, character, conflict, structure and character change/growth. In a typical 3 Act structure a character will experience a conflict and resolution, to which they have learned or grown as a person by the end credits. This type of narrative formula is most common in Hollywood films – browse a Video Ezy (do those even exist anymore?) and pretty much everything you find will follow this example. It’s only the indie and more alternative films that shy away from this – of course that’s a generalisation, but you get the idea.

Personally, I’m a fan of the predictable formula – not in the sense that I necessarily need a Happily Ever After or cliché tropes to be overused in every film I see (if anything, please god no I don’t want that). Just in the way that I find this to be the best way of creating a good story that is engaging all the way through. As was explained by Brian, narrative codes such as this can generate or control the flow of suspense, provide setting and engage viewers attention to reveal character or further the plot. It is, ‘a creative demonstration of the truth’. The truth being of course – that people experience ups and downs and people grow.

Are We Being Brainwashed?

I have been doing a bit of ‘noticing’ media since it was first brought up in a lectorial a few weeks back. It’s an interesting concept and once you start, it becomes hard to stop. When I was thinking about ‘media’, I narrowed in more on advertising in every day life. Things like billboards and posters.

Rachel mentioned today in the lectorial that it’d be smart to talk a bit about media overseas. I’ve travelled to quite a few countries and it’s interesting comparing Melbourne’s media displays in places like the CBD versus those across the world. Compared to something like Times Square (which is, overwhelming to say the least), Melbourne is pretty minimalistic with its media. There’s the occasional digital billboard, but that’s sort of a big deal here. In NYC though – it’s pretty much on every corner – one big colourful advertisement after another. So you can imagine, after wondering around Bourke Street during the lectorial activity, and finding so many little and big things to pick up on – just how widespread that would be in Times Square.

More recently I went to England and found that the Piccadilly Circus area is similar. Wrapped around the buildings there are giant neon billboards with ads playing for things like Coca Cola. Several classic red double decker buses will drive past with advertisement slapped along the body. Different shop radio can be heard from just about every direction – and don’t even get me started on the tube.

Thinking about this also reminded me of a film I really loved as a kid, ‘Josie and the Pussycats’ which integrated a world record amount of advertising and brand dropping into the film – it’s pretty much in every scene – as a kind of irony to the plotline about media monopoly and brainwashing. Take a look at this clip I found from the film.