Studio Experience
The tasks set by this studio, in relation to how we effectively communicate our personal experiences place and neighbourhood to others through screen, were daunting at their outset. The early films we watched (and two stand out for me) were demonstrations of how to quickly, with honesty, establish place to an audience, but were done on seemingly such large scales that any replication of their feat in a mere twelve weeks seemed impossible. The Human Scale travelled all around the world and backed itself up with serious intellectual proof on its theories and findings, while Hoop Dreams was constructed from 250 hours of footage filmed over five years and dealt with such an iconic, well-defined place, both physically and sociologically. However, as the studio progressed and we went through developing our own pitches, and started engaging with more documentary content, it became clearer what we would be creating it and how we would go about it.
For some reason I was under the impression we would eventually be individually producing what we had proposed in our original pitches, and when we were grouped together I worried that each group member’s individual vision would be lost as we began to collaborate on a single film concept. However, in my group in particular, since we all originally pitched films with similar concepts and in a similar area, we were all able to put forth and develop the ideas and concepts we’d explored both in class and through our pitches. If I were to do this studio again, I would perhaps spend some more time thinking and reading about what neighbourhood means, in a historic, cultural and academic sense, as I think looking at everyone’s final products now, mine included, there is no real united sense of “neighbourhood”. Perhaps this is down to the nature of neighbourhood itself – that there is no united definition of it – but a more critical discourse over what it means to live somewhere and how we relate to place would have been at the very least interesting.
Collaboration
The preliminary stages of my collaboration with Krista and Penelope were quite easy, because as I mentioned although content-wise our films were different, conceptually (and location-wise) they were fairly similar. We all had films that were chronicling change in place, all in neighbourhoods that are rapidly falling victim (or, on the other side of the coin, benefitting from) gentrification, so we knew how to direct our content through this conceptual mesh we shared. We were also in agreement on the structure of the film and how we were to go about making it. In terms of skills, we all shared a fairly similar level of skill in operating the camera and editing, with Krista perhaps excelling the most with the camera and Penelope excelling the most at editing, but since we were all at that fairly similar level we were all able to contribute to each process of the film’s production. We all, at times, had various health problems or were just slack at attending class, which wasn’t ideal (I’m not trying to pass off the blame here, I was definitely one of if not the chief offender) but we developed an understanding over this and most of the time made sure if someone missed class or a shoot they contributed in some other way, although this workload gap perhaps became a bit more distinct towards the end of the production process.
I think the only downside to having a group with such similar interests and visions was perhaps the film came out a bit one-dimensional in its viewpoint; we were all in agreement over how we felt about change and gentrification, as was our subject, so that was the only voice heard. Perhaps there is a great benefit to working with people with a similar vision and style to yourself in that collaborations run a lot more smoothly, but if you introduce other, even dissenting voices into the equation, you may emerge with a more well-rounded and discursive project.
Production and My Role
Throughout my degree at RMIT, I’ve always been on the lacking end of whatever studio I’m in in terms of actual video production skills. I’ve definitely improved so so much, to the point where I’m comfortable with most camera equipment and a very competent user of Premiere, but as I’ve improved so has everyone else in the course. My strengths lie more in the written side of media. Therefore, in this project I was probably the least proficient technically, but I feel like this didn’t stop my contribution. On our first day of filming I was responsible chiefly for the sound, although we didn’t end up capturing or using much foley audio that I collected. On our second and principal day of filming, I took full control of the filming after some discussion with Penelope, who was our chief interviewer, and I think from the diversity of angles and shots from that interview that I did fairly well. It was a great experience for me as I sometimes take a backseat during shoots. Penelope and I also collaborated on two more shoots in search of B-roll, to which we contributed fairly evenly.
The shooting process itself went very smoothly: we had full access to Noir Darkroom’s space so we had plenty of time to experiment with lighting and the such. We spent a lot of time preparing the actual interview shoot (doing a dry run with one of us in the position of the subject) so I think the footage came out as well as it ever would have. The interview itself went fantastically, and I think that came down to our over-preparation in terms of questions: we discussed heavily what we wanted to extract from our subject, made sure we covered every angle and she ended up being very passionate about the topic and extremely well spoken, which was helpful. I think being over-prepared and familiarising yourself with both the subject and the space in advance, if possible, are imperative for capturing a good interview of this kind.
As I said, I’m a much stronger in the editing suite than behind a camera so I contributed significantly to the editing process, mostly mocking up our entire rough cut and a lot of our final cut, although Penelope put in the hard yards putting together and tightening up our final cut. Editing wasn’t always smooth, as we had issues with getting files to each other and having the right edition of Premiere, and we also decided halfway through our edit we need to do another shoot, which I’m very glad we did. Editing in a group can be very difficult: I think unless you’re a professional or very close to the person you’re editing with and able to talk to them straight it can be very difficult to express how you feel about the process. Also, only one person has their hands on the keyboard at the end of the day. I feel like films like this would often work better if the editing was done principally, and almost solely, by one person, but I feel like that would be untenable and it seems to work collaboratively in other cases.