The Zen Files

I had written about the abstract vision exercise Gabe and I did in week two in another blog post where I mainly discussed the technical process of shooting. Here I want to talk about the editing of these abstract shots and the abstract sounds I recorded with Annick.

At first I just started playing around, seeing how various shots would cut together in different orders. There seemed to be no clear unity between the shots, so I began to try to connect them through different effects. I created a split screen mirror effect and repeated the same shot in different ways. I also tried to colour grade the clips similarly (the most obvious being the black and white filter). My favourite edit is the cut between the ‘two-headed’ statue and the reverse shot of where the statue is ‘looking’.

Prior to creating a split screen effect there seemed to be no purpose to the shot; but when I changed the position of the statue in the frame it seemed to link the two shots like a traditional shot-reverse-shot continuous edit.

I also experimented with an effect I learnt last semester called time splicing where you crop a frame into separate columns, layer the separate clips of the same shot on top of each other in your editing time line and then methodically move each clip a couple of frames later than the one before. The clip I was using didn’t feature much movement, but I realised that when there was movement across the whole frame it created an interesting rhythmic effect where the action slowly transferred from one column to the next. This is an exercise I would like to investigate more throughout the semester.

After listening back over my abstract sound recordings I decided to only use the sounds I really liked, which limited the amount of layering I was able to do with the audio tracks (because I only liked two of the recordings we got). Instead of going for a realistic soundscape I decided to go for something more abstract. I used the recording of a pedestrian-crossing to juxtapose the nature shots we filmed (for example the shot of the spider web). I then used the intense sound of a water fountain to layer over the vision of a man-made statue.

This week I discovered the importance of playing around in post production, because there is so much more you can do with vision and sound when you aren’t limited to creating something that looks continuous or realistic.

The ‘Three Shot Exercise’ we did in class was a lesson in how to ‘shoot to edit’. This prompted the question: how can we record vision and sound that will give us options in framing and ordering during the editing process? I worked with Helena and Annick on a fairly simple scene where someone walks down the stairs and then calls someone on their phone.

Often when we ‘shoot to edit’, we ‘shoot the shit out a scene’ by capturing the same action in multiple ways (using different angles, shot sizes, camera movements and length of takes). In retrospect I think we could have done a lot more of that for this scene, because as soon as I sat down to edit the sequence I realised that 1. There weren’t many different ways I could order the shots and 2. It was going to be difficult to make the scene look continuous because we hadn’t shot enough ‘extra’ footage (we had really only given ourselves two alternative angles for the stair shots).

As a result of this I feel like my final edit lacks energy. I would have liked to quicken the pace of the cuts to build some tension in the scene, but because I only had two different shots of the staircase, the fast cuts felt unmotivated and didn’t add anything new or interesting to the sequence. I also struggled to make the scene look continuous, not because of the visuals, but because of the audio. We hadn’t taken an external microphone out with us to shoot that day and we also forgot to record an ‘atmos’ track, which is critical when shooting to edit. I had a realisation during the editing process for this scene that much of the ‘flow’ in films comes from the audio continuing from one shot to the next. This is a fact that I take for granted, because I usually rely on being able to ‘cut on action’ to make my scenes appear continuous. Although I did layer some of the audio tracks for this scene, the shots still feel somewhat disjointed because the sound recordings were not of a high quality. Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that even though shooting multiple shots of the same action takes a lot of time and recording good quality audio can be a bit of fuss, it is all worth it for the edit.

I found the sound recording exercise interesting, not only because of the ‘candid’ capabilities of the uni-directional microphones, but also because it is rare for me to solely concentrate on audio, rather than vision.

We started off in class learning about the sound recording technology (a Zoom H4n), which I had used before to record the audio for some footage I shot last year on a DSLR camera; even so, it was a good refresher course. I then headed out with Annick to record some atmos and foley sounds, taking turns in directing the microphone and controlling the H4n. We started off seeing how far we could push the technology by hiding around the corner of the tech desk in building 9 and recording the conversations of people talking to the tech guys. I found myself making comparisons between a microphone and a camera: with a camera you can ‘enhance’ what the natural eye can see. By using either a telephoto lens or zooming in on your subject you can ‘see’ a lot further than what you would be able to without the apparatus. Similarly, with the uni directional microphone we could hear things a lot clearer and from far further away than what we would be able to with our ears.

It was also a good exercise to simply stand and listen to our surroundings, trying to pick out particular things we wanted to record. (Usually when I am filming something at university I am more so looking for aesthetically pleasing things to film, rather than listening out for intriguing sounds in the environment). However, I think next time this exercise would be better suited to individual work. Now that we are all comfortable with the recording technology I believe it would be advantageous to set out by ourselves to really concentrate on the noises of the city without the distraction of talking to someone else about what we should record. I find that completely blocking out my vision and zoning in on the sounds surrounding me is an incredibly meditative process because it is an exercise in focusing all of your attention on only one of your senses. After listening back to my sound recordings, I feel like they would have benefitted from a little more thought and attention to detail, which could have possibly been achieved through more efficient use of time and by being able to ‘fly solo’.

The first two weeks of ‘Ways of Making’ have essentially been a crash course in camera and audio recording setups. Even though I have worked with similar cameras before and have used the audio recording equipment in the past, it has been a really good revision process to get my head back into filmmaking mode. This week I realised that I have really missed being out in the field actually creating video content.

Last semester I did a straight editing studio, which was great because there is definitely a part of me that gets a lot of satisfaction out of sitting at a computer all day chopping up video and audio clips. However, on top of this I was also doing a great deal of editing for my internship, which meant that for the majority of my week I was sitting in a dark room looking at a screen. As much as I love the creative process of editing, with computer work always comes numerous technological problems that often take hours trying to fix (and that part of editing, I definitely do not love). Thus, these last couple of weeks have been a breath of fresh air, because I’ve been able to get out of my chair, out of a dark editing suite and into the real world, working with other people on really fun little filming exercises.

My favourite exercise was shooting abstract 30 seconds clips, because there was no limit to what we could film and we weren’t shooting to edit. I think this freedom gave my partner Gabe and I a chance to really concentrate on the technical details of the shot: the exposure, the white balance, the focus, the framing and the depth of field. In the end I thought we shot a few really nice clips and I believe they turned out so well because we had the time to set up properly and we didn’t need to think about continuity problems or narrative flaws.

All in all, I’ve realised that taking time to set up a shot properly is always worth it and also, maybe I don’t just want to work as a film editor, maybe I want to be a part of the pre-production or production process (rather than just post).

Midway through 2015 I scored a part-time job working at a cinema, which fortunately meant I got the perk of free movie tickets. I purposely tried to get a job working at a cinema because I thought that while I’m studying at university I may as well make money in a place where I am surrounded by the things I am studying: films. I am lucky enough to mostly work in the ‘Gold Class’ section of the cinema, which means that I am constantly walking in and out of theatres with various different films showing. Often I am walking in on the same films again and again (for instance, I think I know Star Wars: The Force Awakens shot for shot now). Although I originally thought this would get boring, as a media/film student, it only gets better the more times I view a scene from a film; I get to study the different parts of the scene every time I see it: the first time I generally concentrate on the dialogue, simply to understand what is going on in the story, then every time after that becomes more of an investigation into the visuals and soundtrack.

As well as these few glimpses of parts of films, over the holidays I also got to sit down and properly watch a lot of the films in full. As many of my tutors and lecturers from RMIT had told me I should be doing over the years, I started taking notes on all the films I had been watching at the cinema.

For instance, I took notes and drew some frames from Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015), a film that I only got to see parts of. There are two particular shots from the film which I think are completely brilliant. Emily Blunt who plays the character Kate Macer is lying down on the couch. As she is kissing the man on top of her, Ted (Jon Bernthal), she looks around to the coffee table to see what he has just taken off his belt. At this point the keys he has put on the table are out of focus and the audience’s attention is drawn to Kate’s gaze. As she looks around, the editor of the film Joe Walker has cut on action to a shot of her reflection on the glass coffee table.

This cut and shot is disorienting for a second or so, because it seems to take the mind a moment to register why the shot has suddenly flipped upside down. What is amazing about this shot is that it is motivated. In this one frame we view Kate looking at the object and we also get to see the object itself, once the camera pulls focus from her face to the keys.

Instead of cutting from her looking at the keys to a shot of the keys, which would end up being a standard reverse shot in most other films and TV shows, Villeneuve has essentially worked out a way to do it all in one take. I think this kind of cinematography is wonderfully innovative and I hope to be seeing a lot more camera coverage like this in other films coming out this year.

Coming back to university for my third and final year of Media at RMIT I wanted to do a studio where I had the freedom to create something that I really wanted to make. That is why I chose ‘Ways of Making’: the studio at least sounds like it won’t limit me to working within only a fictional or non-fictional realm, nor will it dictate the methodology I use to create my films. My main goal this semester is to make something or be a part of something that I am proud of so that I can use the material in the future when I am trying to secure a job in the media industry. I want to be able to show my friends and family a film that I worked hard on and am entirely happy with.

In order to do this I will need to learn about filmmaking through practical and theoretical research. Some skills that I particularly want to learn or improve on are colour grading, setting up rigs for dollying/tracking (which I have never done before) and lighting (artificial setups). I also believe that I won’t be able to do everything in or for my film by myself. Thus I would like to collaborate with my fellow studio peers as well as people from outside my own course. For instance, I would like to work with (preferably trained) actors, sound designers and writers.

My expectation of this course is that it will teach me how to be a better filmmaker and prepare me for the ‘real’ world e.g. how to act on a film set. Hopefully we will also get to explore the blurred line between documentary and drama films. I find Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) a perfect, but extremely rare example of how subjectivity, objectivity, fact and fiction can blend into one film to create a kind of ‘hybrid’ form of cinema. It uses animation (a film form generally associated with fiction and fantasy) to present a true story about war, but from a subjective and possibly warped perspective of reality. I would love to investigate more films like this and maybe employ some of these techniques into my own work.

 

The Script (by Ineke Adamson):

This week I decided to test run the method I had put together for my final shoot. This collated all of the techniques that I had found worked best for me in my previous shoots during the semester.

Fortunately, this amalgamation of shooting processes worked really well. Particularly my idea of:

“Shooting at least one alternative shot perspective that is completely improvised for each shot in a scene. This shot should overlap the preceding and proceeding shot. For example, if, in the original storyboard, shot 1 was meant to show a character saying ‘Hi, how are you’ and then shot 2 was meant to cut to another character saying ‘Fine, how are you?’, the alternative shot might encapsulate both of these lines of dialogue by framing the characters in a two shot. Having this ‘backup’ perspective will ensure that I can achieve a sense of continuity when editing the scene. The improvisation of these alternative takes will inject some spontaneity into the shoot, which could end up producing a better shot than the one originally planned.”

This was a technique I hadn’t yet experimented with in my other shoots. I had done exercises where I shot the ‘hell’ out of a scene by shooting the whole thing from different perspectives, but I had never covered a scene by simply recording single alternative perspectives for each shot. I think this worked well because it forced me to come up with new and interesting compositions on the fly, making the scene appear more dynamic. It was also greatly beneficial to have even just one extra perspective per shot to fall back on when I was editing; especially when I decided to slightly alter my original idea for the scene (i.e. cutting out the dialogue). In the end my edit didn’t look anything like what I had put together in the storyboards; nevertheless, I still think it would be worth drawing storyboards for my final scene because they help to guide me through a shoot (particularly because I am shooting in chronological order).

ROUGH STORYBOARD

 

FINAL STORYBOARD

 

Although I did use a script, rather than a prose, which I was meant to do, I hardly followed it at all (particularly because there was only one line of dialogue). Instead of telling my actor exactly what to say, I just gave her a general gist of what the conversation was about and she improvised the rest. I also let her act the character in the way that she wanted to, which at the time I was a bit worried about because she hardly knew how to smoke a cigarette and couldn’t even light a cigarette lighter, and the character in the script was meant to be a full-time smoker. However, when I began to look over the footage, I realised that it didn’t really matter; in fact, it kind of added to the realness of the scene. Overall, I think that using a general prose for my final scene will work out well (hopefully anyway).

One of the best things about this shoot and the look of the final edit is the lighting. Finally, I realised that I am not good at dealing with natural daylight and instead, I should just shoot with artificial lights. The advantage of shooting with a ‘controlled’ lighting setup is that you don’t have to worry about continuity issues during editing, plus you can create a sense of depth and thus avoid boring, flat backgrounds (i.e. white walls). The changing lights from the TV also added a sense of movement to the scene, however, Paul suggested that I could have cheated the TV behind Sarah’s head in order to light the off-side of her face a bit more. I have become fond of this lighting setup and so I think I will try to employ a similar effect in my final scene.

The only thing I didn’t really do, that I had put on my list of techniques, was to have a first assistant director help me out during the shoot. I thought I wouldn’t bother to get someone to AD this shoot because it was a really simple scene with only one character and one line of dialogue. However, I now realise it would have been beneficial to have a helper because there were a few things I either forgot to do or couldn’t really pull off by myself. For instance, it was difficult to pull focus and tilt the camera up by myself. Although the shot (pictured below) is relatively smooth, there are a few little bumps that could have been avoided if I had have had my AD focus pull for me. I also didn’t realise that I needed to have my TV muted throughout the shoot (I only recognised that this would be a problem when I was recording the last couple of shots). This is an example of one of the times where it would have been handy if I had’ve had an AD to remind me of this issue earlier in the shooting process. It might also be beneficial to write a list of things ‘to remember’ before going into the shoot. For instance, for the shoot where I was using Woody Allen’s method of filmmaking, I wrote some notes on my storyboards so I wouldn’t forget things the little things I needed to do.

Another process I want to add to my method, is showing someone else a rough edit of the scene before finalising the cut and beginning to colour grade etc. After I shot this scene I quickly put together a rough edit that was not colour corrected. I got Paul, Maddie and Tom to look over the scene and give me their thoughts about how I should go about finishing the edit. I think it is incredibly beneficial to get someone to look over a piece of work with fresh eyes. Because I am so involved with my own work, sometimes it is hard to separate myself from the piece at hand and so when I got the others to look at my work they were able to give me some really interesting advice. For instance, Paul told me to get rid of the dialogue, which I would never thought of doing because at that time I had thought that the conversation was the only segment of that scene that offered the audience any kind of meaning. However, this audience read the scene very differently to what I had initially thought, which meant that the dialogue became superfluous.

All in all, I was happy with the end product and I found the actual process of making this scene really fun. Without the stress of having to cope with changing lighting conditions, I was able to relax and enjoy the shoot. I felt excited while I was filming like when I shot my week 7 scene using Nicholas Winding Refn’s improvisational method. I think the method I have created works well in terms of mixing together a spontaneous approach to filmmaking and a more organised approach. Now that I have tested this process, I can’t wait to put it into practice again for my final shoot.

One point that I found interesting from this Week’s Galloway reading, was the idea that the availability of the Internet could be used as a sort of ‘weapon’ in future wars.

Galloway discusses the Domain Name System (DNS), which is an essential component of the functionality of the Internet. The DNS contradicts the decentralised nature of the World Wide Web, in a sense that it is hierarchical.

‘All DNS information is controlled in a[n]… inverted-tree structure.
Ironically, then, nearly all Web traffic must submit to a hierarchical
structure (DNS) to gain access to the anarchic and radically horizontal structure
of the Internet.’

So essentially this one element of the Internet is actually centralised. This means that North America (the country who owns the most important Internet servers in the world), could hypothetically ban a certain country from the Internet. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, claims that:

‘…they could do so very
easily through a simple modification of the information contained in the root
servers at the top of the inverted tree‘.

And without the Internet, a country would pretty much lose all connection with other countries. This would have a major effect on not only their importing but their exporting.

I always thought that this ‘withholding of resources’ tactic would be used in future wars, when things like fuel and water were scant; but I had never thought about it in relation to technology. I guess that’s what Russia is really doing at the moment with gas. Although, they’ve also got nuclear weapons…

 Jane discusses something I have been wanting to post about for a while now – the Wikipedia game. I used to play this in class at high school as well. It highlights the idea of hyperlinking and almost proves that you can get from one ‘place’ on the internet, to anywhere else on the internet – simply through links.

I had to have a bit of a giggle at Kiralee’s running-commentry-like post about this week’s symposium. ‘Adrian disagrees’ (to something Betty has said)… well that doesn’t happen every week does it?

Ellen takes an oath that she’ll start to get her shit together for uni this week. I think I need to make the same one as well. Last week I got through two seasons of Modern Family and even now I’m writing this while watching Harry Potter with my housemates. Anyway, it’s getting to the business end of the year so I suppose I better knuckle down, just for a couple of weeks and try to make the most of my time. Here’s to hoping I actually do it.

In yesterday’s symposium, Adrian gave the analogy of a database being like a ‘box’ with information in it, that has rules so that one can find the pieces of information they want more easily. As soon as I heard this, I thought of algebra. In year seven I remember being taught that an algebraic equation could be likened to a box or a machine and when you put ‘something’ (a number) into it, it would churn out another ‘something’ based on the rules which ‘occupied’ the box. I’m sure most people would have been given a sheet of paper like the one below when they were beginning to learn about this strand of mathematics as well.

Anyway, I soon realised that the association I had made was based on more than just a similarity in metaphor. Algebra is really the basis for the formulas and algorithms which control computers and in turn databases. For instance, a person’s iTunes music library is a form of database – it is ‘box’ of information that can be ordered alphabetically and can be grouped by artist/genre/album etc. If someone uses the iTunes search bar to try to find a song they want to listen to, they may type the first few letters of the band in and in turn the computer utilises algorithms (rules) to find the corresponding information.

Thus, just as Betty concluded in our symposium, databases aid in ‘searchability’ – making it easier for us to find information efficiently.