This semester has been extremely challenging for me, within the space of about a month I went through a terrible break up, got an infected wisdom tooth which made me miss a week or two of university for doctors appointments just to have my surgery canceled because of Covid 19, I had serious landlord troubles and moved house just to have to move back to my parents when I couldn’t afford to live in Melbourne anymore due to loosing my job (again thanks Covid) I also totaled my first car. So university was about the last thing on my mind. But this studio in it’s own way has taught me that there’s a way around most things in life no matter how shit things get. I never thought I’d be making films with other students over the internet without any face to face contact but I was really pleasantly surprised at how everyone was so willing to collaborate and help each other out in these circumstances. I also liked how this studio covered a wide range of skills from editing, to actively shooting footage to script writing and creating animatics and mark-ups. I had done script writing in a studio last year but had never gone that in-depth when it came to planning out a shoot in it’s entirety.

For the vast majority of anything I’ve ever made, it’s either just shooting and improvising off a vague idea of what I want to create and mostly making it up as I go or literally doodling around and editing old random footage in my spare time for fun, so outside a few group projects I’ve done in recent years there’s never been this much planning that’s gone into anything I’ve made (even if my end product was kind of scrappy). I really liked this about this studio and while I wish we could have been working together with tripods, lighting stands and nice cameras in different locations and such, working and creating under lock-down was a really unique experience (hopefully the last of it’s kind in my lifetime, and my kids lifetimes) and while I’ve been stressed out trying to rebuild my life and find work so I can move back to the city, having university projects to work on has saved me from going a bit mental I think since there’s almost nothing else going on and it’s great to just have a goal of any kind to work towards where you can actually see yourself progressing.

Collaborating with other students obviously had its difficulties as we couldn’t meet up to shoot anything together and all planning had to be done through messenger and Zoom. Like I said before I was pleasantly surprised at how willing to help out everyone was when it came to filling me in on class information I’d missed or being on board to help shoot part of my film from the script I ended up choosing. I think I tend to avoid reaching out to other people to help work on my projects since I lack confidence and am pretty anxious about judgement from other people when it comes to my work (or work I’ve tried to pour my heart into), I also think I see myself as being to disorganised to properly co-ordinate other people and direct them as to what I want from them whether it’s acting or helping film. The fact that this studio pushed me to better my communication and collaboration skills I think was challenging but also beneficial because it was a lot more straightforward than I expected it to be in the end. So I think I’m going to have more confidence when it comes to reaching out to others to work on my films in the future.

Looking at my work, I think one thing that’s changed over the course of the semester is that I’ve stopped overthinking and overshooting everything. The ‘Making the Bed’ exercise was one in which I purposefully tried to make it as simple as possible and from memory the whole thing consisted of only three different shots while for the very first exercise we did, my work had more than double that for the same thirty second time span. Learning to trust in simplicity and not to overthink, over edit and basically just over do everything was great for me I think, less is definitely more sometimes.

In creating the animatic to match the Lenny script and our specific mark-ups I think I learnt new techniques and ways in which I could string shots together without even having to shoot them which was really cool and something I want to practice and put to use more in the future. I remember sitting down to think out which location I had immediate access to around my parents’ house and how best this might compliment the given script. In the end choosing the shed was a better option and more appropriate to the constraints of the project as well as the script itself as the environment suited the narrative a lot more than the inside of mum and dad’s house, most importantly it was a lot more open and spacious and I could take photos to try out different angles a lore more easily without having to navigate the furniture and random crap inside the house.

This was also the first time I’d properly considered things like eye-line for characters, the 180 degree rule for shooting exchanges and dialogue and how different shots and angles could draw attention to different parts of the environment or aspects of the scene like the mysterious box. Continuity errors are something I came up against both in my animatic and the editing of my final film. Within the Lenny animatic I remember characters would go from wearing a beanie to being bare headed or vice versa within a few shots, this was a silly mistake on my part. Within my final film it was mostly the fact that mine and Eamon’s door frames were completely different colours as well as the inside of the house just within the front door. This couldn’t really be helped as I wasn’t about to go out and re-paint the door frame for this project. What I could control however was the look of the shots in post-production and account for the colour and brightness that the two environments created. This I played around with in the colour grading compilation I made as part of this final project but didn’t worry about too much within the final edit.

 

What annoyed me more to be honest was the sound and while I’m not skilled at mixing and dealing with levels and white noise, I did take it apon myself to try and create continuity when it came to the birds that are making a ruckus in the background of my shots (as my parents live in the bush). Of course in the shots Eamon sent me there was no such noise, and this bugged me more than the tone or lighting so I tried to fix it by simply chopping up parts of the continuous shot I’d filmed with all my lines in which I wasn’t taking but the birds were carrying on and kind of just taking the audio and putting it under Eamon’s shots to make it sound like those same birds were continuously making noise in the background and thus helping the illusion that we were in the same place (ignoring the ever-changing door frame).

I also downloaded royalty free door and microwave sound effects to use as I didn’t think to just use the sound of the microwave that was actually behind me within the final shot. On reflection though I think the sounds effect has a louder and ephemeral quality to it that makes it seem a lot more significant and integral to the way in which that edit panned out, as if to emphasise the shock on Mia’s face when she reads the letter Hugo had left inside her book. I also had to flip Eamon’s footage to make it look more plausible so we weren’t facing the same general direction within the shots and made sure to angle my phone camera where the door itself was blocked by bricks so that nobody would be able to tell that Hugo or Eamon wasn’t actually standing there.

All of these things that I had to work around and find solutions to either in shooting or post-production are usually things I never have to consider within the usual style of film I’m used to editing. So working to fit a script and especially within the constraints (both controlled and uncontrolled in this case) has been a different and very rewarding experience for me. It’s built my confidence in collaborating and problem solving which will no doubt help me with future projects.