Q1:

The ‘dream’ or ‘fake’ sequence has virtually no sound audible other than the music. Exceptions to this include the puttering of the car as it drives past the camera, birds singing, bells ringing and woosh as she throws her scarf in the air. They have obviously made a very deliberate attempt to draw primary attention to the music and words being sung, and secondary attention to the sounds one associates with the various actions that take place. It is likely that most of the added sounds were not recorded by this film team at all, instead, perhaps being sorced from a 3rd party sound library.

Post-dream sequence, the film takes a realistic step back, lowering the level of the music and instead focusing on the starkly contrasting voice of Rana Husseini. The sound recordists, from the sound of things, would have made a particular effort to eliminate any background noise in this interview, maximising the signal-noise ratio and thus achieving the cleanest possible recording of Rana’s voice. There is still the presence of sounf effects, such as the bells ringing, but they are far less prevalent on the overall soundstage of the clip.

Similarly, the sequence showing Dr. Amal’s interview also takes priority in focusing on the interviewee.

The next sequence involves intercutting between the three subjects as the film sets to disprove many of the claims made in the false book. The focus is on the voices of the subjects primarily, however the music creates rhythm in the clip and takes on a more active role in this sequence. There is also a larger emphasis on the noise of the environment in which the ‘false’ action takes place, things like the sound of the cash register and lighter flicking on are most likely taken from a 3rd party source and layered beneath the interview audio and music to add feel to the clip.

Q2:

– New Bin: (Cmd+/) this shortcut will be important as keeping all of your footage tidy within Premiere is important and makes the whole editing process a whole lot easier. Especially because we’ll be shooting multiple subjects/locations over multiple shoots, it’ll be more efficient to seperate all the different bits of footage and group them accordingly.

– Export Media: (Cmd+M) this shortcut will be handy if we’re exporting several different versions of our film – whether they be individual sequences, versions for youtube etc., it will just make the process a little bit shorter.

– Paste Attributes: (Opt+Cmd+V) this shortcut will be most effectively used when in the colour grading stage of production and will save a couple of seconds each time you want to apply a grade to a new clip.

– Snap: (S) this shortcut will be helpful when matching audio cuts to video cuts and will simply give a bit of piece of mind so that we know our cuts are matching up.

Q3:

I really like this clip… In particular the frantic rhythm which is created in the opening few minutes. This feel is prompted by the nature of what’s being filmed (people crossing a busy street), but is truly made by the addition of the music – without the unnerving jazzy track in the background, the people crossing the road might seem very pedestrian and regular.

It looks as though all of the subjects are genuine passersby and were spontaneously filmed from a bit of a vantage point, unbeknownst to the subjects. I also really like the way that the camera deliberately selects and follows certain people on the street, whilst ignoring others.

Q4:

This reading from ‘The Conventions of Sound in Documentary’ was interesting for me to read, as I’ve been put in charge of sound for our documentary on Pentridge.

Although mostly unrelated to our Pentridge documentary, I liked the debate as to whether or not music could be included in observational documentary. To me, a film seems unfinished without music, on the most part, as music has so much to offer a film. It can add so much meaning, depth and audience understanding to a film so easily, as long as it’s selected carefully. I thought it was interesting to read that a documentary cannot truly be ‘observational’ unless the music is diegetic – which seems reasonable, but also counter-intuitive to me. Sometimes, it might not be ideal to have music playing whilst trying to film for a documentary – especially if there is dialogue involved. I was mostly just surprised that the definition of an observational documentary required all sound, including music to be diegetic.

I was also drawn to the section on location sound and the fact that edits between scenes could be described as a cacophony, because of the natural differences between sound in different locations and the relatively uncontrolled nature of these changes. Reading that the audience had to make decisions as to whether or not certain sounds are ‘important’ in many documentaries was interesting, as this directly relates to one of the interviews we conducted for our film whereby the nearby traffic is audible, but not distracting from the interview subject.