reflection: exercise 3 & 4
Having not attended the class where the clips for Exercise 3 were shot, I felt a little strange about using the other’s snippets to put my piece together. I hate city landscapes and so it was pleasant to see that some groups had opted to film close-ups of nature and rather abstract compositions.
To mesh my piece together, I chose to feature the theme song from Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) since I thought it would be an ironic juxtaposition – In Weir’s film, the girls are trespassing upon a rock, whereas in mine, the rock has been replaced with modern-day structures… But why stop at sound? Each of the 6 clips are prologued by a famous quote from Joan Lindsay’s novel that provide a context for the image that follows.
When I made the first cut for this piece, each clip went for 30 seconds as was required but they dragged on too much and a tedious rhythm began to form. To remedy this, each clip was purposefully fixed to varying lengths so that audience attention wouldn’t wander. I have also implemented the use of a Sony VSCO ‘Polaroid warm +++’ filter to induce a sense of dreaminess and ensure that the raw and clinical feel from the original footage was gone.
Whilst I don’t particularly like what I’ve created, this exercise has reiterated how important visual selection is, signifying that there is weight in a specific order of clips.
The second exercise was a re-staging of Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon (1972) and Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008).
I particularly love the single-shot used in the French copy, as it screams volumes about the pair’s relationship. What catches the eye is the way that the female protagonist is always towards the centre, making her a focal point for the audience. In comparison, her male counterpart is either heard from off-screen or peeking out from the edges of the frame, which is a quaint way of fuelling a dull scene with artistic power.
I tried to mimic the actions of the red-sweater girl (Irene Skobline?) as best I could and I believe that Tim and I achieved the awkwardness of the pair… a fact which is mostly due to trying to remember the lines.
Our group obviously wasn’t too phased with the idea of ‘head-space’ since the top of my forehead is nearly out of frame, which is a factor that we need to be wary of in the future.
The re-staging of Vicky Christina Barcelona wasn’t executed as smoothly as the first scene but the general idea is there. It was difficult to control the lighting in the space since we began filming at about 2 and the shoot went until 4, meaning that the sun was either too harsh or too bare. This is observable with the shadows that are cast on Lydia’s face, obscuring her cheeks with black. As with the first scene, I have edited the images with a blue-based filter in order to make them appear more cinematic. In retrospect, I should have used a warmer tone so that they follow the impressions of the original films but I like the pop of red that a cooler hue has provided.
Moreover, the camera movement in this scene worked quite nicely but the sound is shocking. The atmos is definitely too audible in a few of the clips and then absent in others, ruining the flow. I have to pay close attention to this detail in my semester final because admittedly, I don’t worry about sound as much as I should.
