I think I’ve cooled off the footage a little bit now. The rough edit is done, and I do truly enjoy the sound we have recorded. Fluorescent hums, the wind on the green and the ticking of the clock works beautifully with the record crackle of the song. Yes, it’s a bit rushed, but it’s something I will reshoot down the track.
The outdoor shots are beautiful, and the rotating wind gauge is nearly so mesmerising it could be a GIF. I’m starting the colour grade tonight.

I’ve come back to this post about an hour into the colour grade. The greens are standing out beautifully in the dancing on the grass scene but I’m having trouble with some of the grades looking polarised (I’m not sure if that’s the right term) especially over the singer who stands under those bright red lights. (below)

I am excited to show my edit in the consult later this week. I know theres some tweaking, especially syncing the movement of her lips with the audio of the song, along with just some edits which could be rearranged.

I’m trying to edit the bowls club piece which was aptly titled by the actress Justine “boys in love at the bowls club” and I’m having a hard time. Emotionally I am struggling to edit because the shoot doesn’t much look like it would have if I had directed it. The footage is hard to edit with eleven takes from the same angle and half of the footage devoted to an unscripted scene that didn’t translate well with the actress. The location was so brilliant, the cast were great, it just didn’t come together how I pictured and emotionally I’m struggling to edit.

needing more varied angles, reverse shots, crowd reactions etc

I was hoping to work as an interchangeable group where we would all look at the monitor and scope out ideas and give criticisms as a team. I don’t think this is how the rest of the team works and in my pitch I should have made it clearer that I wanted to work in collaborative roles where we would all have a say in the shooting style. I think next time if there’s a pitch included I will put a priority into expressing the ways I would like to work, as I totally left this out of my presentation in the weeks earlier. Thus my reflection on collaboration would be that I think need to learn to speak up more and assert myself if I know I have an idea that will work well on screen. Also I know how to use the cameras and need to stop doubting myself as a more hands on role during filming would have been great.

Looking at the footage, there aren’t enough different shots to make this easy to edit. There are no closeups or details, and nearly every shot is a wide angle. I feel as if theres a distance between the viewer and the characters.  We were truly short on time, as the host of the club wanted us out at 9.45 and our actors didn’t arrive until 7. I was pushing for us to squeeze in as many closeups and detail shots as possible; so much of the story is in the characters hands. I would have loved some closeups of the beers they were holding, nervous tapping, the shoes dancing etc.  I made a list of what I would have liked to include:

A objective MS shot of Chris (glasses) with the chair in the foreground. Mark would walk into the shot and we see his hand on the chair.
A reverse shot of Mark from Chris’s perspective, giving a glance down at Chris not flirtatiously, but more in a sense that the time has come where we dance – I never wrote the script to be flirtatious, more abstract attraction, as if dancing together was something they knew they had to do, and were happy to? I don’t know if that makes sense.
Chris smiling back at him, probably from a side angle, no longer in their perspectives bur from our own, and then a closeup of those hands clasping, preferably with a short depth of field, the camera following the clasped hands onto the dancefloor.
A shot of the couple dancing from the singers perspective (symmetrical dirty o/s… so more dirty overhead?)
Then there would be closeups and ECU’s of their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.

I understand the actors were doing us a favour and weren’t 100% comfortable with acting and holding each other this way but sometimes you have to push. It was really rewarding working with actors again. People are generous with their time and efforts and I want this to look good for them. Colour grading post will be next.

We’ve gone back Tuesday night for our second shoot. I just looked at the footage today and it’s okay but Sammy and Louise agreed we were all a bit flustered when shooting on location for the first time. It was FREEZING and super windy. I played music off my phone to scare away the ghosts.

I had this thing about not knowing how to frame a shot in class. I do know how to frame a shot. I am good with a camera, I’ve done camera training for two years at La Trobe. I feel like I let so much of that training slip from my mind when I came to RMIT. I wanted to start on a fresh slate, but the short films I made at La Trobe had some dope camera moves and I was 8/10 times the Camera op or sound op. I know what I’m doing I’m just a bit intimidated because my group has such strong photographers. But when it comes to shooting on the night I don’t think we will be using singular roles. Everyone is super capable of doing each role in the team and I think working interchangeably will be great. Everyone can look through the monitor and call the shots as I dont think any of the girls are sensitive to criticism and are flexible with roles .

The footage we got Tuesday is much more calm and controlled. Shots are running for long enough, everything is much more detailed and I think we’ve applied the “camera on world off” mentality. I guess it was seeing the place at night for the first time Monday that was distracting because it’s a new space for all of us. I am so keen for this shoot, and also the tennis club one will be wonderful to move to a similar but new location. The court we are thinking of using for Bell’s script is clay and it’s nearly like the bowls green but in an alternate universe.

Tonight we are about to do our first crack at filming establishing shots, as we have no actors. The ad has just gone up on Starnow but unfortunately the only applications are for the singer, who doesn’t even sing. I really wanted a drag queen for this part because she would be a lip synching professional, but the group agreed that drag queens were a handful to work with. I’d gladly take a armful if we could get a sweet queen in a sequin dress but it’s a minor role so I’m not going to arc up about it.

If we get an older woman I want her to look a bit beat, from the wrong sides of the track, she is the club regular, performing for an audience of five, dressing for an auditorium. I just saw the movie Patti Cake$ at MIFF and the mum character is brilliant. This bar scene doesn’t have the performance in it but the set design and production design nearly mirror the bowls club (mirror ball more like it).

The weather looks a bit scary tonight but once again it’s shot at night so it shouldn’t matter too much. We will be using my camera which I’m a little concerned about. The quality isn’t brilliant in my opinion. I really want this to be cinematic and crisp, really well made. Maybe we should hire a lens out? I think I’m being paranoid because no one else can see the dip in quality in the footage.

I will begin by summarising my initial presentation and summary of ideas that I presented in my prompt’s pitch before we formed our groups. I wrote a short piece to present with my powerpoint to the class but never ended up reading it out. It summarised how I feel on the the streets at dusk and night

I ride my bike home after work a lot and I think it’s the best part of the night. There’s a big blue-black over the sky with little pin-hole stars. Theres little boxes triangle roofs with little box windows that glow yellow. There’s big arching poles which point white lights downward to keep you safe. I love night time and I think it’s the most beautiful in the suburbs.

When I ride home at night I’m always listening to my tunes, and even the title of albums inspire me let alone the sings with in. The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, Night Time, My Time by Sky Ferreira, Night Drive by The Chromatics, Floating Into The Night by Julee Cruz. Now that I’m writing these titles down, it’s all becoming clear that there’s a pattern here…

I placed images of music videos I admire that are shot at night in my presentation; Lorde’s Yellow Flicker Beat, Arcade Fire’s Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) and my girl Angel Olsen’s Shut Up Kiss Me. After writing and reflecting on my script, I’ve realised Shut Up Kiss Me is so important in influencing me in my development. It’s Angel rolling around in an out of hours skate rink under some disco lights. The rink too is super 70s. She’s sitting outside under street lamps, under that white glow I want to emulate. My favourite shot is when she follows the car, illuminated by the brake lights. It’s the red light the bowls club provides and I can’t wait to use it. The singer in the script I wrote too is wearing a sequin dress. I’ve taken so many aspects of this video and placed them in this script.

After assessing the club and visiting the location, I’ve put the outdoor scene on the back burner. The big bowling green is no longer what I’m totally enthralled in. It’s the incredible untouched interior I’m dying to shoot in. The green will be beautiful to roll the Dolly over, but it’s the stage and the singer I’m reworking over and over again, who initially was a secondary thought I added to balance the script out further.

Tomorrow we will begin storyboarding and we will be incorporating a parallel narrative totally utilise the space, where the singer is preparing in the bathrooms while the courting begins in the hall. The script is developing as the project continues. I’m finding the nature of this project collaborative and spontaneous, and the short length of the clip is encouraging rather than limiting.

EDIT: FRIDAY 20 OCTOBER

I developed this presentation before I developed the script. In all honesty the script came second, and in honesty, it was based solely on incorporating the Bowls Club into our project, which my group wanted to ditch. I don’t think they believed that people would be kind enough to give students out of hours access to a bowls club for an ‘experimental’ short film. I thought back to using a friend-of-a-friends house in Ascot Vale to film a short I had made about a woman having an existential crisis via a pack of winnie blues. Our actress let their cat out (never to be seen again), smoked inside the house and left a burning cigarette on their leather couch. Regardless, the house owners let us film a second day!

The development I should have written on in the above post was location scouting. I had just emailed and called about 12 different bowls clubs in the inner north to see if we would have a chance to film and 9/12 replied with an enthusiastic yes. As I organised to pop into Brunswick Bowls to meet with the owner and assess the clubrooms, Ian from Thornbury bowls club rang to confirm we could use the club. I was at an RSL at the time. It was very appropriate.
When we arrived to inspect, all three of us were taken by the interior of the bowls club. My presentation was based on nighttime from the perspective of me on my bike, of what things looked like from outdoors. Now it was time to present nighttime from an interior.

THE SAPPHIRES – What a Man!

I love Jess Mauboy. With that said I will begin this deconstruction.
I chose this clip because I will be soon shooting in our final assessment a performance, an audience reaction, dancing and behind the scenes. This clip probably isn’t the best to reflect two old men dancing in a bowls club but it still captures a perfomance in a confined space, and most importantly, the backs of the audiences heads, which I will want to place in my final projects.

The scene begins with discernable out of focus dangly things which symbolse showbusiness I’m assuming in a wide swooping pan, then I noticed the sudden focal grab at 0.05 seconds.  I will be taking some aspects of this shot and applying it to the bowls club scene. The next part I found interesting was the sequence in which we are presented with the characters faces peering through the curtains, next was their point of view with the sides of the curtains again,and then a complete 180 switch where the camera is pointed at the backs of their heads. Is this camera technique used for anything other than expressing that the character is looking at something significant or scary to them?

The doorway looking in on the man cooking the rice next reminded me of the scene we looked at in class of the Italian film where she shuts the door and it’s nearly as if the character is in a completely new scene. I watched Chopper for Australian Cinema this week and the final scene showed Chopper in his cell watching his TV interview with the guards. Light flows into the cell, the tv shoots colours and the cheery chatter of the interview fills the room .In the last moment the TV is turned off and the guards slam the door shut. A pale green/blue washes in through the windows between the bars covering it. It’s complete silence, loneliness and isolation, all in the close of a door. I really like the concept of a single shot which shows a partition separating two completely different scenes, such as the one above.

As for sound in this clip, most of it is in the soundtrack but the muffling of the announcer’s voice as it cuts between the stage and behind the curtain os something I would like to learn more about. Would they have recorded the whole line in one take and edited it in post, or recorded on two occasions? I’m leaning towards the first but I’ll look into it.

EDITED: FRIDAY 20 OCTOBER 2017

Adding onto this post, I’m going to approach this revised deconstruction of The Sapphires as I did in my last deconstruction of Muriel’s Wedding; by compartmentalising into two elements of production that stood out most to me which were composition and sound.

sound
I’ve started to analyse sound by listening to a clip with my eyes shut. I used this approach in my Top Of The Lake sound deconstruction and it really opens you to th miniscule changes I never noticed. I’ve probably watched this clip ten times now, but on my blind listen, I noticed the atmos over the announcer (clinking glasses, murmuring) stops as soon as they are behind the curtain and we hear room noise such a fan, air con, buzzing. The same kind of room noise I’ve been recording at the bowls club. I never noticed how much of the timing of this clip is centred around the music. The first bars are used to cover up these transitions between atmos. I really struggled in making the atmos transitions sound natural and not disjointed. If there’s a class offered on sound editing next semester sign me up! I’ve found that noticing sound in television has been especially fascinating this semester, especially learning about Wild Lines. I still don’t fully grasp how actors can walk off set and repeat the lines into a microphone at the exact same timing as they did on camera but I am willing to learn more about it. I might look up some videos of actors recording wild lines on set, because I can understand the actor rewatching their movements in an edit suite and re-recording dialogue but recording on set still baffles me. Another aspect of sound is the man making rice’s spoon clinks the bowl at the exact right time, so I’m assuming they recorded that sound during this take with a boom mic. As for the song setting the pace for the atmos, as soon as Jess begins singing, the atmos of the audience completely disappears! We only hear the song, until a subjective view of the audience from the Sapphires perspective is shown and their glass clinking and murmuring comes back. The song builds, thus the crowd noise builds, and by then end of the clip the two are as loud as each other. The transitions between volume and atmos are brilliantly constructed.

framing and composition

This shot is the one I tried to compare to the scene from L’a Ventura in my previous Sapphires deconstruction. I suppose rather than shot construction, which I wrote on last time I’m looking at composition here. The use of a partition to narrate space is an aspect of filmmaking I would like to explore. I immediately think of a photo I saw in a VCE TopArts exhibition by Meg Tully, who photographed various scenes in apartment windows together.

I’m sure this is a shot that’s been widely used (ie. Shine) but I would love to somehow experiment with an open plan apartment complex, or even work on a film about someone trying to exit a building, rounding staircases, opening doors, passing through corridors, nearly getting to the end of the building only to find that it goes further and further. I have a recurring dream that I’m at work at the deli and someone asks for 200g of cooked peeled prawns. These are usually placed at the end of the deli so I walk the customer down to find that the display case doesn’t end and only stretches further and further. The customer has reached the end and is impatiently waiting by the prawns for me to weight them but I can’t get to the end, as if I’m stuck, running on a treadmill.

This next composition is really interesting to me.

1st shot: Jess takes the stage just after the shot off the partition. No one is interested in the performance.
2nd shot: This is my favourite shot, the sense of space, and how small they look on stage, the still heads, just watching and staring, the distance between Jess and the rest of the girls. They look scared and small, which is exactly what this scene was trying to communicate.
Image 3: 30 shots later, we have this image of the girls at the end of the performance. Jess has been cheated closer to the rest of the group, clapping and cheering hands breaks the awkward inaction from the crowd, the camera slightly pans to the left, rather than the stick motionless we saw at the start of the performance. The camera height is lower, and we are more encompassed within the crowd. Also, we appear to be closer to the Sapphires, physically and emotionally!

COLOUR GRADE 1

This was the first colour grade I tried. It reminded me of editing instagram pictures which is a fine art. Unfortunately I found the preview screen really hard to notice effects and changes on because it was so small. I used the RGB chart to change these which is why I ended up with that extreme black and yellow image. In the end I was playing around with saturation and tried to make a homage to Didge’s death sequence in Neighbours; the most oversaturated clip I can remember. It’s the last…. day on earth… in my dreams dreams dreams……

COLOUR GRADE 2

I used the saturation sphere tool to change the colours here. I like a bit of warmth in this because the locker rooms, as beautiful as they are, have a really harsh, cold flourescent light which I’ve warmed up in the second image. The third one was too blue and I’m not a fan, and the final image is where I tried to recreate the lighting in Chopper or Undferbelly which I’ve been rewatching. Green = drug den. Blue = cops talking about a case. Red = sexy scene.

COLOUR GRADE 3

We’re very adamant about using the amazing lighting already provided in the bowls club, however through colour grading we can really play with the tone of the images. I love the deep blues I can pull out of this scene. I’m still not very experienced with this but if I can make it less saturated but still pull those vibrant colours I would be super satisfied.

FOCAL GRAB

So the first thing I thought of when looking at this footage was the focal grab I tried to attempt earlier on in the semester when filming the infamous ‘Lenny’ script. Now that I know how to mark the f.stops on the camera, it changes everything. At first I was aiming for Lenny to walk into focus and then out after a few seconds, but in the footage, Lenny walked into focus and then stayed in focus even at a pretty distant focal length. This is something I would like to reshoot again; a subject walking into a pulled focus, heading towards the camera, and then pulling them out of focus again. Above, I’ve added in my favourite dramatic sound effect straight from Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen to illustrate the untapped sinister side of Sammy who in class said if she had the chance she would steal a cop’s gun and wave it around “for the thrill”.

PANNING EXERCISE

I didn’t actually shoot any of this exercise as I was the model so it’s harder to analyse what happened and how things developed. Also considering that we decided to use this exercise time to have a production meeting for our project. When I edited this, I’ve tried to make a narrative to the random images of me dancing around building 12. Surely there is something I could cobble together with a string of nonsensical footage. If that’s not a spontaneous prompt driven narrative I don’t know what is, Paul.

INT. STANDING ROOM COFFEE. DAY

On a busy afternoon, STANDING ROOM is abuzz with student's lining up for coffee drink. All are using their facial tanning devices into which they stare intently, hoping the UV rays will make them bli-nd. ROSIE is receiving a call which consists of only the screaming of loved ones, in the hopes it will send her deaf. 

Suddenly a TIME TRAVELLING DEMON appears, using her sensuality to lure ROSIE away from the coffee drink stand in the hopes of killing baby Hitler. As she is lead to alter the fabric of time, ROSIE uses the ancient art of KUNG FU to attack the demon. She wanders back to the stand, but something catches her eye, THE VOID

ROSIE (to the void)
What?????

THE VOID
recording...

In a moment of realisation, ROSIE realises that existence is futile and astral projects into another plane of reality. Then she does a sick dab. 

END 

I think the most integral part of learning to pan would be body position when turning the pan-handle. The pans in this sequence are moving too late after the action and are still clunky.

TEST SHOOT

The test shoot was really integral to work out the space and location. I realised the setting would have these huge beautiful windows which I would love to shoot from the outside, with the stage lighting, disco ball and suspended animation. I want to capture this with a slow zoom, followed by a reflection on the glass captured in a focal grab which I now know how to do.