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!