Ok so… I know I’m supposed to write two posts per week but week 11 for me was more focused on my other classes and I didn’t get up to much editing or thinking about box at all considering I had three essays to smash out that week. I’d prefer if I could write another post about week 12 which has been much more vital in experimenting and developing Blue Moon. So this is that post, which in my opinion is much more interesting than what I would have wrote in week 11 because I’m having a scary epiphany.
In my previous post, which I intended to be my last, I had uploaded the final cut of Blue Moon to Vimeo and shared it with a friend and showed a housemate etc. I was happy because it was ‘done’ and uploading meant setting it free into the world. However, as the assessment 4 deadline looms I checked back to see if I had missed any posts. I had missed my second week 11 post, which I was going to rewrite just now. Week 11 post part one discusses a muffled track I intended to put over the outdoors scenes of Blue Moon that I never got around to doing. It was the song with an effect that made the music sound as if it was coming from another room. To chuck it into my week 11 post I quickly scrapped together the muffled song over the visual… and loved it…. too much.
Yes my final cut is done…. yes i’ve uploaded and sent it out to the world… but this effect encapsulates exactly the diegesis I love in the Top Of The Lake clip I deconstructed here. The train in the background is way more apparent, the song is less controlling, it’s much less of a ‘music video’. I’m hoping my group gets back to me with feedback asap because I need advice. Is it worth reworking or should I leave it?
LESSONS LEARNED: If you plan on experimenting, take the experiment the whole way through otherwise what’s the point of experimenting at all (right ladies!)
– no half-assing!
I’ve just uploaded my final cut. Wow the world works in mysterious ways.
Feels good.
I’ve sent it to my closest pal and production partner Colin and am waiting for a response. I can see that exporting to vimeo settings then actually watching it on vimeo changes EVERYTHING. That crisp vision I crap on about in all these videos is clear and brilliant. I’m really happy with how this ramshackle little vid turned out. There’s a sense of space that I never noticed before long distance shots of the green, to closeups on face. Indoors is so confined in this video, and outdoors is so free? Adding title cards really opened me up to noticing these things. It gives the video a sense of finality.
Colin replied,
some useful feedback
I noticed a fleck of light on Chris’s glasses that I didn’t see before.
The camera shakes from when the tripod was knocked annoys me but there’s not much else I can do about it at this point. This is a cool lil proddy, a great learning experience. Asthis is my final BOX post, I’ll address what I’ve learnt throughout the semester through a short list:
Trust my instincts and trust myself. I need to shake off my self doubt, my insecurities. Filmmaking used to be so much fun for me but now I’m so terrified whatever I make wont be good enough for an employer or for peers etc. It’s not about that though!! Don’t be scared of being contrived! Everything in filmmaking happens for a reason, everything is set in place for a purpose, so thus everything is contrived and we are all try hards and we desperately want our work to be liked… if that doesn’t make sense it’s an epiphany I need to work out how to articulate.
I can write a script about anything and nothing and it’s still valid. And I enjoyed writing the deli script and blue moon thoroughly!
A good lens if your friend.
Look at how things are made. Look at the camera movements in everything. The panning, the height, whether he camera is based on a tripod or hand held, look at the depth of field, tracking the performance, the lighting (is it offside? it’s always offside!)
Feed the cat.Here’s my last deconstruction (couldn’t find a longer version of this scene but it’s got the best part in it):
I’ve been obsessed with Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake. In this scene, a hardened father and husband has angrily stormed a women’s retreat in search for his wife and daughter. Here he approaches them after trying to win them back.
The use of sound in this show is incredible. Campion’s use of extreme wide shots opens the soundscape up to an incredible array of noises. Birds are distant in the opening ECU, with her meddling guitar blending in closely. I rarely see shows (or notice) an instrument playing in diegetic manner. I rewatched ‘Blue Moon’ with my atmos volume higher, yet the soundtrack still encompasses the image. To achieve this effect what I would have done differently would be to record the atmos of every setting with as much importance as the image. The guitarist in this clip is small and insignificant compared to the location, as the song should have been in Blue Moon (regardless of if I titled the film after it!). Water trickles, footsteps are light on the grass, the father yells from a distance. Campion’s soundtracks give an incredible sense of space, distance and location.
The shot construction is beautifully composed; in the establishing shot mother and daughter are sitting parallel, symmetrically distanced placing the shot into a brilliant rule of thirds.
A dirty o/s from the father’s perspective, blacking out one third of the screen as he, a suited man, encroaches on this wide open feminist nature haven. As we reverse back to his face, the offside is lit, even though in the opening image the sun is clearly pointing to the left of screen, yet his face is lit on the right. I’m assuming this would be by bouncing the light off of a reflector.
Does the above sequence break the line? Or does it just play with subjectivity. He seems like the one in control during the beginning of the exchange, but as he starts to play around, she seems to hold the cards. I am trying to work out whether this breaks the line, especially the second image of the father from a mid shot, it definitely seems to be further out than 60 degrees, and in the third image (of the daughter) it’s unclear who she is looking at. My final verdict is that the line was broken.
That’s all I have for now. Thank’s for a wonderful studio. I’ve learnt a hell of a lot, and a lot of a hell.
A bit nerve-wracking to be honest but I am really delighted with my feedback from the class viewing. People seemed to like it, the building didn’t burn down, people’s eyes didn’t melt out of their sockets. I warned some people about the mistakes that were in the video such as my heavy breathing in the background, some camera shakes and the singer’s movements not syncing up to the soundtrack. It’s better to call out my own errors than everyone think I’m unaware of them, I reasoned. In retrospect, if I hadn’t had told them about the errors I genuinely think no one would have picked up on them.
My feedback was to lengthen the end shot where Chris and Mark are slow dancing on the green “until the shot becomes awkward”. I love doing this. In my original edit, the shot of the wind meter went for nearly ten seconds. I’m happy to keep them dancing for as long as I can. Another piece of feedback was to change the lip-syncing tempo to become completely out of sync, like wildly out of sync so that the overzealous movements we got on the night aren’t as apparent, and we can justify it under the guise of abstraction. I’m not sure about this because I don’t want viewers to focus on how jarring a movement like this can be, or to think it was a mistake in the edit. I’m going to make a version with this effect and show it to my housemates as a test audience and see if they think it works or think it “sucks”.
Viewing the class’s productions was strangely cathartic. I don’t know what I expected but it was strangely reassuring to see everyone’s beautiful productions, birthed from the same set of prompts and ideas. This class definitely challenged the way I work and approach a brief, but at the same time opened up a whole new creative stream I didn’t know how to access. I think the project I was most taken with was the visual poem set in Macedon, I cant remember the name of. The image quality was so crisp and picturesque. Throughout the entire Bowls Club project I’ve been fretting that the image quality my XA50 was shoddy and grainy. Seeing the crispness of their DSLR footage, along with the DSLR footage Bell produced in the bowls club really opened my eyes to the importance of a good lens. Choosing a quality lens will be a big technical skill I’ll be taking away from this class. However, technical qualities and skills are totally important, but I think being able to script, conceptualise and put a project into motion from a really tiny or mundane prompt is the most important skill I’ve gained throughout this class.
Our consult session was really helpful, especially on the topic of SOUND.
Sound that needed to be tweaked was the track itself. I vibed this record crackle-distant-radio-sound when I wrote the script where the song would be played from a radio, then lifted to non-diegesis as the singing begun, and thus I’ve attempted to alter the song to this. I’ve exported the song to Audition which is a program I’m still shaky on, and after watching a couple of youtube tutorials, I’ve used the custom FFT filters to give the song a radio effect. It’s somewhere between old radio sound and a mobile phone voice from a movie. I like it regardless. There’s a brilliant function I was playing around with that makes the audio sound as if it was from another room. Here’s the effected track below:
I still am yet to place the atmos audio under the song but I’m hoping this will deter the music video-ness of the project. I got a great clip of a magpie warbling and the train in the the distance, honking along with a level crossing ding. I need to go onto the media servers at uni tomorrow before the class-viewing cut is complete to get a couple of snippets from Bell’s file; the sound of the gate creaking (I’l place over the image of the bowls club sign), a shot of the clock in the kitchen (this time in focus), and more atmos. As for my colour grade, it was encouraged that I’d crank it up a few notches to see a real difference. I’m so terrified of colour grading! I’m scared everything will look like the toaster filter on instagram. Nevertheless, I will persist.
