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.

Our script adaptation was made in three different shots. We wanted to choose an outdoor location full of dappled light and we found it on the balcony… well full of light, briefly.  The clouds came over quickly and all of a sudden we were working with harsh daylight. Luckily, there was a thick layer of cloud and that filtered the 2pm lighting down to something soft.

In our first shot, we only POFENGERED…. without the POW! The blue tones are indicative of no white balance. It’s blue, but theres a partial amount of the dappled light we were aiming for. My shot is the final one, of a CU of Margot’s face. Here I am trying to light the off-side.

I should have used a tripod, but I chose not to because I was intending on standing really far back, cranking the zoom to create a cool depth of field. I had just watched The Piano and there was a shot of Holly Hunter playing on the beach, with the golden background totally blurred. This shot has been haunting me (starts at 1:03).

In an epiphany I’m just having now, I realise that if I wanted to recreate this shot, I would need a tripod. The shot would need to be static and my hands would shake at a zoom length that far.
Anyway, I forgot to even attempt it because we were all freezing and the ear-touching scene was too funny.

Make The Bed

I really wanted to make the bed something really special, but upon rewatching it, I realise I’ve ‘shot the shit out of it’. The whole video is a bit disjointed and overthought. There are 9 shots in 39 seconds, and only one shot repeats itself. I went in to get every angle possible  As each stage of the bed progressed, I shot each one in that order – pillows off, top sheet on and tucked, doona, pillows, decorative pillows, resulting in chapters of the film for each action. I think reviewing my rough cut, which ran overtime, I can see this chapter structure clearly.

In the first cut of this exercise, I am aware of myself trying to create a scenario. The slow cuts between shots of the strewn pillows are intended to mimic “aftermath” shots, often seen the morning after parties, and these pillows could be hungover revellers. Rosie from stage left comes and inspects these pillows, accepts the challenge to clean this up and begins by tossing the pillows on the ground, slowly at first but more intensely, leading her to rip the bedsheets and shake off the mess. I was semi-conscious of this storyline while acting and shooting, but reviewing it two weeks later, it’s apparent that I had a clear story in my head when I shot this.

Finally, this extra piece of footage was entertaining to rewatch as I added the clips into the sequence. My girlfriend Siobhan has been interrupting the filming to pop into our room to grab her keys, change her clothes and at one point jump on the bed I’m making. In this shot I am about to shoot what I thought would be the pièce de résistance; the doona cover slowly falling in the air, compressing itself as it lands. Siobhan starts asking me where the spinach is in the fridge. This is the best piece of footage I shot that day:

Lenny in Three Acts

I found this first sequence I shot with Margot and Nikki really interesting. We storyboarded well, had a clear vision and had completed a correct camera set up. It was only until we got out into the alley did it look totally different from what we had envisioned. The edit wasn’t as seamless as I had wanted, but there was a really crazy shot we tried with a focal grab, just as an experiment. Nikki would walk up to us with a pained face, and the closer she got the more in focus the image would be. It ended up being my favourite shot. Unfortunately it was hard to edit into the sequence but I tried anyway.  If I could go back I would go back and reshoot this take to fit the shot in better.

The video is very blue. It was about 4.00pm on an overcast day and we had set up the camera facing the light, and the actress turned away from the light. I could write that the pain and nearness to death she was experiencing was pushing her into darkness, but it was more accurately a factor of filmmaking we did not consider. I want to be more wary of light, as all of the photography classes I’ve taken have said that it is the crux pf shooting anything. I find myself more engrossed in the performance whenever I’m looking through the viewfinder, or the direction the action moves in. Or even more, a colourful detail I want to include in the shot, such as the yellow pole or the RMIT sign on the wall.