Take Your Chances from Samuel Harris on Vimeo.
In all honestly, I had a blast making this. I enjoyed every aspect, from the casual chats surrounding the interview process to the day-long editing affairs; I’ve learned a little bit more about After Effects (a little) and discovered a few secret Premiere Pro tricks and in turn I am a lot more confident in my editing technique. But it’s well known every project has its problems, and mine is in no way exempt from this rule. By far the weakest (or most problematic) (or most annoying) aspect of my project is the audio. For starters, (literally, because this is a rookie mistake) I clipped a little too much blank space between a couple of words in the audio narration and now some sentences are replaced with a robotic sounding Graeme, something I hope to improve on in the future (maybe I’ll check out Lynda.com, if I have to). After mistaking this project for the 3-5 minute VLOG in Pop Culture in Everyday Life I realised I had a lot to trim, and a lot of picking and choosing to do. With the amount of content I recorded (my interview has since found its way as a 67 minute, 733mb wav file) I could’ve made a thousand different portraits with a thousand different angles; but I’m satisfied (just, as the perfectionist I so frustratingly am) with this final result.
Secondly, I underestimated the range of ye ol ZOOM mics, and caught a little too much background coughing and laughing (I was so sure the sounds weren’t loud enough to be picked up) which I managed to remove in parts, but some vital sections demanded the most delicate touch of editing and therefore couldn’t be removed. Better luck next time. I found myself enraptured by the possibilities of using found footage (so much to go through, such little time (and key words necessary to find what you need)). My portrait very much relishes in the opportunity to use such footage, and when planning I based many of my shots and ideas around these opportunities and brainstormed accordingly. If the next project, or any project in the future required us to create an entire story or video solely with the use of found footage, I would be in heaven.
In my eyes, my most successful aspect is my use of the found footage to contrast or represent the audio narration. My aforementioned dabbling in After Effects helped me create the title card that flashes up towards the end in the middle of the Charlie Chaplin skit (film projection jitter and all). After Effects is so far the only Adobe program my beautiful laptop seems to have trouble running, but I hope that won’t inhibit me from delving deeper into the clockwork of it. Overall, I’m happy with the result, and also feel as if the constant narration pushes the project swiftly to its breaking point and that this tension is released in the final moments with the candle being blown out. Although just clocking in at just over 3 minutes, whenever I watch it I feel as if the time passes much quicker.