The other work I was most inspired while doing this assignment was visiting the Zanny Begg exhibition at ACMI. I loved how much variety there was and how the order of each small film changed every viewing. I liked the pace of the poetic bee section of the piece.
All of our videos were created in a poetic form of documentary, although the voice over piece was probably more in the form of expository.
When researching for this section of this project we couldn’t find a lot of films, documentaries or videos on the internet to inspire or emulate. Although I did find a couple of videos on Vimeo that I thought would be great to emulate. Especially The Neighborhood – Tito’s Butcher Shop by Zublime, this was a short 30 second documentary about a butchers shop in Amsterdam. Although the video was more like a process of creating a burger, the video used a lot of shots that we thought would be good to emulate. It was also helpful because it was close to the kind of timing we needed for the video for this assignment, as 1-2 minutes is not a lot of time.
While editing the interview piece I realised how difficult it is to cut up and condense a large interview. The interview that we found at the museum was around 20 minutes long and included music sections, narration, questions and lots of talking by the interviewees. It was difficult to sort out what was most important and also to put it in order so it created a story and made sense. I think I ended up doing this mildly successfully. With editing the cloud of the interview piece, I also found it difficult to edit the colour as the lighting in the butchers shop was all very different. The freezer created a much more red tinge while in the shop was more of a blue tinge, therefore I found it hard to make all the shots look as similar as possible. What I think was successful in this piece was using the music that was from the original interview recording from the museum, I think this worked well as a start and ending of the piece.
If we could have filmed this piece again I would have liked to have been able to film more variety of shots. I thought that it would be a clean video with just shots from the butchers, but I think it would have been more effective if I could have added some photos of the women from the museum. I would have liked the editing to be tighter and been able to either find good un-copyrighted sound effects of a market or recorded my own if I had had more time.
For the montage video we wanted to show the contrast between old and new locations in the Western suburbs. To also show the contrast on how locations and places change or don’t change. We researched and found historic images of place in the West and then found the current locations of these pictures. We thought it would be appropriate to add a soundtrack to the video as it creates the fast rhythm similar to that of the Western suburbs of Melbourne. We were inspired by Radiolab’s documentary video ‘symmetry’. The directors ‘play with our yearning for balance, and reveal how beautiful imperfect matches can be’. The flow of the piece was to show the most well known icons of the West at the start, have the places that have changed the most in the middle and end with footage of the places that haven’t changed as much. The shooting was difficult as light conditions changed, creating different looking shots even though we wanted the shots to all look similar.
For our voice over piece ‘Interview with the Italian Women of Werribee’ we used a transcript that we found at The Living Museum of the West and recorded Darcie reading it. We also incorporated pictures and videos found at the museum. We then edited the transcript piece down. This piece is the only of the three in which it explores the history more wholly. The other pieces incorporate modern and historical aspects together.
I believe if we had had more time to create these pieces, we should have filmed more or created more complex stories. It probably would have also been good to create a cleaner edit of each piece if we had had more time. I think it would have also been nice to have a common theme throughout the pieces to create a unity between them, if we had had more time.
I think the major thing that I found out while making these videos was that ideas change all the time. I was quite disappointed as I had gone out to film the montage video. But a couple of days later we visited the museum again and decided to change our ideas. I had enough time to film more, but only really one day that I had enough time to.
I think we also found out just how many shots go into even a small piece like one minute. If you want to create a fast piece, you have to film a lot more shots than I would have thought!
I really enjoyed working with the audio that we had taken from the museum and I think this might be an idea I’d like to carry to my major piece for this studio. I think that finding a random interview from the museum then doing as much research as I can about the person/people in the interview would be an interesting way to approach this project.
Also reading about Open Space Documentary in the Patricia Zimmermann & Helen de Michiel reading, opened up my view of what documentary is and just how many different forms it comes in. So I have been starting to think about ideas that aren’t necessarily just video.
References:
Zimmermann, Patricia R., and Michiel, Helen De. Open Space New Media Documentary : A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, Routledge, 2017.