For this week’s tutorial we were asked to do the exercise of using the camera and microphone and to record a Climate Change Rally at the State Library of Victoria and edit them in to 2 short film, however the 2 films should present different feelings and emotions, one is my (editor) feelings and another is the feelings of participants in this rally. Thus I started to think about how a documentary presents the different emotions in different ways.
Before the shooting practice we watched a film called “Into The Streets”, it filmed a parade from the preparation to the end in a chronological way (Into the Streets (People’s Climate March + Flood Wall Street), 2015). With the changes of time, I think the emotions which audiences feel about would be different — the tension and excitement during the preparation and the enthusiasm brought by the huge crowd during the parade. Also it filmed in a different angles, like birds eye, in the crowd or in a distance, they all show different feelings (Into the Streets (People’s Climate March + Flood Wall Street), 2015), which the birds eye gives a overwhelming feeling and when the shots in the crowd, it makes the audience be immersive, and intuitively understand the enthusiasm of participation. Moreover, the random clips like in the film people’s facial expression, police’s calm and slogan & posters are directly presented (Into the Streets (People’s Climate March + Flood Wall Street), 2015), this kind of multifaceted recoding helps to fuller the content and enriches emotions of this film. Thus, those techniques are in some extend inspired me and I would like to imitate the way it makes documentary in my short films.
For my first short film I tried to make it exciting and fun to express my feelings of the rally because in some extent it’s my first time to get “into” the rally. The most of footages I used were camera (me) in the crowd, like mid shots or close ups, moreover I put a lot of shots of people’s reactions to the rally and some fun slogans shots in my short film. Additionally I brighten the film and make it warmer. Thus in those ways I think I made the film of a excited and positive emotion of mine. Additionally I mainly used the crowd footages and establishing shots to make the overwhelming feeling and to show the participants’ passion in the second short film, the audio of interview of the participant was used as a voiceover to connect the whole film, which can straitly present their emotion of want attention from public and government. However to reflect my work I would make it more complete in the way of making it longer and in a chronological way in next time, and I would like to learn to add some voiceover to clearly telling the emotion as well. Also to do the interview next time I would choose a quiet place to film (as my film this time the background noise was too loud).
first video
second video
Bibliography:
Into the Streets (People’s Climate March + Flood Wall Street). 2015. [film] Directed by A. Mallis. Meerkat Media.