Our pitch is done and ready for next week.

We have a lot of different parts to our project and I am a little unsure how many of them are necessary. However, I am especially excited for the diary and have found inspiration in a television program called “The Fall”.

“The Fall” is a television program that follows the life of two people; a detective and a serial killer. They remain anonymous to each other. What I find interesting in this TV show is that the writers manage to make you feel sympathy for the serial killer. You get an insight to his life and although he does really bad things, he seems quite normal at times. It plays with your emotions and makes you feel unsure about the whole situation. He also keeps a journal filled with the women he is obsessed with. A lot creepier than we are planning to execute though, the serial killer keeps hair clippings and naked photos of the women’s dead bodies. It is his little secret that he keeps very close to his hear, above his daughter’s bed.

Other than the diary we are planing to create the following to aid our story:

Facebook photos of the event where he goes on a murder spree.

News report.

News coverage piece, a “tell-all” story.

Webisode with the point of view of the Mother and the neighbour.

Video Logs.

Planning our transmedia projects this week. We have taken a lot of inspiration from what I posted on last week ( J.J Abrams “s”). We are telling the story of a young man with psychological issues who goes on murder spree at the end. We are shown the story from many peoples perspective hence transmedia. It is a way of interweaving different parts to the one story, creating a database. We are thinking of making news articles and little webisodes from others perspectives but to see the perspective of the main boy we have a more direct and personal connection.

We are creating some video logs where he tells the camera his struggles in life and what makes him angry. We tell from this that he is not 100% normal. There’s something about him. Further, we are creating a diary where he lets out his inner most thoughts, his plans for violence, people he obsesses over. In here the inner workings of our character is truly displayed and depicted. This will be different from the video logs because he isn’t opening up fully on the web. He is still trying to remain cool and likeable even though he is a lone wolf at school.

This shot needed to have it’s blacks lightened to show more of the details of Theano’s face, however we wanted to keep it dark as it is a solemn moment of the documentary.

At the beginning of the semester I wanted to create a documentary that meant something to me and to my viewers. I feel that I have achieved that. I filmed my grandmother retell the story of how she met the love of her life, and I feel that this is something viewers can resonate with. I also aimed to “capture the true essence of those I interview”, and this is something I also feel I have accomplished. I filmed my grandmother in her best moments, bubbly and humorous, and in her most vulnerable moments, in tears. I have to give her a lot of credit, since she was a natural on camera and didn’t let the presence of a film crew detract from her retelling of her life.

Question 1

Question 2

Opt+Cmd+V: Paste attributes – is my favourite key board short cut. I first began colour correction last semester in the short film and this short cut allows you to quickly correct one scene after doing just one clip.

Shift+Cmd+/: Duplicate – Is another great one as it saves time to duplicate shots so I can play around with the copy and not affect the original. Also useful for colour correcting.

Cmd+R: speed/duration: I always spend ages looking for this so it saves time as all keyboard short cuts do. I always seem to be speeding things up or slowing them down for some reason so I use this a lot.

Cmd+/: Bin – I began using bins last semester after Paul made me pretty much. They are really useful and made me feel more organised while editing and i knew where everything was.

Question 3

“From a distant gaze …” (1964) directed by Jean Ravel

In the beginning I was intrigued by the shot construction and editing. A shot that moved from left to right followed a shot that moved from right to left and so on. It stopped the film feeling like it was spinning in circles and highlighted the busyness of the city. It also allowed the viewer to notice when a shot was changed. It immediately becomes apparent that the overall theme of the film is movement. People walking, cars driving. This was in the shot movements, the subject’s movements and the editing. There was pacing to the film that began fast and slowed down and then changed through out the film.

Question 4

Week Nine’s reading is  (63-73) from Documentary storytelling for film and videomakers by Bernard Curran.

“Filming real life is a constant struggle to distill realtiy into a meaningful subset of itself, into the telling moments, the telling gestures, the lines of dialogue that will suggest the rest of the scene without actually having to see the rest of the scene”

This is a point I found particularly interesting. In our documentary we filmed my grandmother retell the story of how she met my grandfather – one of my favourite love stories of all time. I have heard her for years talk about my grandfather. I have seen her with my grandfather and I have seen her without my grandfather. I am very aware of their relationship and as she says it was ‘true love’. To record and show in a 5- 10 minute documentary, what I have heard my whole life is extremely difficult. To record and show what my grandmother lived through is pretty much impossible. So it became a challenge to express the reality of this story through the little moments my grandmother told and her gestures and lines of dialogue. I had heard a lot of stories so I got her to talk about the moment where I thought beautifully summed up their life together. Her passion about the topic brought on beautifully crafted lines of dialogue that I know I will use in the final cut. Her gestures also show how much she cared about him, which then affected everyone else’s gestures in the documentary.

In my film I tried to link footage with both subject matter and camera movements. I link the tree with the leaves to then the leaves on the floor and then the hands tearing up the leaf to paper being thrown out, it kind of represented the cycle of paper in society. I linked that section with sounds. Industrial sounds and eerie sounds. In the beginning of my clip I made it a lot more abstract. I changed the hues of the footage and intercut the footage with other footage to play in time with the sounds. It’s pretty random however this is where I matched the subject matter of leaves and also the camera movements in the up and down pans. My piece was very random and seemed like an acid trip.

https://vimeo.com/103575368

Reading: “Documentary storytelling for film and video makers” by Bernard Curran.

This reading opened my eyes to the world of documentary and how much planning actually goes into it. I always thought of documentary as having a much lower level of creativity and creative choice than feature films, however a point that stood out at me was that everything in documentary has a huge decision behind it. Things I simply ignored such as will the documentary be observational, or will the documentary contain interviews, will the documentary get the filmmaker involved, will the documentary use more than one interviewee? There are many ways to do the one documentary and what sort of documentary it becomes is based on the filmmaker.

Another point that excited me in particular, especially about creating our own documentaries this semester, was when the article stated that filmmakers talk about ‘“finding” the story, or the story revealing itself’. I am beginning my documentary with a rough idea about what my grandmother has been through in her life time, and her love story with my grandfather, although I don’t know what sort of road the documentary will take. I don’t really know what will be the main focus for her stories, will it be her troubled childhood or mainly her relationship with my grandfather? I think the story in this documentary will reveal itself in the editing room after we have asked her millions of questions and cut together the most fascinating bits. I am really excited to make this documentary.

They initially set out to discover what makes the residents of broken hill so content to live there however instead it seemed they made a film that portrayed broken hill as a pretty boring and bad place to live. There was a creepy feel about the whole documentary and as the residents were asked what they liked about broken hill, their interviews were intercut with images of broken hill at it’s worse; empty and filthy. It looked like a ghost town which fulfilled it’s treatment of portraying the emptiness of towns in the outback. It portrayed it’s residents as somewhat deluded and crazy. The treatment worked because the audience is left wondering about the residents way of life in such a secluded area.

Question 2

One point I took from the reading that interested me was in the very first paragraph; these days everything is recorded. Everyone carries a camera in their pockets, when something happens it’s recorded easily with the click of a button. It almost feels as if you can’t trip down the stairs in public without being filmed. Therefore filmmakers have to focus on “film making” rather than just “recording”. As the reading states, the directors personal vision and form is important. For example the documentary we watched as part of True Lies last semester by ________ where he filmed events in his life. In the beginning it seemed as if he was meaninglessly recording things around him, however throughout the film you become aware of the vision and the direction of the film. It all comes together as (what I think) is a beautiful heart-warming documentary that relates to it’s viewers. Another point that excited me was that the author wrote that documentary filmmaking required a level of schizophrenia; to portray a subject you must both enter it and see the world from it’s eyes while keeping an aesthetic distance from it. After re-reading this sentence a couple of times I likened it to a lot of documentaries I had seen. You have to immerse your self in the subject completely to film it and make a documentary on it while also viewing it as an outsider, as an audience. I don’t know if I explained that well but in my head I was like wow this is deep.