【Recording Place】#15 Final Reflection

Recording Place is a studio which is a location-based documentary practice. “Place is absolutely the best framework with which to tell a story. It’s the place you begin, and it’s the place you wind back to.” For this summer, we focus on the place Queen Victora Market. From this studio, i learned a lot. It’s very glad for me to took this studio through this summer. I learned how to find the story through the place with any details. I learned how to use x200 camera. I learned how to editing the documentary. Also, I learned what a good documentary should be. Rohan is a good teacher who taught us a lot about the documentary filming. I enjoy the whole sessions of our studio. When I do the filming, editing, having lectures and even write the blog. It’s a nice experience for me.

Our group ‘s work is focused on the Mr.Huang who is a man with an indomitable spirit. At the age of 76, he can be found with a cigarette on his lip and a pallet of produce in his wiry grasp. Originally from Guangdong, Mr. Huang takes us through a day in the life of one who is beginning to feel the weight of his years.`After we have the brief ideas, we started to do some filming. We went to the market in few days to shoot for different footages. The time before market opening, the time after market opening and also during the work time. We shoot lots of footage in different situations for our film. Also, we did an interview at Mr.Huang’s home. He is a very kind man. We had a great time in this home. After all these shooting things, we split footage up into folders. Becuase Mr.Huang is a Chinese who can’t speak English very well. So the interview is in mandarin, and we need to do the subtitle translation. After translation, all of our group members can understand what he was talking about in the footage. Then all of the members watch all the footage, listing highlights, overall action in the scene, and anything else that you feel is important. Write down what happens and what we think is appropriate. This is a huge job and we need to make sure to break the core into manageable chunks.

Then we go to the rough cut part. We break down interviews and other longer things into manageable segments. This can be done in final cut by marking when someone goes onto a new topic. And then we lay out interviews in order in the timeline. On top of this start putting appropriate shots. Then we do the slash cut. Put all your footage in order on the timeline without doing any editing. We also need to find tempo music for us to edit to. One of our group member Meg let her friend make a background music for our film. So everything seems going well for our group’s work.

From my individual contribution, actually in our group we do the works together. Every group members need to do the shooting. But for the interview, i went with Jenny and Jack. We enjoy the time in Mr.Huang’s apartment and listened his story. It’s amazing and he is so kind man. We discussed a lot about our concept. Like we do the concept about “The difference between the life in Austrlia and China”, and then we try to narrow the concept a bit. Also i did the subtitle translation with Jenny.

I feel very happy with my group work, we learn a lot, we know each other a lot and we do our work pretty good. I think it make me want to have more group work in further, because it learn much more in group than you do the work alone. In the further group work, i will be a person have a lot of communications with my members. It is really helpful in the group, because you can have a lot of creative ideas while in communicating.

Also, Rohan gave us so many advice. It’s so useful not only in this course, but also in our future media careers. That’s really nice for me to take this course. I enjoyed it so much in this summer.