Feedbacks on the rough cut:
- Tristan suggested that it would be cool to explain that Jarrod and I met on the train and had a conversation which led to the interview that we did later.
- More cutaways (as there’s only a wide shot in the rough cut).
- Adjust the volume of the clips to the same level.
I forgot to ask Jarrod to fill out the personal release form and sign it. So I emailed Jarrod to ask him to sign the form and then send me more clips of him skating and some of his family photos.
Group Exercise – The Pursuit
This time’s exercise is way more successful than last time. I think the main reason is that we came up with a good idea. Brainstorming really helped us with the pre-prodction. Tristan asked each of us ‘what do you pursuit in life’ and I answered ‘dreams’. And at that moment we knew this is going to be the story. Then I said I would love to throw light on the concept of depression and then there’s the battle between dreams and depression. To embodify the struggle, they should be played by real people. I quickly drew something on the storyboards to show my thoughts on the camera movements and everyone understood immediately. Storyboarding is amazing. Even though we did not follow all the stuff I drew but it’s still good to have some visualization. As you can see in the video, Tristan is ‘Dream’ and Joey is ‘Depression’, which is kind of funny because Tristan has got the devilish personality (sassiness) and Joey is such a sweetheart. But the contrasts that they’ve made with the characters they play and the contrast between each other are surprisingly good and add to the comedy quality of the story. As you can see in the first shot, Joey is smiling but saying hateful words to me and Tristan looks serious but is complimenting me. I love how stereotypical characters have their own special personalities. It’s genius.
The filming process is a bit harder that last time. We confronted with many problems such as the uncontrollability of the elevator and we got it wrong so many times with and without being interrupted by other people. At the end the video, we’re filming at the 4th level but there’s a group of people talking loud on the side so we decided to go down one level (4th is the top level). But after we’ve done the last shot on the 3rd level, we noticed that the hall looked different so the previous one where the elevator’s door opens and Joey greeting us had to be redone on the 2nd floor. It was such a hassle and took us so long to arrange clips correctly because we’re not allowed to edit using softwares. We had to delete all of the NGs. But the touch screen of the camera is so hard to use and we might have deleted one very important clip in which I run all the way up the stairs and stop and glance back to see if anyone’s following. Ughh. But apart from that missing clip, everything went well and all the problems were fixed in time. We even did titles and credits to make it look more professional haha.
From this time’s group exercise, I learned that storyboards are essential to the pre-production part of the video. We were the first group to get out of the class and start filming and that felt great hahaha. Brainstorming is definitely as good method to draw out ideas. Be more familiar with the camera, otherwise it does stupid things that you don’t approve of.
Here’s the video.
https://youtu.be/t16xYQ_9B3Q