During the course of Film 3, my eyes have been opened to so many film techniques that I have been itching to try, and when we were told to pick a technique to investigate with a group on Friday I was overwhelmed by the options.

Eventually the choice came down to the day before, when I watched a documentary on the making of Sense8, a fantastic show with beautiful cinematography and some of the most intriguing storytelling and world building I’ve come across in a long time. The premise of the show, for those who haven’t seen it (and need to go watch it right now), is eight people who share a connection that lets them ‘visit’ each other, and take over each others bodies in order to share skills and information.

This is all achieved through what I assumed was seamless editing of two shots of the actors repeating scenes, but watching the documentary I saw that instead the cameras view would be blocked by something, normally a person, and in that time the actors would physically switch places. It was hilarious to watch these intense scenes play out, and then halfway through the actor would just bob down and crawl off screen. My favourite was when a switch required one actress to fall backwards off her chair into the arms of a stagehand who then dragged her away.

So when our group got together I explained the shot, and asked the chosen actors to come up with their own lines around the idea of gossip. I didn’t want to steal straight from Sense8 and copy the body sharing, so I thought of another way this particular shot could be used, which is to show a story spreading, from person to person, and since the focus is on the story and not the characters it should be portrayed in the same way, hence the body replacement. Its a bit hard to explain, so I’ll show you.

The editing of this piece I enjoyed immensely, because its the first time I’ve experimented with more editing than just a simple cut transition. Figuring out how to speed up the video was easy enough with my handy friend Google, but my real interest lay in the sound editing. I found once I had sped up the middle bit of the footage that Tylers voice sped up, which sounded a bit silly on its own. I tried cutting the audio from the sped up version, but the absence of background sound was jarring.

I experimented with a couple of different things, but I really wanted to create the sensation of time passing between each characters dialogue, so I incorporated a zoom sound effect, then copied Tyler’s sped up voice, moved it around a bit so it didn’t repeat too obviously, and done! Sound editing had never been a large part of my projects, but this gave me a new appreciation for its intricacies.

Disclaimer: Tyler and Serena made up these lines, and my condolences go to both Jessica and Mark (even though they’re fictional)