Consider in what ways you hope your final work engages its audience and communicates a key concern of the studio? Draw upon your experiences from attending the studio exhibition.
Ahemad (2024) stipulates the cultural and artistic legacy that the Golden Age of Cinema brought, offering timeless narratives and storytelling techniques, enduring as a important touchstone for contemporary filmmakers. I believe that our work follows these guidelines, offering a timelessness to our story through the universal experience of loss, and with common filmmaking techniques via shot composition and colour to communicate that loss. I feared that the non-linear storytelling and lack of dialogue may have been confusing, however from questioning the participants of the exhibition, all of them understood the premise and narrative of our film quite easily.
Cagle (2007) points out the crucial role that cinematography plays in “lending an air of realism” to films. For example, I believe that the use of black bars to mimic a widescreen look for our film greatly improved the aesthetics of our film, as it matched the wide field of view we often see out of our eyes. On the topic of aesthetics, I also believed that the framing of our characters added to our storytelling, as many scenes had their silhouettes highlighted by the sunlight behind them, isolating the two characters more starkly in certain scenes.
Lastly, though our sound design was fairly simple, I’m satisfied with the result we ended up with, as it appropriately set the tone for the mood, atmosphere, and emotion of our film (Babbar 2024). The choice to cut out diegetic audio aside from the last scene in place of music was much more appropriate compared to our initial dialogue. Through the music, the proper emotions that needed to be invoked in the audience was communicated, and it allowed the audience to engage with the film and fill in the gaps through their own imagination. It also made the memories much more abstract and out of reach, suggesting the loss or inaccessibility to someone, further communicating our intent.
Overall watching our film on the big screen was quite reassuring, as I did not feel as positively to our final product initially. Although there are undoubtedly improvements that could be made, I believe that our film did succeed in engaging our audience in the ways we intended to.
Outline the singular most successful and singular most problematic aspect of your process/finished work
The most successful aspect of our process had to be the brief feedback sessions we had with our tutor. From 2 short feedback sessions, our product had changed drastically and for the better. My only regret about this part of our process was that we had not contacted our tutor prior to our in-class sessions for additional feedback, as we had 3 weeks of editing available, and most of it was done on the third week due to this oversight. If we had engaged with more feedback, we might have been able to add more polish to our final product. I believe that this experience highlighted the importance of constructive feedback to me, and I will seek more feedback from my peers and professionals for my future projects.
The most problematic aspect during our process were the long intervals between our communication process. There was a lack of feedback between groupmates on many of our drafts during the first 2 weeks of editing, which ended up creating a lacklustre product that had to be rushed in our final week for it to be presentable. I believe that if we had a quicker feedback loop, we could have smoothed over much of the editing process and achieved a much more satisfactory result for our drafts. Furthermore, I should have experimented beyond what the script had entailed, such as how we eventually decided on a completely different structure than what we had intended and even cut out most of the diegetic audio that was intended to be used as dialogue. In the future, I will take note to smooth over communications in a group setting for a quicker feedback loop, and take personal action in experimenting with different formats and styles.
Imagine you are going to keep working on that media piece, what would be the core things you would want to improve and extend and why?
I believe that more close-up scenes that could tell the story of our characters visually could improve the cohesiveness of our story. It would be much clearer what had occurred in the narrative, and improved audience engagement. We had initially planned to do this, through environmental storytelling with messy clothes, close-ups of photos and more. However, we didn’t end up having the time to prepare these props and film them on shooting day.
I would also love to rerecord the diegetic audio we used. We had used a boom mic to record our audio, however the dialogue that was recorded ended up having quite a bit of reverb and was quite echoey. If I could do it all again, I would have chosen to use lapel mics instead of the boom, which would make the audio used in our film less jarring to hear and more realistic.
Outline one key thing you’ve learnt from your studio experience that you will take into your future thinking and practice
The most important thing I learnt from my time in this studio is the preparedness. Good planning is involved in virtually all steps in media creation, from pitching, pre-production, shooting, and editing. The areas that we succeeded in were usually the ones we prepared for the most, and the areas I found lacking tended to be ones we didn’t give much thought too. In the future, it will be important for me to put a great degree of importance on the planning process of any project I work on, including as many details as I can come up with.
What’s one key takeaway about working collaboratively?
The key takeaway I had about collaboration from this studio was the importance of communication. I believe that we were not always on the same page in terms of how the project should proceed, and while that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, our lack of consistent communication created an environment where we lacked efficiency, as without a consensus things could not move forward as quickly. For future projects, I believe I should put emphasis on the importance of regular face-to-face meetings with a group, and outlining clear goals and deliverables for these meetings in order to keep things on track
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References
Ahemad, I.(2024). Shadows and Light: Exploring the Legacy of Golden Age Cinema, The Seybold Report, 19 (1): 854-862
Babbar, I. (2024). Evolution of Cinema, International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, 6(1): 1-4
Cagle, C.(2007). Two Modes of Prestige Film, Screen, 48(3): 291–311