Working on Individual Exercise 4 was a really pleasant experience.
We were tasked with two clips to recreate: ‘Love in the Afternoon’
and ‘Vicky And Cristina In Barcelona’.
Location:
Our group choose to use the classroom as our only location as logistically it worked really well for both videos. For example, in the first video we were attempting to recreate, the actors have a conversation in the eve of a door (which the classroom had). The second video was another conversation set at a table in a restaurant (the classroom also had a tables). Using the classroom was a no brainer. Another advantage we discussed in using this location was the extra time we would get by avoiding having to set up, pack up and transport the equipment. This factor was certainly a big plus as in past in-class exercise we ran out of time and struggled with some curve ball nature threw at us.
Additionally, we were happy with the soundscape, which seemed pretty clean and minimal, however in post I discovered this wasn’t the case, more on that later. Overall I was very please with the choice of location as I felt we had control over our environment.
Love in the Afternoon.
Our group spilt the workload equally, and organically fell into each of the roles required. For the first clip I was directing. I was a little surprised with how much I enjoyed this role. I implemented a few of the techniques we learnt in last weeks workshop, such as: standing as close to the camera as I could with out disturbing the camera operator, so I could see if I was happy with the shot. The shot itself that we were recreating was relatively straightforward. It was a single 50-second shot with no camera movement. Besides directing actor movement and eye line, I found that there wasn’t that much other direction to give. I was really happy with the actors Monaliza and Tim’s performances. They really conveyed the awkwardness of the relationship, as well as the unspoken feelings the characters each had for one another. This awkwardness was emphasised by the lack of score or backing tracks in the original so I decided to maintain that in post.
The edit was equally straightforward, I added French subtitles as a little salute to the original, and also used the lumetri colour panel in premier pro for colour correction and grading. I decided to add yellow tones with green highlights to recreate the period look of the original. I was pretty happy with the result. The overall video came to life and I felt really had character.
Vicky And Cristina In Barcelona
After finishing ‘Love In The Afternoon’ we moved right along to ‘Vicky And Cristina In Barcelona’. Our group rotated roles, and this time I was the audio mixer. This video had a few more moving parts. There were multiple shots and multiple camera pans. That aspect was the one I was most worried about, however it didn’t turn out to be that much of a challenge at all, which was a pleasant surprise. As audio mixer I made a few mistakes, for the first take I didn’t adjust the levels and consequently the audio was way too quite. Additionally, I discovered that there mic was picking up a lot of background noise, such as the traffic from three stories below, I wasn’t sure how to address this at all.
During the edit I added restaurant ambience to help create the effect that they were meant to be in a restaurants setting, not just a classroom. A small challenge I ran into was finding the background noise on the takes I wanted to use was actually pretty bad, and cutting between shots of good audio quality and bad audio quality for dialog sounded shocking. As a solution, I found a single take that had all the dialog I needed, and was also of good quality, and dubbed it over the intercutting takes. It worked reasonably well.
Overall I was very pleased with the results of both videos.