Category Archives: Workshop

Narrative Structure Exercise

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait? I am interviewing my sister who is transgender. The controlling idea of the interview is how she copes with this challenge, especially through creating costumes.
  1. How is your film structured? My film is going to be structured largely through voice over narration in the form of the interview. It will follow certain rituals in my subject’s life, in a ‘day in the life’ type style.
  1. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? I want my audience to gain some insight into the life of someone who is transgender, and to realise that although this concept may be slightly strange and unfamiliar to them, she is just another person with the same hopes and dreams as anyone else.
  1. How is your portrait being narrated? My portrait is being narrated by clips from the interview with my subject. This will make it seem personal.
  1. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? The found footage in my portrait will be largely clips from 1940-60s videos that focus on stereotypical gender (particularly women’s) roles and appearances. This will contrast with my interviewee, who despite transitioning to a woman, still does not the encompass stereotypical woman.
  1. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point? I’m not sure my portrait really has a dramatic turning point. Whilst it is communicating a narrative about my subject, it doesn’t follow the three act structure precisely, besides having an opening and closing.
  1. When does this turning point in your portrait and why? If any part can be called a turning point it would probably be in the final moments of the project where I will attempt to emulate the process of transformation, symbolic of transformation of gender, which I’ll try to reflect through my interviewee’s costuming craft.
  1. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum? My portrait gathers momentum by beginning with simple introductory statements, such as the interviewee’s name, before delving into deeper and more personal narration.
  1. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from? The dramatic tension will come from the building and combination of different images, the found footage and original footage. I will cut between shots of my interviewee answering questions, shots of her working on her project, and found footage that will reinforce the theme of the film.
  1. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution? The climax of the film will be a shot of my interviewee dressed in one of her costumes, signifying the completion of the transformation.

These questions definitely incited me to think more deeply about my project and lead me to decide I needed to make some changes to make my project more engaging and effective. I struggled to answer a few of the questions, which made me think that I needed to put more thought and planning into the construction of my project. Hopefully this exercise will lead me to create a better final product. As Rabiger puts it in Directing the Documentary, (2009), 5th Edition (Focus Press), this exercise did lead me to “think hard about [my] story’s essentials, which is the spade work of creativity.”

Sony MC50 Camera Exercise

As you can see in the finished result of this exercise embedded above, we faced a few challenges. When we struggled to even set up the tripod properly, we knew we were in for a fun ride (we did figure it out eventually!). It was hard to find a suitable place to conduct the interviews that was quiet enough, had an interesting background, and decent lighting, we ended up having to compromise on all three of those points.

Upon viewing the final footage, I realised that some of the shots weren’t properly focused on the interviewee, so this is something I will have to make sure of in the future, as this really affected the quality of the shot. It was also hard to make the reverse shots of the interviewer look consistent as we didn’t have control of the lighting and were inexperienced at setting the white balance of the camera. It did help us to realise that framing the interviewer and the interviewee properly had a significant effect on the consistency of the interview.

I think the establishing/wide shots were the most successful, as it was easy to get a shots that reflected RMIT life in and around building 80 due to the interesting architecture and large numbers of students.

Workshop Exercise: Intro To Recording Sound

This week’s exercise included running around campus pointing our trusty zoom recorders at things hoping to produce something resembling a ‘clean’ recording. The initial challenge was finding a suitable place to record the interview part without any background noise – seeing as quiet places in the CBD are hard to come by and there were 20 other students with the same idea. Once we’d find a suitable hideaway, however, another issue presented itself. Namely, how does this thing work? How far away do we hold it from the interviewee? How do we know if it is recording at the right volume?

The answers mostly consisted of ‘I don’t know, but let’s give it a shot.’ After listening to the interview recordings, I feel that the recorder should have been held closer to the interviewee to record clearer sound. Also, the spot where we recorded the interview was a bit too echo-y, and this affected the final recording.

We also had issues recording particular sound in public spaces, such as the noise of a tram, as there was too much background sound, and you can hardly tell the population of Melbourne to be quiet, please. The more successful recording is therefore the interview one, which was recorded in a comparatively more quiet space.

Bringing the sound clips into Audition was fairly straight forward after coming from learning Premiere the previous week. Although I had some what-am-I-doing moments, thanks to some trial and error this was quickly resolved. I layered a few different sounds to create the clip embedded below, trying to keep in mind the figure-ground-field technique. The figure in this clip is the interview, set against some ‘Melbourne’ sounds – casual chatter, music, and the dinging noise of a tram, that create the atmosphere. I had to move around the levels a lot in order to bring forward the interview recording, and I applied some fades to make it more smooth.

 

Premiere Pro: First Impressions

This week heralded my long awaited introduction to Premiere Pro. Having been baptised in the fires of iMovie and Final Cut Pro X I was ready to find out how real editors work. The answer?

With tears. Lots of them.

But, thanks to Lynda, and evangelistic greyhound enthusiasts (“They are quiet, they are cleaaaan”), I have thus far made progress.

I had some serious struggles along the way, however, from figuring out in and out points, swapping clips, audio – just went I thought I’d made the perfect haiku video and exported it, I’d somehow added in a minute and a half of empty black footage. (??) I don’t know. Thanks to this gruelling exercise I do feel more optimistic about taking on Project Brief 2, and hopefully this time the process will be a lot smoother.

Haiku

I wanted my haiku video to reflect a ‘modern’ haiku. In the spirit of experimental film, I experimented with some editing techniques to create interesting effect.

 

Audio from www.PartnersinRhyme.com

Review of reviews

In my Media 1 seminar we discussed our reflective portraits in groups. After some difficulty with missing cables and confusing audio jacks, we got started. Except, there was a twist: we were to use Edward de Bono’s ‘six thinking hats’ to give feedback to our fellow group members. To simplify things, only four of the ‘hats’ were to be used:

Yellow = positive

Green = alternatives, creative, new ideas

Red = gut reaction

Black = something that doesn’t work.

This process, however, began with a rocky start and never felt comfortable to our group. Perhaps it is meant to be somewhat uncomfortable, to put one out of one’s comfort zone in an attempt to foster new ideas. One challenge was that each group member was charged with a specific ‘hat’, which created some conflict if, for example, a person with the ‘green hat’ wanted to mention something that didn’t work. I think this thinking strategy would work better as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. From my understanding, this thinking process is intended as an indirect and creative approach, but in the way we applied it, it felt rather limiting.