Phantom Cinema Week 12 Reflection

Originally our plan for editing the video was for me to be in charge of audio and for Kenza to take over video editing. However, due to some miscommunication and the looming deadline I ended up editing the video as well. I felt bad for Kenza as she had expressed interest early on in editing the video and if I could re do the project I would definitely make sure this wouldn’t happen again. Nevertheless, I have had a lot of video editing experience so I was excited to take this challenge on. Given the late notice I did not have time to record piece to camera footage of me delivering the script which would have proved very valuable in hindsight. This is because I struggled to find footage to keep the visual aspect of the project engaging. I wanted to use footage from unmade films however given that these are after all unmade films it was a struggle to find high quality and accessible footage for me to use. I tried to find other footage of early 20th century cinema but again this proved difficult as most archival footage was behind pay walls, watermarks or just simply to hard to find. I settled on the idea of having different scenes from unfinished films play in the background whilst I read the introduction and conclusion and during the body paragraphs I used footage from our two referenced films. Finding popular unmade films was relatively easy however usually these scenes/clips were short so I struggled to not have the same scenes repeating over and over and resorted to splitting the clips into segments and intertwining them with clips from other movies. Finding footage for our film examples proved the most difficult as Esfir had little to no publicly accessible video footage available so I resorted to screen grabs. Somehow I was able to find a large portion of the Florestine Collection on Youtube which proved to be a life saver as I was able to showcase much of Helen Hill’s abstract animation. Given the limited time I was limited in the effects and overall editing techniques used in the creation leaving the visual component of the work relatively simple. Although I was not to unhappy with this as it allows the narration to be the star of the show I do wish if I had more time I could have incorporated more sophisticated visual elements to enhance the work.