Filmed on a Panasonic LUMIX GH4 with Tripod. Audio- Rode VideoMic and edited with Adobe Premier Pro CC (audio files mixed on Audition).

Choosing my subject was quite simple generally I think about people who have a passion and drive on a subject they’d be willing to talk about but what I didn’t take into account this time is whether they’d be able to properly articulate that on camera. Although my close friend is quite talkative as soon as the lens was pointed the words started to stutter, in future this has given me a learning experience as to always create a test demo with a subject before committing them fully to a project.

When I was editing the hue on the wide shot was more intense then the close up which caused extra editing in terms of color correcting and even though the hues were lowered and more blues added to tone out the strong saturation of red it still wasn’t as white balanced as the close up shot was.
The most successful aspect was the mise-en-scene especially aesthetically- I choose to shoot in a room where I could control the amount of natural light and mainly use electrical as this gave me more power over what the intensity and brightness would look like on screen.

The problematic aspect was the interviewee was quite camera shy and less articulate than his real life personality, this made cutting and mixing audio together more of a challenge this also made the footage more relaxed with less momentum which didn’t suit the themes of ‘travelling, Japan and sports photography’.
I managed to overcome a lot of this by mixing audio and adding extra overlays to cover the mixing, this made the interviewees voice sound faster and gave the piece a stronger momentum and created a more precise meaning. Also to take note the choice of audio was a risk I was willing to take, originally a Jazz piece was chosen but ultimately this dragged the pace of the film down, thus I switched to a track that had the speed I wanted but also vocals- my main issue was to make sure the vocals didn’t distract from the subject this meant fiddling with the audio and remixing the track to suit my liking. 

Key notes would be once again to create a test demo with your subject on screen before filming further as well as understanding that the creative possibilities of storytelling expand beyond visuals and audio, It’s so important to make sure the subject has enough engaging substance so that the target audience will be drawn in throughout the whole piece. Creating this piece really makes me want to delve more into the realm of lighting and especially expression within lighting (mood lighting) as well as color pallets although these were also aspects I’ve been wanting to explore for a while. I’d love to create more of an art-house portrait that contains a less conventional narrative structure and one with more interpretative means.

In terms of broader development my main note would be to always edit and have time to re-shoot in case any footage or feedback you receive from a teacher, producer, director isn’t the type you were hoping for. The feedback I received really helped me reedit my whole piece although I did not have the time to re-shoot, I also believe in overshooting when it comes to extra footage than undershooting so if anything goes wrong and you’re under timed or some of the footage doesn’t fit you always have extra to fit in.