Digital Video 1 was a subject which it was not a requirement to write a weekly journal. However, I found that this is a process that helped me throughout my work, so I kept completing them anyway. This was until a couple of weeks ago, when my workload shot through the roof and anything not marked as ‘required’ was pushed to one side. So this will be a bit of a wrap-up of the past few weeks.
I think I’ll start with the end. Here is the final product…
It actually came together surprisingly well, considering some of the problems we came up against. I think this was in part because of our experience with the first project. This time around, whilst there was a much greater workload (both because of the nature of this project and the other subjects we needed to present work for), each member of the group seemed to have a better idea of where their own role was. And aside from a couple of people falling away at the very end (most definitely due to commitments in other subjects), everyone put in a great effort.
Our script writer and director, Jordan did an excellent job in pre-production. This being her story, I think she obviously felt a connection with it and wanted to put together a great deal of the planning work (script treatment and storyboard) we did in Celtx. Our DOP, Daniel also prepared a shot list during planning, but on the day the shots used were more of a collaborative effort. As a bit of an aside, I think my time at Enmore helped out here. My strong attitude to not ‘crossing the line’ with shots did – I think – make for a stronger sequence. And my self-assigned role as 1st AD (head kicker on set) forced everyone to keep moving, so we wouldn’t run out of sunlight.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the equipment we wanted for the shoot. Nearing the end of semester, it was hot property and we could only manage a HC-9 camera and not even a shotgun microphone. Whilst the HC-9′s screen made focus quite difficult outdoors, it was the latter which was the biggest problem. Needing to resort to my own gear, we went with the ECM8000. Not a bad microphone, but being omnidirectional, it was totally inappropriate for getting dialogue on a film shoot.
This was made even more apparent in post. Editing was a bit of a nightmare, and I spent far too many hours processing what ended up being snippets of dialogue, to try and get each piece sitting well together, and losing as much background noise as possible. The Freesound Project came through with the goods once again for me – I grabbed some great atmospheres to layer here. In the end, the sound was passable, but not great. On the upside, editing at home allowed me to sneak in a Ryan Teague track for the majority of the film whilst no one was looking. I’m going to make it my personal mission to expose as many people as possible to post-classical whilst I’m at COFA.
The acting was pretty average, but being self-absorbed, whiny teenagers was exactly what the parts required, so I don’t think it was much of a stretch for them. The star of the show was definitely the location though. Again, Jordan came through with the goods there – some of the shots look fantastic. Unfortunately, we lost a bit of quality on a couple, which needed to be cropped due to a renegade microphone peeking in the side of frame and some poorly white balanced locations.
But really, I’m just nitpicking at the film. I think we did really well to pull it together as it stands. In the amount of time we were allowed, the outcome isn’t bad at all. Now, I think that’s enough group work for me for a while…
Speaking about different treatments for Red Riding Hood in class made me think about our script in another way.
I realised that it was not necessarily important to find a text that fit within our time limit and other restrictions, but instead to find a text that had something intrinsically strong within the story itself, that we could mould into our own. With a seemingly infinite number of treatments done on Red Riding Hood, it’s easy to see why so many old stories get reworked into films these days.
Development
However, with one of the other members of my group keen to write a script, I – hesitantly – let them take the reins and oversee that side of things. In the meantime, I began to think about how much work we had ahead of us and particularly how difficult it will be to balance this with other subjects. The Schedule section of Celtx came in really handy in getting this all down in a visual way.
Once I’d got the pre-production section down, I sent off the Celtx file to the rest of my group. I think this had the desired effect of putting everything into perspective a little better. The next time we met up, everyone seemed a lot more focused and keen to get things moving forward.
Not only that, but we had a script! It reminded me of something I would have written as an angsty teenager (which wasn’t that long ago… sort of), and it was still very workable for our project: minimal characters and locations, with no exploding buildings, naked blue Gods, or any other special effects.
I suggested we condense the total number of characters from 5 to 3, to simplify things even further and then sent out an advertisement to NIDA, via a friend, to try my luck at getting some proper aspiring actors.
I’m not holding my breath for this, seeing as we have nothing to offer these actors, but warm hugs, so we’re already lining up friends that are stupid nice enough to get in front of the camera.
One down and one to go. Our documentary seemed to be fairly well received, with some really helpful constructive criticism. I really appreciate being told where I’ve gone wrong, when there’s reasoning and alternative suggestions behind it. But without any time to rest, we’re on to the Narrative Project.
We’ve been handed similar restriction on time for this project: a short turnaround of six weeks and an equally brief film length – a maximum of five minutes. This is actually a far more difficult prospect for the Narrative Project however. In this time, we need to create a screenplay (or at the very least, adapt a screenplay from a text), organise actors, possibly find costumes and locate… locations.
Fortunately, we were directed to an excellent piece of software called Celtx. For anyone remotely interested in industries that require pre-production (film, 3D, AV etc), you should take a look at this software. It’s free, it’s cross-platform and it has a solid looking community behind it.
Development
Sitting on one of Sydney’s older, tin can train carriages the other day, an idea popped into my head. I was seated just inside the door to the carriage and from my vantage point, was able to look upstairs and downstairs at the other passengers.
I thought of ‘appropriating’ Hitchcock‘s Psycho and using each level of the train carriage to represent a different area of Freud‘s mind: the Superego, the Ego and the Id (from top to bottom). The trick here would be to get a dialogue between all levels. Using one actor, speaking a type of monologue, split by levels was probably not going to give us the arc needed to fill one of the project requirements. So I went on the hunt for a usable text.
In the meantime, I got in touch with RailCorp. There was no point pursuing the idea, if we weren’t going to be allowed to film on a carriage. I have to say, contrary to media opinion that all RailCorp/CityRail workers have been employed specifically because of their sub-human intelligence levels, they were quite helpful and surprisingly coherent for monkeys. However, it turns out that even for students, filming on RailCorp property is prohibitively expensive. Not only does it cost money to film (billed in 3hr units), but there are parking fees, electricity charges and whopping costs to have a RailCorp Safety/Liaison Officer present. I’m actually not begrudging RailCorp their right to charge these fees – I understand what must be involved with their responsibilities as a government company, but I did have my fingers crossed that we’d get some special treatment as students. Nevermind, on to the next idea…
One of my favorite writers is Dave Eggers and his quarterly short story publication, McSweeny’s, which is always stunning and wonderfully quirky.
However, after showing them to the other members of my group, with a lacklustre response, I think I’ll have to go back on the hunt for something with a bit more that we can flesh out of the story. A couple within my group want to write the story themselves, which sets of alarm bells of time wasting and bickering to me, but we’ll see how that pans out. What’s the worst that could happen…?
I’ve found that film-making can be a difficult process. Not for the massive technological, financial and sanity issues, but because you need to work well with others. I’ve long known that I’m something of a control freak and like things done my way, so I consciously tried to sit back and let others get involved as much as possible for this project.
The problem with that is it’s a little like teaching someone to drive a car. Everyone needs to learn and often has their own way of doing things, but if you feel as though you’re heading for a tree, you want to grab the wheel, yelling and screaming: “this is how you’re supposed to do it!” But I digress…
We each had plans to go away during the ‘break’ (something of a misnomer, considering our workload), so we split the workable footage up into four themes and each did a rough edit over the week:
Background of the Bus Museum
Introduction of each person and their role at the Museum
Why each person is interested in buses
The future of the Museum
We spotted very early on that this documentary would be more focused on the people themselves, rather than the issues facing the museum. Over the space of a maximum 5 minutes, there was no way we could really explore a complex problem and besides, the Museum volunteers are just far more interesting.
Once we returned from the ‘break’ and put all the sections together, they needed a seriously large pair of scissors taken to them to get us under the 5 minute mark. The biggest problem we faced however, was getting the HD and regular footage to play nicely together. It was a nightmare. Final Cut has some pretty convoluted menu and window systems going on and it doesn’t take much to make the entire sequence flip out and you not notice until it’s too late.
We did of course, get there in the end. The documentary shoot is finally done. So without any further ado, here it is:
Development
So what have I learned from this process? How to beat Final Cut into submission would be high on the list. It’s one of those programs that you find there’s 100 ways to do everything. Some of them aren’t pretty, but if they get the job done, then it’s worth a go.
Another would be paying more attention to the planning process. Pre-production is underestimated all the time. It was to our own detriment that we didn’t decide on clear roles for each person within the group at the beginning, as it resulting in a lot of looking at each other blankly and shrugging. I think if we all knew what we were responsible for, we would be much more likely to dig in and get it done.
Finally, I did actually learn to let go a little bit. Working within a group is pretty trying at times, but that’s probably more a reflection on how I like to work, rather than the members of my group, or the project in general. Here’s hoping I can get it together even more for the next one…
Unfortunately, the weather didn’t really turn it on for us, so lighting within the warehouse wasn’t quite what we had hoped. Whilst we had the Dedo lighting kit to help us, I think in retrospect, a bigger wash light would have been more helpful. It was hardly a deal breaker though, so we continued on with the shoot…
I have to say that the volunteers at the museum were, without exception, warm and helpful. Whilst they did look at us with a mixture of amusement and confusion, they were more than happy to have a chat to us – some of which we caught on film (some golden moments were missed, but that’s the way it goes). In the end, we shot for almost 6 hours continuously. Aside from one of our cameras refusing to let us change settings and therefore filming in a different format, everything went pretty smoothly.
If I had to make critical comment about our shoot, I would say that we could have used a bit more organisation as far as defined roles for the day. There were a few cases where we should have been more assertive with our own duty in the shoot and really had a clear leader overseeing the filming generally.
Back at uni, we ran into a few troubles due to the different formats of our tapes and the fact that FAT32 drives can’t deal with files larger than around 4GB. This means a 60min DV tape captured to disk, won’t back up on an external FAT32 drive. Which leads to students having a freak out. However, our talented computer tech guys let me in on a MacBook secret I’d never heard of before to get around our problem: if you boot up a MacBook whilst holding down “t”, the laptop becomes an external drive. And not a frustrating FAT32 one either. Plug in in and you can transfer to your black heart’s content. These are the little tricks that make Mac fanboys such a self-righteous pain in the arse. It is pretty cool though.
After sorting our initial problems and having a couple of false starts, we got there in the end. A quick look at the footage has shown a few potential problems…
The lighting is not consistent across all subjects
The subjects are framed differently in relation to the top and bottom of screen
There are quite a few shots where the boom pole drops into frame
Our next step is to get a rough cut together, so that we can divide up the editing amongst the group. As we’re all going to be heading our separate ways during the break, we need a clear direction before we go to infinity and beyond. Or something.
Our pitch was received quite well during the last class. With a degree of trepidation, we stepped up first, expecting to be grilled. But instead we were guided through a ‘to-do’ checklist of our planned shoot.
I think our pitch went smoothly in large part because we were all aware our plan and we’ve kept it simple. I still believe that for a project with such a short turnaround time, the last thing we should attempt to take on is a documentary that requires a huge amount of character development, or multiple shoots. The Bus Museum is quite well contained, with all our shooting and interviews available to us in the one place, on the one day, allowing us to focus more on getting it right and then moving straight into post production.
After ticking all the boxes during our pitch, it was just a matter of confirming gear and dates.
Thank goodness for the helpful Resource Center lads. There’s some pretty expensive looking gear in the bowels of COFA’s C-Block and we made a good effort to book as much of it as possible. Flashy gear makes it look like you know what you’re doing, so the Bus Museum volunteers are going to think we’re pros. He’s some of what we’ll be taking along for the shoot (if you’re adverse to lists of tech gear, look away now):
I’m not totally sold on the Dedo lighting kit, but after explaining our shoot to the Resource Centre guys, I was told with conviction that it would do the job (and who am I to doubt the Keepers of The Gear). Either way, the warehouse has excellent ambient light (if the rain clouds disappear by the weekend) and the Dedo kit could give some nice highlights to the buses.
We’ve got a solid day of shooting planned, and have been assured that we’ll get to interview up to six of the volunteers, working at the museum. Potentially there are a lot of great shots in there, with some excellent characters to capture on film, so fingers crossed it all goes according to plan and we come away with a bunch of workable footage. There’s still time for one last group meeting before the shoot, so we’ll sit down to check off any last minute details, like transport arrangements and finalising questions for those we interview.
Development
I have been thinking a lot about the style of the shot composition that could work for this documentary. I’m still leaning toward the up close, almost macro style of Helvetica, although seeing some of Werner Herzog‘s film, Lessons of Darkness in the lecture reminded me of one of my favourite documentary-style films, Baraka.
This is one of the better known scenes from the film and whilst it’s a bit heavy-handed with its juxtaposition of humans and battery chickens, it’s undoubtedly effective imagery in place of a spoken narrative. And all shot on beautiful 70mm film… if only!
I absolutely love tracking shots on a large scale. And within the huge bus warehouse, I think we may have scope to do just that. How it would sit alongside the closely shot interviews and cutaways of engine parts and bus badges is something that we may have to discuss after the shoot.
Dropping into my first Digital Video tutorial in week 2, I had to get myself up to speed, as well as finding a group to join. The first project of the semester requires us to create a short documentary, which will obviously be a team effort. Contrary to the prolific DIY culture of video sites like YouTube, creating anything with even minimal production values needs the input of multiple minds. Whilst this obviously won’t be a Bruckheimer-esque epic, the roles of filming, sound, lighting, research, editing and waterboy will be shared amongst the group.
Fortunately, I came to class with a concept, because it was something the other members of my new group seemed a little unsure about. In the footsteps of my bus and train crazy father, I suggested that Sydney Bus Museum would be an ideal subject. The guys that volunteer their time to run this museum are a perfect for a project with such a short turnaround time: they are passionate about what they do, so are usually happy to speak about it; they are constantly struggling for funding, so there’s an emotional interest in their story; and they’ve got cool old buses, which will look killer if we manage to shoot them properly.
Development
After sending through an email, enquiring about their interest, I was happily responded to immediately. The good news was that it seemed the people behind the museum would be quite happy to chat to us. The bad news being that the museum had been shut down just weeks ago due to issues with fire regulations. However, this provided an opportunity to create further interest in our documentary: telling the story of the volunteers at the museum and their struggle to keep the doors open.
Dropping in to the museum, it was even better than I had hoped. It’s one of those increasingly rare Sydney warehouses: filled with wonderful old toys and soft, beautiful light seeping through the roof. Quite perfect for staging our shoot. To give us something to work with when planning our documentary, I took a few pictures from around the museum…
The gentlemen we found working on the buses there were equally fitting. They seem only too happy to talk about their own experience with the museum, why they love these old vehicles and hopefully with some encouragement, they’ll chat about the hardships that the museum faces right now.
Reflecting on the warehouse visit, my first impulse is to film this in a similar style to the brilliant design documentaries by Gary Hustwit, Helvetica and Objectified. The latter isn’t quite due for release yet, but you can get a feel for it by watching the trailer…
Being a complete font nerd, I think Helvetica is a fantastic film. But it is also beautifully filmed, as well as spinning an utterly brilliant soundtrack. Some places are cut in a similar fashion to a music clip, but that aside, it’s generally presented with some serious flair.
I believe this style of filming would fit the documentary for several reasons: the cut-up editing will allow us to tell a story in itself, perhaps getting across more than the short duration time would otherwise allow; it will express the near-fetishism that these people have for their vehicles, much like the font and object designers have for their own work; and it will look sexy. That’s pretty much the most important point. Sexy-time. I know the macro, shallow depth of field thing has been done to death, but stuff it – I still think it’s awesome.
So myself and my ultra-talented crew booked in more gear than we could fit in the Tardis and are readying ourselves for an April 4th shooting date. It’s going to eat up some of our post-production time waiting for that day to come around, but sometimes you just have to sit back and wait for the planets to align before moving forward.
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