Experimental film - self-assessment

For our work me and my partner Chris wanted to create the sense of a bus ride, but more than that we wanted to focus on the idea of public transport being a place where people’s personal stories gather yet are only really glimpsed at. The original idea really stemmed from our mutual enjoyment of Daybreak Express by DA Pennebaker although after the idea of working on public transport our project moved a bit away from this influence and more towards Pejk Malinovski’s sound project Tunnel Vision. We thought that by having people’s thoughts over the atmos track of a bus that we would achieve this affect. Continuing on from this our film consisted entirely of black and white photographs we thought that this would emphasise the idea of the audience only seeing a snippet of the character’s lives while the lack of colour would help indicate that the character’s minds weren’t on the current journey. The idea to use still photographs for our film came from the Chris Marker’s film La Jetée-, after watching it we realised that not only would photos be the best way to visualise our soundtrack but it would fit with the theme that we were going for. Another influence that affected the production of our audio project was Zbig Rybcznski’s film Tango, we realised that the chaos created by overlapping repeated actions could help to demonstrate the idea that public transport is a chaotic gathering of peoples personal worlds. The affect this overlapping repetition had on our soundtrack made it harder to pick out just one character’s voice, we felt that this helped to create the affect that the audience weren’t hearing the character’s full story while the repetition of the same lines showed the repetition of people’s mundane lives. We didn’t really think of a particular audience when we created our work but due to some language and references our project wouldn’t be suitable to younger audiences.

As a whole I’m pretty happy with how the soundtrack came out, the levels on the character’s lines are pretty good so that the sound of the bus isn’t drowned out by them, yet they are strong enough to stand out even when the chaos is at its height and there is three or four character’s speaking at once. The overlapping voices and use of mixing left and right mono sounds really works to create the chaotic nature we were going for, it also forces the audience to pay more attention to one character over the others in order to catch the glimpse of that character’s life. The editing for the sound is also really good with the timing between the character’s line being repeated over becoming shorter and more chaotic as the piece goes on before levelling out again at the end. One criticism that I do have is that one or two of the character’s lines could do with re-recording, this is mostly due to us using friends as actors and actresses so the delivery and emotions of the lines aren’t always delivered as good as it could be. If I was to make the project again I would consider using people with more experience in drama or acting to deliver the lines. For our film I think that the quality of both the photographs and the editing was done to a high standard and I was really pleased with it. The use of photos helps to convey the idea that what the audience is seeing is just a snippet of that person’s life, the one criticism I would make about the photos is that we could have done with a greater range of shots for some of the characters. This would have add more variety to the film and could have helped to enforce the character’s thoughts and emotions at certain points if we were to remake the film we would definitely get more photos during the shoot to increase the coverage and help to enforce the character’s emotions. The editing really helped convey the idea of many different character’s stories being glimpsed with some of the timing of the cutting even making the audience wonder if some of the characters are linked together. In terms of criticism for the editing I would say editing can always be improved, the timing of some cuts could have been tighter, we could have utilised the idea of having quick flashes of one character’s photos in the midst of another character’s thoughts like we did earlier on in the film. There are also points in the climax where it’s arguable if we focused on the right character or if we lost a bit of the rhythm. This could all been improved if we spent longer editing the footage and is something we would certainly do if we were to redo the project.

We struggled a bit for ideas for our sound project at first and it took a while for us to really get an idea together, eventually we sat down and discussed what work we’d seen in our seminars that we most enjoyed, this is what sparked our idea for recording people’s thoughts on a tram. We came up with a rough plan of what sort of sounds we wanted to record and how they would fit together; we also decided that for the sound project I would handle most of the recording while Chris dealt with most of the editing. Our project went through a variety of changes when we moved from the planning stage to the creation process, for one our original idea had been to record on a tram but due to costs we had to move the idea to a bus, this didn’t affect our production drastically as it only affected the atmos track and not the other content. Another change that came about was we decided instead of asking people on the bus what thoughts they had while on a bus we decided to script some lines for a variety of different characters and record them in another location, this decision was made for two reason, firstly if we recorded on the bus then there would be a lot of background noise to deal with and secondly we thought people wouldn’t be very inclined to divulge personal thoughts to strangers on a bus. It wasn’t until late on in the editing that the idea of having a repeated overlap of the character’s thoughts came around. When it came round to making the film we didn’t really get started until the idea of having it made up entirely of photographs that we really got started, with this idea we firstly switched roles as Chris was more experienced at using cameras than me and so took the bulk of the photos, we then made up a rough design of what photos we wanted and which character’s they belonged to. We originally planned to have some subtle moving images in our production as well but we were forced to dismiss this idea due to the difficulty of getting steady footage on a moving bus. The bus setting also caused other changes to our production as we had to work with limited space and couldn’t plan for how busy the bus would be, as a result of this we were forced to abandon the seating plan for our characters that we had drawn up as well as some of our shots. During our shoots for the bus photos we were forced to do some characters on different days due to our actors being unable to make it, this limited some of the shots we could take as we couldn’t show empty seats our different bus passengers that weren’t on the other shots. As Chris had done the majority of the photo’s I did most of the editing, we couldn’t really plan this section as for the most part it had to be judged by ear which character’s voice was the most dominate or meaningful at the time and which photos were most appropriate to follow that up with, the editing process mostly consisted of me re-listening to the same section of audio to distinguish which character’s photo was most appropriate and how to follow it up with the next photo.

I would definitely say that during this project I have developed more creatively than I have technically, because before this project I had never even looked at audio projects or experimental films. So I had to learn how to approach the project in an entirely different manner to how I would normally, for instance before this project I wouldn’t think that a film consisting purely of photograph could really express ideas or hold an audience’s interest. As such I think I will be able to approach future briefs in a more creative manner. On the technical side I have grown more confident with the zoom sound recorder, a piece of equipment I had little experience with, I’ve also learnt the benefits of specific equipment such as a pop shield when recording just voices and a shotgun mic for recording specific sounds.  For this project I also had to use Final Cut pro an editing software that for the most part I was unsure of how to use, my skills didn’t develop massively in this area as our project only demand me to cut the length of the photograph although my ability in timing cuts has developed during this project as it was an essential skill to master for this project to work. One area where I have developed new skills with Final Cut pro is learning about which video settings are best and what changes to make to them before I begin any project this was caused by several exporting problems that came about after the editing process. Chris did teach me a little about how to use the 60D camera we booked out, so in terms of that I’ve developed in areas such as framing shots and how to use some of the settings on the camera.

 

On a whole I think that Chris and I worked well as a team, we both had strengths and weakness that counter balanced each other. For instance during the audio part of the project Chris was the one who originally came up with the idea of having peoples thoughts on a tram while I made the more practical points such as cost and having to script characters, then later when we needed to script the character’s Chris would come up with the characters we needed and I would come up with the script. This balance continued throughout both sections of the project and I would say contributed to the quality of the work we produced. A strength of our teamwork would definitely be our communication as there was never a point where one of us didn’t know what was going on or where we were meeting, we also always made sure that both of us were able to come at the designated time before planning a meeting so that neither of us was left alone to do the work. Although we did take main roles in the project such as one editor and one recorder we both contributed equally to the recording and editing side of the project. If I was to criticise how we worked as a team I would say that we tended to be fairly slow on actually starting the project and we would take large breaks between working on it, this left us rushing at times to meet crit deadlines, this could partially be put down to us as a team not doing as much planning as we probably should have. Personally I believe that my own teamwork skills could be improved by me offering my ideas and criticisms more readily as I was sometimes slow or reluctant to offer these to Chris, I did improve upon this as the project went on but it could still do with some more work.

Experimental film - crit

After our crit we made several small edits to the film, we also fixed the export problem that we had ran into after finishing the first draft of the film. The main feedback that we had received that we could work on was that the film lost something during the middle part of the film, although they couldn’t describe in detail what they thought it was missing. Both me and Chris had a similar inclination that the middle had been lacking something so we knew what they were trying to say, the only solution to this that I could come up with is that at some points I had picked out the wrong character’s photos in the middle or that the photos weren’t quick enough for an interesting climax. Besides from that the film received fairly positive feedback with our peers picking out either the photography or editing as the best feature, which goes to show how both me and Chris contributed fairly equally.

After a lot of help from support staff at Stores, we finally managed to fix the export problem we were having before the crit so that our finished film was the right size and quality to show our work in the best possible way.

Experimental film - Filming and editing

The members of our cast that
could make it

Unfortunately due to various reasons it was impossible for me and Chris to get our whole cast together on one day, this was fairly problematic for us as we had to be very careful with how we framed the shots because we couldn’t control the set and the passengers of the bus would look completely different on different days. It also meant we had to be careful in our positioning of the characters as we couldn’t show an empty seat or another passenger where we then later showed a character. We decided to make the best of the situation and shoot on the day that the most people could make it on, this limited the shots we could take on the other members of cast who couldn’t make it but the damage was limited this way. To compromise the limitation of what we could show on the other characters we tended to take extra care with the framing or we used more close ups, we also on a whim took a shot of one of the characters (the paranoid girl) where you could see that the bus is empty behind her we decided that we could use this shot to emphasise that she was paranoid.

I did most of the editing for this project, which although didn’t require any advance editing techniques it was time consuming and difficult. For the most part all I had to do was decide how long each photo would stay on screen for and which photos to use, this was relatively easy for the start of the film as photos could linger for a while and there was one character to deal with. As the film progressed and voices began overlapping it became increasingly difficult for me to pick out which photo best suited the dominate voice and which character’s photo should follow it.

Experimental Film - Planning

With the base idea of what we were going to do me and Chris began planning our film. We decided to firstly return to the bus station to reacquaint ourselves with our set, while we were there we took several pictures with the 60D camera we planned to shoot on the idea was for use to get some establishing shots that we could place at the start of the film. After finishing looking around and checking how much room we had to shoot on the bus, we sat down and began to discuss ideas as to where the most idea locations for characters to sit were and what sort of shots to go for. Obviously we knew that as we were shooting on public transport that our ideas would have to be flexible as we couldn’t control how busy the bus would be or what seats would be free.

With the ideas we had come up with Chris drew up a rough storyboard for the character shots, this was to give us a rough guide as to what sort of shots we had to get while filming and a rough order for the first character track.

La Jetée- Chris Marker

La Jetée is a 1962 French film by Chris Marker that consists almost solely of photographs. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world in France; the narrative revolves around a man that is sent back in time to find help for the future but the man is transfixed by a memory of a girl he saw on a jetty when he was a boy, he also vaguely remembers witnessing a death that day. As you would expect from a narrative set in a post-apocalyptic world the plot is quite dark and at time unnerving. Personally I had been dubious on how well a film of photos could tell a story such as the one in La Jetée but I was surprised to find the method worked incredibly well, the use of photographs helps to emphasise that what the audience are seeing are moments from the past as that is what we associate photographs with. The photos tend to be fairly dark and grainy, this serves not only to create the dark and unnerving atmosphere but it also helps to create a believable setting without the need for a detailed set that a film filled with moving images would require.

The key tool that truly carries the films narrative though is the voice over that runs over the images, as without the audience wouldn’t grasp the narrative. The voice over is sometimes joined by other sounds such as the beating of a heart or half heard whispers that the audience can’t really make out, this works to keep the dark and sinister tone of the film even while the narrative moves to a story of the man chasing after the woman in his memories. This aspect of the narrative adds a sad undertone to the film as the man chases after a woman that is likely long dead in his own timeline, this undertone works well with the slow lingering pace of the film and the photographs. The use of these undertones throughout the film could be seen as foreshadowing the end where the audience see the man return to the memory of when he first saw the woman but is killed before he can reach her, this brings the narrative back full circle and explains the man that the character saw die when he was a boy was actually himself from the future. This final realization brings home the crushing darkness and sadness of the film as you realise that the man’s life was always going to end in despair from the very start.

The film has a very interesting and unique narrative; its success can be seen by its influence of the film 12 monkeys that was heavily based on La Jetée. After seeing this film both I and my partner have agreed that the use of photographs is the best way to tell the story of our own film, from that you can say that La Jetée is the largest inspiration for my own experimental film. Personally it has also shown me that simple and unique ways of telling narratives, like using only still images, can be just as interesting as traditional ways.

Sound Project 5 - Improvements

After the crit me and Chris began to improve our project in the ways we had outlined, we rerecorded the voices this time using a pop shield in front of the mic to improve the quality of the recordings. Once we had gathered the voices we began to work on editing them together to improve the piece, while discussing how best to edit the piece we came up with the idea of having the sound track repeat itself similar to how Zbig Rybczynski’s experimental film Tango does.

 http://vimeo.com/21175765

I suggested having the repetition start midway through the sound track so that the character’s thoughts began overlapping and becoming more confusing, my idea for this was that the overlapping of the thoughts would be similar to how the individual worlds of the people on the bus overlap by them all being on the bus at the same time. Chris improved upon this idea by coming up with the idea that the repetitions should come from only one direction, for example the first set of thoughts are stereo sounds but the first set of repeated tracks come from the left speaker, the tracks then begin to alternate which side they come from until the final set which is once again stereo. Not only does this add to the confusion of the piece but it also serves to separate the thoughts while forcing the audience to pay more attention to one voice over the others.

We also decided to have the atmos track fade out near the end so that the paranoid character's lines have more impact and to emphasises the idea that while she is having those thoughts the bus has stopped and everyone else has gotten off.

Sound Project 4 - Crit

Today we had the sound crit for our audio projects, where I and Chris presented our project to our seminar group and tutor. For this presentation we showed the first draft that we had created, we explained afterwards that it was our first draft and we still had a fair amount of work to do on it. That said the feedback we received was very positive, besides some issues with levels which had affected all groups, this was due to the speakers not playing the sounds as loud as the headphones in the editing suit did, many people thought that our project sound finished as it was.

We explained that the next step in our project was to rerecord the voices using different actors, other than ourselves, as well as adding other sounds in the background of the dialogue to help explain and reinforce the characters’ thoughts and story.

Sound project 3 - Recording dialogue and some editing

Me and my partner met up after our seminar and gathered a few people to record different audio to a few different characters that Chris had come up with. For the most part we let our actors look at the character they were playing and improvise a few lines that they thought fitted the character in the given situation, if they were struggling we would quickly script a few lines for them to read. This method of recording characters was a good solution to our previous problem of a script being too narrow but recording actual bus passengers would be highly difficult, this method also allowed us to record in a quiet room and overlay the voice over the atmos track. As this was to be our first draft of the project, we had some actors play multiple actors which is something we will avoid in the final production. We decided that I would write the script for the final draft although I will only be semi scripting it as we decided it would seem more real if the actors were allowed to improvise some of their lines. By the end of the day we had managed to record the voices for all of the characters, Chris had recorded two the previous night, and we began the process of editing it.

Chris did most of the editing but I did give advice and suggestion during the process to help refine the project, one such suggestion was turning the volume of the atmos track up slightly because as it was the sound of the bus was lost behind the dialogue and as such the sense of place we had created was lost. The actual editing was fairly simple it mostly consisted of cutting the sound clips to just include the dialogue we wanted and positioning the files in the right order. Although the editing was limited and all we were creating was a first draft the end product sounded pretty good, our plan is to improve it by adding further sounds to support the thoughts in the characters’ heads, we also would prefer a more diverse range of actors to improve the realism of our piece. We’ve discussed some ideas and have come up with a list of possible sounds that we need to record to see how well they fit in the piece, we’ve also started talking about rerecording the dialogue to improve the quality and find other actors to fulfil the character roles where actors doubled up roles.

Sound Project 2 - Recording atmos track

Me and my partner met up to begin recording sound for our project upon meeting we made several adjustments to our idea. Firstly we decided to move the project from a tram to a bus; this was partly due to the cost of having to take a tram whenever we needed new recordings. We also decided to partly script the voice overs that were going to appear in our project and record them at a later date. When we got to the bus station we got permission to record there, we recorded multiple sounds in the station ranging from the general noise inside the station to specific parts of the buses as they drove away. For these more specific sounds we used a shotgun mic to focus in on an area without the general buzz of our surroundings interfering.

Once we had gathered the sounds we needed we moved on to an actual bus, firstly asking the bus driver for permission to record. Once we were on the bus we set up the zoom on its own to record stereo sound at the back of the bus, I recorded multiple three minute tracks so that we had spares to edit with if there was a problem with any of them. We also set up the shotgun mic again to record specific areas in more details, such as the bus door opening and passengers getting on. With these tracks recorded we were pretty confident that we would be able to create a decent atmos track for our project.

When we were finished recording Chris asked if he could take the memory card from the zoom so he could listen through the clips at home and begin editing them. I saw no problem with this so I agreed; I later heard the mock up that he had made. It sounded pretty good and definitely gave the sense that you were in a bus station and getting on a bus.

Sound Project 1

The other day me and my partner Chris Lowe sat down to discuss the ideas we had and decide which one we were going to go with. After some discussion we decided to go with Chris’ idea of recording in a public tram, the idea was inspired by Pejk Malinovski’s sound project ‘Tunnel Vision’. Our idea differs slightly though as where Pejk recorded people talking directly to the microphone our idea was to record snippets of conversations and have them fade in and out over each other. The reasoning behind it is to create a realistic atmosphere of public transport, by emulating the idea that on public transport you are surrounded by people who in a way are in their own worlds and you only ever catch snippets of that world never the full story behind it.

During our discussion I did raise several points that may cause problems with our idea, firstly was that our idea required us to record on a public transport so we would most likely need permission to do so. Chris hadn’t thought of this but said he would email the tram company to see if it was okay and that we would double check with the personnel on the tram when we got there. I also raised the problem that people may not be willing to let us record their conversations, the only solution we could come up with to solve this is to record partly scripted conversations later but that would cost us the diversity that we would get on the tram and it wouldn’t be as natural. In the end we decided that scripting the conversations would be a last resort.

At the end of the discussion we had to decide which roles we were going to take, we decided that I would be the sound recorder and Chris would be the editor. That said we decided that we would both be present for the recording and editing to offer assistance if the other needed it.

Sound Seminar

In our last seminar we were given the brief for our first project, the project was a sound project and as such we were also taken to Chris Watson sound exhibition nearby. The exhibition was a sound map of Sheffield; as such it consisted of recordings from many different locations in and around Sheffield. Being new to Sheffield I hadn't been to many of the places that I heard in the recordings but I also found that I didn't need to have been there. The sounds were so immersive that it took very little effort to imagine being in that place.

On a later visit to the same exhibition I found that moving around the gallery, caused the sound to change slightly. This was further emphasise on the exhibitions immersive nature, I wasn't just seeing the place through the sound I could walk around it, experience it from different points. Although this was mostly done through the way the gallery was set up and is a little harder to achieve through a sound piece alone, it doesn't take away from the impressive immersion that the sound piece generates.

What I think I took away most from this exhibition was a sense of just how powerful sound could be on its own, I already understood that music was a very powerful tool and could be used to manipulate emotions and atmospheres but I had never truly appreciated how ordinary sounds on their own could create such powerful atmospheres. This hasn't so much as inspired me but more made me determined to create a powerful sound project that has the ability to immerse an audience in a similar way that Chris Watson's exhibition does.

Analyse of Love Me or Leave Me Alone

In my opinion “Love Me or Leave Me Alone” is a rather simple film what you see on the surface is really all there is to the film, it is the director’s portrayal of a stereotypical teenage relationship. Although personally I didn’t really like the film I can say it was efficient in getting across its meaning the film really highlighted the immature and bipolar nature of such relationships, an example of this can be seen by how in the space of the film the couple go from extreme hate to love.

One particular technique that was used in this film that I liked was the way the cuts between shots grew quicker as a way to build tension, this technique changed some ordinary scenes to tense filled moments. The reason for the use of this technique was most likely to capture the audience’s attention as little happens in the film yet the building tension creates a sense that something is about to happen. During the boy’s journey home the scene was almost too dark to see with only the passing headlights of cars illuminated the scene, I particularly like this technique as it not only highlights the character’s solitude but visually it is an interesting technique. When combined with the built up tension this technique really draws in the audience as they expect it to end with a car hitting the character.

The form of the film is a fairly standard structure for a film to express the sort of subject matter that the director was trying to get across. The only notable anomaly in the form was that the film started in the middle of a heated argument between the couple, the context and beginning are never shown, which is a little odd structure wise. This could have been the directors way of adding realism as without context the argument could have been about anything and so could  apply to any stereotypical teenage couple.