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.