Liverpool Production

Upon arriving in Liverpool we were a little apprehensive as we only had one solid meeting arranged and our entire idea hinged upon it. Luckily John Finigan and Steve Barton of the Liverpool Homeless Football Club were fully on board with our idea after hearing it in more detail from us by the end of the meeting we had a full schedule of interviews and appointments, we had also acquired permission to any online footage that they featured in as they held all rights to it.

During the actual filming process I was resigned to an assistant role as I was the group’s editor so I didn’t have a crucial role in this part of the project. When we were on location I helped to set up the equipment and set for the interviews, I tended to spend more time helping out the people who were working on sound as most of them weren’t well practised in that area. So for the most part I took a backseat in the production phase as there was little for me to do, one role I did find myself in multiple times while we were in Liverpool was as the group organiser because besides from Emily Spokes our Producer my group were a bit of a rabble at times and needed a forceful hand to get them to appointments on time.

Liverpool Documentary - Pre-production meetings

Over the last two weeks my group and I have had several meetings in which we discussed ideas, approaches and attempted to make contact with people relating to our ideas. After several discussions we have decided upon the idea of making a documentary on Liverpool’s homeless football club, this idea stemmed from one our earlier ideas where we though to find a homeless person staying at a local hostel and get their life story due to difficulties with making contacts and uncertainties in the contacts we had made we decided to change the idea after Tyrese found a news story on a homeless football club in Liverpool. We’ve made initial contact with the manager of the club and he has given us his full support in making the documentary and has kept in contact during the lead up to our residential trip to Liverpool, the only condition that they set on the filming was that we weren’t going to design the documentary to put a negative spin on the story, we reassured them that we had no intentions of doing so and that they could have a copy of the documentary when it was finished to use as promotion material if they wished.

We have discussed the idea of our documentary to our tutor and he agrees that this new idea is a much stronger idea to the ones we had previously pitched and encouraged us to fully commit to this approach. We discussed some ideas on the visual approach to this film and I believe one such idea that we are strongly considering going with is to not initially bring up the situation of the players in the club, instead we plan to reveal it later in the film so the audience can see just how strong the positive impact this club has on the players life as well as acting as a hook to get the audience’s attention. In the lead up to the trip a seventh member was added to our group (Marcus) who has opted to help out in the sound department so he will mostly be working with Tyrese and Ryan.

After multiple talks with the chairman of the club we have come to the mutual decision of spending the 17^th getting to know the players and staff in a meeting, before conducting interviews and getting footage on the 18^th and 19^th. This was decided so that both parties feel comfortable with each other before cameras are introduced, this benefits us as if the players feel more comfortable with us it’ll make it easier for them to talk about their stories on camera and overall the documentary will be of better quality because of it.

Quick look at Shelter

http://vimeo.com/45260069

The above link is to a documentary that Victor showed the rest of us during one of our group meetings. The documentary involves several interviews with homeless people, rough sleepers, in Manchester, it has a fairly standard style to it unlike the other documentary I looked at previously yet the standard more polished style has its own merits which work well with this sort of documentary. The documentary features some pretty impressive cinematography it even has some tracking shots as they are shown where these people sleep It is a very powerful and emotional piece that tackles a similar issue to one of our ideas for our documentary. The close up face shots during the interviews with side shot cut aways really help to get across the emotions of this piece and helps focus the audience on what is being said rather than being distracted by the background. If we end up going with the homeless idea we are currently discussing, I’d like to emulate a similar style to this film I particularly like the use of name titles before each new interviewee is introduced to establish the character with the audience.

Pockets

 

http://vimeo.com/21776727

Pockets is a short almost experimental like documentary about what people are carrying in their pockets. The documentary has a poetic feel to it as the audience can gather an idea as to what sort of person the owner of the object is by its backstory. There is no standard opening or ending to this documentary the opening scene consists of a little girl explaining her locket, the title does fade in after a few seconds leaving the audience to make the connection as to what the video is about.

A faint audio track runs throughout the video in the background, the track is serious but also has some lively notes this adds weight to the serious stories that are told to the audience without detracting from the more comical and happier characters that appear. Overall the technical aspect of the documentary is fairly simple consisting of either close ups of the objects in the owners hands or a close up of the owners face as they explain it, the documentary also makes use of a depth of field blur to fade into its shots.

Overall I really like the concept behind this work as it’s simple yet yields a great insight into peoples’ lives. The mix of characters and stories shown allows this documentary to be both serious and comical. I also like this documentary as the style is similar to the sort of concepts that my group is discussing for our own project and so I feel greatly inspired by this experimental approach to documentaries.

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.