There isn’t much to say that hasn’t been said in my previous post about collaboration but in a nutshell here it is. As a group we made sure that everything was decided evenly. We tended to work in stages and everyone had a job for that stage, even if they weren’t the same job, classic example: everyone else was writing scripts, whilst I was editing scripts; everyone was buys sourcing talent, whilst I was organising and writing up a call sheet. There were definitely times where people strengths and weaknesses showed, like in any other situation. The creative writers were in their element when writing the scripts and the media students generally took the back seat to learn. Then when it came to the production side of things the media students were in their element and the creative writers took the back seat to learn.

If you’ve ever heard of the phrase too many cooks you understand thins paragraph. There were sometimes I felt there was too much input from people; for instance, it took us a long time to decide on our initial idea because everyone was so keen to throw in their ideas that it was hard to move on from. Other clashes we had were just small things, people preferring to do it a certain way, whether it was the movement of the camera or the way that the scripts were written up. But if the only problems that we had was that everyone wanted to contribute too much then I think we did pretty well as a team.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the valuable lessons I’m learning is that, in order to make things run smoother and more efficiently, sometimes you have to learn to bite your tongue and get on with the task at hand, otherwise you’ll be going around in circles all day discussing what slogan a character should have on their T-shirt.

I have to say, the same thing goes for participation, we all understood that we had separate lives to live, work was a major thing we had to work around but we all did extremely well to make it to meetings and the shoots when we could. After our consult on Monday we had our own separate meeting, which everyone attended as much as they could. We had full days of shooting and editing that people gave up their weekends for. There is no stand out from this group, because we were all on the same page as to what we needed to get done. I’d like to commend my teammates: Niamh, Trent, Darcy, Nat and Jen for an excellent effort and a great result.

With the second Trailer I tried to make it more informative without having the rely on my narrating the whole thing. I used the footage and audio that was taken on the second day of shooting from Jack, who was the lead on the mockumentary genre. Cutting together her dialogue with titles helped explain the story a bit more. The main problem I have with this is it makes Jack seem like the main character of the series when in reality each character is the main character in their respective episodes. However I don’t know how I could’ve used dialogue from other character without making it sound too incoherent and messy.

One problem I had with the editing was trying to make the two different cameras that we used look similar enough. We decided to change camera for a number of stylistic reasons which made sense at the time however without the context it looks sloppy. Because the cuts are fairly quick I’m hoping that it mostly goes unnoticed.

explanation Trailer:

I thought this might be a good opportunity to address some of the worries I had going into editing about the way we conducted our shoot.

The main concerns being the:
– quality of the footage with the camera that we were using (focus)
– The quality of the audio
– Being able to easily navigate to audio whilst editing

The footage came out really well! for the most part the footage was definitely usable, there were clips that were soft or completely out of focus but we took enough takes for there to be at least one usable/workable shot. There are certain instances where the focusing couldn’t be helped because it was such a shallow depth of field, like in the image below, only half of “Ted” and “Vincent’s” face is in focus.

 

 

The audio was a big problem! It turns out that the lapel microphones were very faulty and wouldn’t record anything! so there are a few files of nothing mixed in with the rest; the only usable audio came from the boom. Luckily they were all grouped so one take was in one folder which had 4 audio tracks in them. This did make it marginally easier to sort through the audio tracks however it was still a hassle opening up the audio tracks to listen for the markers instead of being able to just read it on the still image of the footage. Alas we didn’t do that, next time I will try and be more adamant that we need to add the audio roll to the marker!

This isn’t the end of the world though and we seem to be coping well enough so I shall continue to soldier on.

So we decided as a group to go the way we’ve alway gone when dividing up tasks and that was for every body to take responsibility for their own genre. As has been noted several times before, I don’t have a genre that I’m looking after so it made sense that I was to cut together a trailer to show off the series as a whole. Originally I thought it would be better to wait for everyone else to finish their editing, that way I could use their already edited footage, keeping the correct colour and the correct mood for the genre. Very quickly I realised that this would leave me at a big disadvantage as I was totally dependant on everyone else finishing theirs and giving me enough time. So I decided to create a trailer from scratch.

We had gotten a class on how to set out your editing and workspace so I tried to keep to that as much as possible. It seemed like a lot of ground work for some peace of mind but I can understand the reasoning behind it. We were to create new sequence every time we wanted to do something different, that way we would have a record of where we came from. I have to admit it is hard to keep it in your mind, its a bit like clicking the save button, you never can remember it until its too late.

My first step isn’t very exciting so it’s not worth much of a post but here it is anyway. I set up a sequence entitled trailer footage which was all the unedited shots I though were good enough to make it into the trailer. I ended up with about 20 minutes of footage which was a lot better than the hour and a half that we had. I chose these shots because they looked good, not because they were important to the story. There is, however, one piece of dialogue I will keep which was filmed on the second day which is the character Jack explaining to camera why they are here, basically telling the plot points of the series. My plan, as it stands at the moment is use that dialogue under the other images to create an exciting and insightful trailer.

You can see my first attempts at editing a trailer below:

 

So we have finished out filming and it looks really good, really proud of the shots and everyone involved! in our consult we were asked to do a colour correction exercise to start us off. Even though I do love editing, I use Final Cut Pro instead of the program that we were asked to use which is Premiere Pro. Although they’re similar the small differences have been enough to trip me up and is just more time consuming.  Although the tools are different I figured the outcome should be the same so with that in mind and my past experience I set to work on colour correcting the clip that I chose. I didn’t choose the clip for any other reason than I liked it.

In the video you’ll see 4 clips each with different colouring, I tried not to be too gentle with the colour so that you could really see the difference and it would be easier what kind of mood a certain colour gives to the shot.

The first clip is is the footage that has come straight out of the DSLR – no colour correction.
(because its a DSLR the image is already compressed which means it looks good from the start but its difficult to edit the image because there isn’t as much information and range – worth noting when watching the clips)

The second clip I was going for a darker horror vibe, even though the dialogue doesn’t suit the genre I think with this colouring and the appropriate music this shot could come out very sinister!

The third clip is green, because I wanted to try something different, however upon looking at this shot I can see why not many films use green as their filter because it looks pretty awful. I can see how you might use it to your advantage, if a character was meant to be looking or feeling sick.

The final clip is almost a sepia looking filter, the cliche would be an old western but I feel that the fairly flat colouring could lend itself well to the noir genre that we’re exploring as it would let the shadows stand out more than the original footage would.

 

 

So the time had finally come to shoot this thing, and I couldn’t be happier! Even though it was interesting to work on the pre-production and it was a real learning experience for me, the practical side is where I hit my stride and where I was finally able to give some back to the group. The creative writers in our group made it clear that they weren’t the most comfortable behind a camera or doing anything technical so the other media students and I made sure they knew what they were doing by the end of the day.

As you might have seen in the call sheet that I had put together we all took it in turn of being various things, depending on the number of crew we had at a time we would have a Director, AD, cinematographer, boom operator and light operator. By the end of the shoot we all had done at least one of each. I think this was the best way to do it because it allowed everyone to have a taste for each individual job and also allowed us media students to lead by example.

In regards to the actual shooting I think it went fairly well! we had a slight problem with an actor not showing up which we managed to overcome by having one of our own step in but besides that there were no major problems. I mentioned in a previous post that it would be interesting to see how I would go running with a call sheet instead of running on the fly: to be honest, I didn’t find it much of a help. It was good in the sense that we didn’t leave anything out because we new exactly what we needed to film and it made sure that we each gave everyone an equal turn which is fair in this context but when it comes to actually being in the industry you don’t swap around your jobs every hour. I guess it might have been the way that I wrote out the call sheet, I tended to block out hour lots where we could rehearse and film a specific genre but besides stating that every other decision was thought up right there and then, which is how I usually work. I feel, if I had the opportunity again, I would take one script and put it through the whole pre-production phase, doing things like making a shot list and drawing up a story board to create something very rigid that you have to stick to. unfortunately this was not the case and I never got that epiphany that I was hoping for, something to prove to me that it was worth doing so much planning. I guess the only thing that I found benefit in is organising the crew and cast to shoot around their other schedules of work and life, although you’d like to think that if they were in the industry and getting paid for it then you wouldn’t need to worry about that anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great day of shooting, I managed to bring some skills to the team which I may have been lacking in the pre-production stage, nifty tricks that I had learned from my other shoots, only things that you can really learn once you’ve been through them before, like using a swivel chair for a dolly shot.

Once we were all happy where the scripts were we then moved onto the next stage which was organising location. We had always kept location in the back of our heads when writing script so that we could envisage what the end product might look like. We knew we wanted to shoot at RMIT for several reasons: it was central for everyone to get to, we needed the setting of a uni (so what  better place to fit than a uni) and it meant that we could do a lot of specified location scouting to try and find the best possible place to shoot. We all tried to keep an eye out for possible locations during our time around the uni, we’d then take photos and report back to the group what we found and whether we could use it in our shoot. One such place that I found was an alleyway that I thought would be good for the horror genre, even though we didn’t use it, it was good to build up a catalogue of potential locations.

Here are some locations I found for the Horror Genre:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building up a good catalogue of places around the uni is really helpful to map up how our shooting days might go. There were a lot of potential places however the problem that we’re finding is we need rather neutral spaces for our shoot as the location has to accomodate for different genres. In the pictures above they would’ve worked really well stylistically for horror but couldn’t accomodate for mockumentary or fairytale. So at the moment we’re thinking a classroom, or something that is enclosed so that we can control the mise-en-scene.

As Mentioned previously it was my job to look after editing all of the scripts and making sure the continuity was there between the difference episodes. Our original idea of sending all of the scripts to me and then me sending them all out separately didn’t quite work as there was a lot of explaining that had to go on to make sure that everyone understood where I was going with it. There were also a few times where I originally had hoped to change a certain occurrence in the script only to be told by the writer that it couldn’t be changed as it was crucial to the whole story and what they planned to film, so I had to make even more changes to other peoples script and all in all it was a bit of a mess.

At our next meeting we addressed this quite simply, it wasn’t working, what can we do to fix it and make sure that everyone was on the same page. We all decided, in the end, that it was far better for me to write down, what we called, a major story arc and everyone work off that piece of writing, rather than me trying to work off several pieces of writing. Our major story arc contains all of the common occurrences and meetings between the different characters and at what time in the story they occur. It was my job to create this major story arc as I had the best idea as to where everyone was heading thanks to my previous attempts to make things work. It was really simple, I only did dot points of what needed to happen and I tried not to over complicate things so that everyone could follow along easily enough. Then everyone was sent off to work on the scripts again but this time everyone would be basing it on this single piece of writing, which in the end gave all the scripts a nice uniformity to them and kept the continuity peeps at bay.

It was definitely a struggle for me at first trying to get all the scripts to work together because I’d never written many scripts let alone conduct a multi-writer marathon! It was good to collaborate with everyone and really interesting to see different styles of writing and how people were trying to convey their genre within their writing. I think for me, if I was trying to write a script in a certain genre I think the easiest thing to do would be to explicitly say it at the start of the script, because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this editing experience, sometimes the simple solutions are the best!

Here is the Major Story arc that I got people to work off of: