When I began scribbling ideas for my investigation in week 7, I had an idea of what I wanted my final product to look like even though we were told many times that a final product was not necessarily encouraged or required.
Some things I told myself I wanted to improve on was my directing skills, audio+visual editing skills, cinematography, and also communication skills since I would be contacting strangers. I think I have somewhat improved in all these aspects, apart from sound editing which I will go into later.
From an ‘administrative’ point of view, it was difficult to schedule times with each participant, let alone reach out to them. I contacted three actors from starnow, and two of them responded to my project and were happy to help, although we were not able to meet up a second time to film more refined footage. The shootings went well, but one thing I should take note of is the clarity and assertiveness of my instructions. Sometimes I found myself unable to tell the participants to re-redo an action because I felt I didn’t have the right to since they were helping me out. Looking back I do regret that I was not directive enough.
With my cinematography, rather than saying I’ve improved, it would be more accurate to say that I’ve tried a lot of new things that I probably would not have done in the past. I tried heaps of different camera movement, exposure changes, focus pulling, zooming, to the point I would probably say I overcompensated for the lack of movement in everything else I’ve done at RMIT.
In terms of editing, the main thing I focussed on were visuals. To be honest, I completely ignored sound editing because I was too concerned with the images. I noticed that I hadn’t done any substantial sound editing in week 11 or so, and tried to make a soundscape for my frictional experiment but I was unhappy with it so I just deleted it. That’s how I came use my friend’s piano piece for ‘Vertovesque’ – it was much better than what I tried to do on garageband.
From my first and failed attempt at editing montage up until now, I tried my hand at applying video effects several times. I dabbled in things like blurring, transitions, colour grading, and stabilising. Once, I tried applying a blur to the background of a video and it was the most frustrating, complicated, and time-consuming process ever. It legitimately took me 2 weeks to apply the video effect to a 7.5 second shot and the result was relatively subtle for something that, for me, took so much effort. It is highly likely that I didn’t do it in the smartest way though as I rendered the footage almost frame by frame. I learned out how to stabilise videos with the warp effect because my footage was too shaky so I guess that something good came out of that shaky camerawork.
The works that are representative of my research are all unrefined, test shootings that I would have liked to developed on. Given the chance, I probably would in the future. The videos do feel unsubstantial to me especially since they are meant to represent my investigation, and honestly it’s quite weird to not have something ‘final’.
Research works:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B67RnNkkCddvNm9ycXowSDNoQ0U