We’ve finished! First things first, we had to change one of the locations. My initial choice was too difficult to get to and shoot within the timeframe we had, so I shifted it to another place on my first brainstorm we did in class, Alexandra Gardens.
As it stands, I think it the recipe we made worked well, though it wasn’t fantastic. The audio recording seemed to be a bit tacked on, and in practice it wasn’t conducive to getting many good audio files. Perhaps that was just because I wasn’t imaginative enough when trying to write down the list of things I would hear while watching the video, or perhaps the steps themselves need some tweaking. I’m leaning towards the latter though, because the list of visual elements that stood out to me while watching couldn’t have come any faster.
So what worked well in the shooting? , the specificity of the list is really effective. It’s a very detailed step by step procedure that made it incredibly easy to follow, and replicate. That was important, because I wanted to ensure that the footage captured at both locations was as similar as possible, which we definitely achieved. There was a really good number of wide shots and close ups to vary it up, and the videos edited together really well because of this I feel.
What didn’t work? Well as I said, the audio could have been more comprehensive. Perhaps if we had a more thorough exploratory phase for the audio recordings. Maybe rather than thinking things up, if we just recorded everything we can hear while sitting in the space. Perhaps that would have been more conducive to gathering the recordings. I also think we probably should have grabbed a tripod, because occasionally there was a bit of shake in the shoot.
As for the actual edit room, we sort of stumbled into an idea that I think worked really well. We decided to bring the two places together by editing them into each other. We wanted to put the two spaces inside of one another by layer the videos on top of each other and editing parts out so that the bookstore appeared to be in the park and vice versa. I think, limited editing skills withstanding, that the actual concept really is something that could be interesting to further explore in my next assessments. It creates a rather surreal experience for the audience while watching, especially in the shot with the shelf and the city as a background. It really looks like thats the view from the window of the bookshop which I think is a really strong effect as it isn’t really noticeable. Audio wise, I actually really like the music that was playing all the way through. Its just the song that was playing while I was shooting in the bookshop, but I think it really blends the two spaces together. Having the music from the shop playing and the audio from the park playing right the way through definitely helped to merge the spaces into one, coherent, surreal location.