This assignment pretty much marks the start to what’s more to come in the coming weeks ahead. Weekly assignments as well as the major assessments.

Having said that, I’m quite happy with what I managed to churn out from the limited skills I’ve acquired from watching video tutorials on Lynda.com, which I might add are really informative and detailed. Further problems that I might have encountered, I just googled the issue or typed it into the search bar of YouTube. Like what my tutor mentioned in class last week, “Whatever you’re experiencing now, know that somewhere in another corner of the planet has been through it before.”. That’s quite a power message, not just learning how to edit on Adobe Premiere Pro, but I guess it applies to life in general as well. You never know somebody’s background or what they’ve been through until they opened up to you…

Back to point, I had a little brainstorming session with myself during class time in the middle of week #3’s workshop. Started churning out ideas onto my notepad and came to nothing. However, I knew I had to get it done at the end of the day and I needed to show something, so I started on recording my daily routines, like making coffee, walking along the streets, doing laundry, cooking (which didn’t make the final cut), and so on. It’s rather challenging to do a self portrait video that represents yourself when most of the things that represents you are back home, with the exception of a few items like my tennis rackets.

After getting all my raw footages, still photos, and some recordings of daily activities, got down to business to editing. It’s probably my very first time editing on Adobe Premiere Pro if you exclude the “Haiku Exercise”, as that was more like a warmup exercise than an actual assignment. It was quite intimidating at first, but once I got a hang of things and organising my work files, I realised a certain flow from importing files to cropping and trimming to adjusting the scale and positioning as well as adding text. Once all that have been covered, there was more room for creativity on how I select my shots and which pictures to include into the sequence and how certain things are arranged and place. For audio wise, I decided to go with a more stripped and minimalist approach, not trying to go all out coming from an music and audio technology background, it was so easy to go overboard by turning this assignment more into a short 1 minute music video. Instead, I recorded some everyday sounds of water flowing, like being in the shower and flushing of the toilet bowl, and the sounds of clock ticking. It became more of a timbre-centric piece than anything else. I feel that takes my film away from having the common background music to accompany moving images and pictures.

I decided on the title “Out In the Open with Time”, as I believe if I wanted to tell a story, I would tell it through Time, as time has no boundaries, but at the same time, time restricts and constraints. And my story is about how I spend my time after having to move away from home to pursue a degree, and to some that’s like going out on your own, hence going “out in the open”.

What worked in the film? I really liked the opening titles on how the steam from the hot water from making coffee created a blanket for the text to sit and then slowly fade away. I decided to reverse that footage, as it was cool to watch how the coffee and sugar dissolved into the hot water in reverse and it suits the opening titles, otherwise, the steam wouldn’t have appeared first, but me pouring the hot water into the cup. Another thing I thought worked very well was the split screens for the scene showing people crossing the road and cars on the street shot from above street level. Instead of showing individual scenes in full scale, I decided to do it in split screen, but scaled down, as I think they were both have the same function of stating my point that time is everywhere, whether we notice it or not. It also help saves time, instead of cutting from shot to shot.

What didn’t work in the film? It was definitely a challenge to create flow and linking everything together. Without a clear plan of what was I doing, it could just turn out to a video collage of random pictures of my coffee, laundry, tennis rackets and people walking along the streets, and my mates having a game at the tennis court. I thought the concept was very important and it was hard trying to link everything together, which I hope I managed to deliver the message to the viewer.

Overall, it was a good first assignment, getting to know Adobe Premiere Pro and maybe getting to know myself a little better.