That’s a Wrap!

Well, at the time of writing, not yet, but the title will mean something soon I’d say!

Admittedly, I took my time to embrace this studio truly, but once I did I found it so profound to have grouped the extent of what we’ve been learning to this one final project.

First and foremost, I believe strongly that this studio has improved my overall ability to be a media practitioner, or at least my propensity to become one in future. I’m quite sad that after this I only have one final studio with which I have the capacity to employ in my degree the practical things that I have learnt in this studio. Paul has been great at really pushing the Small Things agenda forward, in the extent to which we learnt about lighting, sound on top of the camera work. At some points I don’t think I really knew what was going on though, I’m not sure if that is something that is on me, or whether this was how it was.

It was interesting, when this final part of the studio began to take place my other group members and I quickly, somehow dropped quite a distance behind our peers in terms of preparation which meant that as a group, we had to really step up and get prepared. I tried to get a part of a script concept sorted, which become a part of the script that we used, and it drives a decent amount of the films angst. Further we ended up filming at Darebin Parklands’ a filming location I was excited we were able to film at, though I was hoping we would roam the around the gardens more when it came to the shoot but it didn’t occur.

A few hiccups occurred during our shoot, and perhaps the most major one with the largest lesson to be ascertained was the fact that after all that time, when we shot on day 1 with the school camera, we didn’t actually film with the right sound. This meant that the exercise where we synced sound was completely moot, but I improvised okay, by just being patient with the slates and the clicks in the sound. More or less though it was quite alright, and I think I was pretty pleased.

The first cut

At some stage I got quite excited to start doing my first cut, and I tried to keep faithful, initially to the script that we had, as it stood, initially. But it felt a little bit stunted, a criticism I thought existed when it was first written because I wasn’t convinced it was something that was actually abstract but rather something that abstraction was attempted to be supplanted onto, that I cut two scenes that were originally in the script. I feel this was a good choice stylistically, though it was a shame to remove the work that I had done in the other scenes in the cut so far, but I guess it is beneficial to have made the decision, seen it, felt it right, than to hold onto scenes and footage that needed to be cut.

The smoking scene—

I ended up directing large portions of the night car scene, in which Julian was to be smoking, trying to make it an organic use of smoking in a car, to create tension and distance. Something that I think was benefited from being able to direct without the need of finding sound, though I think in the end, I struggled to find the time to generate the wild sounds I needed to have the sound of Julian smoking, and that is a regret of mine but I don’t think it is extremely detrimental as a whole. But yes, it was nice to be able to instruct Julian to do the things in the shot I felt he needed to do to create the scene that we wanted to in the script.

In terms of the sound mix and colour grade, I had quite a bit of a noodle around in general. With the sound, even the cornerstone track, of a song by the band Good Morning, I juggled around with my initial suggestion, give me something to do, then moved to Cab Deg, then Cosmic Sass as it was instrumental. I liked the facet of having a song play in the background during the talking scene so I made it an instrumental good morning song, cutting out when Julian says “we have to go back”… however when Paul shot this down I reverted back to my initial song choice of Cab Deg, which I felt worked pretty well. I tried really hard to level out the sound of the talking voices, which is something I think I might’ve been best equipped to do having spent all the time recording Gloria and Julian’s voices and knowing and which points Gloria was talking too low for instance, and I am pretty happy with the sound mix in this respect as I think it is pretty levelled out, though perhaps maybe on the day it is too loud in the cinema comparatively? I hope not.

The colour grade was applied onto the day scene to accomodate to all the shots and all the lighting differences that they had throughout the day shoot. I think that what resulted it is pretty good, a calm colour grade aimed at just highlighting the green of the green a bit more, a mood shift to tie in with the situation. I think all in all, the studio really clicked for me in the end, such that I felt like I knew what I had to do when it came to it, as opposed to other circumstances in other studios where I really felt like way more of a passenger. Here, I felt like I’d taken off the training wheels and could ride moderately well.

I think the collaborative aspect of the final project, as a whole, went down pretty well. However, I did have some thoughts about some parts, the first being that the facet (that Paul had raised) about having two co-directors being something that could not be issue-free. I think I had thought it was interesting that this had eventuated initially, and didn’t necessarily have too, but boiled down to circumstance, though when I did start to notice it being a thing, it wasn’t too alarming. The issue was present insofar as simply that we didn’t need two people to make a decision that one person could be decisive about… this led to a shoot that was much longer than I think it needed to be. Not that I’m in the clear here, as I tried, at times to make an input that I probably shouldn’t have been making as someone that wasn’t either of these co-directors, however I may put that onto mild frustrations I had felt at the time. However other than that, I felt the direction was pretty great. The most confusing part lay in trying to deal with the weather conditions, meaning that there was a circumstance of an attempted cheating the screen that was a little confusing, having the talent move around in respect to where we needed the sun to be, and to look.

 

 

 

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