Project Brief 5 – Digital Director Final Reflection

In the final Group Project of digital director ‘Sketchy Students’ I was a part of the writing group. My individual title was Storyboard Generator. I’m a very visual person so it made sense that I would be able to work in this role and it was a generally well-received idea. I also came up with some very basic concept art of the characters and what there personalities might look like. As a part of the Writing Group we all came up with our own ideas and bounced off each others ideas to create the scripts for the episodes of our project “Sketchy Students”. Unfortunately, for one reason or another the scripts went through a lot of critiques by the management team and other individuals, which meant that a lot of our original concepts were changed or left out entirely. This was a valuable lesson that I learned to live with and adapt to: you can never have full creative control when working with a large group of people.

 

Besides the fact that a lot of my ideas got cut in the script editing process I was still pleased with the content that stayed in. For example, the concept for the third episode was an idea that I had brought to the table. I was really proud to see it when we were filming and seeing it evolve into the final product.

 

In regards to my individual job as Storyboard Generator; I hit several snags on delivering them/creating them. I only ended up creating 2 storyboards for episode 1 and episode 3. It was my intention to experiment with how a storyboard might aid the production team in delivering a product that mirrored the writing teams vision. The idea being to juxtapose the two episodes that had a storyboard to the ones that didn’t. Unfortunately neither of the episodes with the storyboards really matched the storyboards because the scripts had gone through such a rigorous critique that by the time the script was finalised the storyboards didn’t make sense anymore. I guess if you can pull anything from that experiment it is that storyboards, at least in the pre-production stage, wasn’t useful at all. The message being that the script needs to be finalized before the storyboards can be created, otherwise it’s just a mess. Upon reflection if there was less critique and a timeline system in place for individual due dates then the whole system would’ve worked a lot more.

 

All in all it was a good class and I had fun collaborating with my fellow students. I also learnt how difficult it is to keep a singular vision when there are so many people working on the project. It was difficult keeping track of the project as a whole because there were so many people working on it, I think, moving forward, it would be good to get a different view point such as working on social media, in order to broaden my knowledge and understandings further.

Is Gogglebox real?

In this post I will be looking at the screening of Goggle Box during week 12 and discuss its construction and its attempt to set itself apart from other reality TV shows.

Gogglebox is a Television show about people watching television, a real gripping concept, so its easy to believe that many critiques were negative towards the notion. However once it aired it seemed to receive much praise. Obviously it has to be constructed in some kind of a way otherwise it wouldn’t be able to captivate its audience. Arguably the show captivates their audience by making something “real”. But hang on a second, isn’t that what reality TV did in the 90’s! Basically Goggle box has re-used the same premise that started the reality TV craze, which, ironically, is that “its doing something different”.

Gogglebox was originally a British television show, it first aired in 2013 and is up to its 6th season! More recently Gogglebox has come to Australia, airing its first season at the beginning of this year (2015) it is now on its second season, obviously the show is doing something right. Obviously the transnational format works, but thats nothing to stick it apart from other reality tv genres such as the Bachelor and Bachelorette, big brother, britain/australia’s got talent, all of which (in fact the genre of reality TV in general) seem have a good transnational format.

In the advertisement for the Australian Gogglebox there are words that flash up on the screen that try to distinguish the show from anything else. Unlikey, funny, compelling, heart warming and original are all words flashing up on the screen, “the TV show about people watching TV”. The advertisement also shows the people watching a few shows, interestingly enough all these shows are based in reality. Family feud is first to be watched by its audience who laugh and crack jokes about it. The news is the second thing to be shown which talks about negative effects of alcohol, where a few of Gogglebox members, the members with drinks in their hand, ridicule and make fun of the accusation. The last show is on Village Vets, this show takes a turn in the mood, picturing an animal in need, various female members tearing up watching the screen. By choosing these types of shows the advertisement is trying to prove the realness of its own show, trying to put it as a step more real than the other shows.

The first episode of season 2 displays some common reality TV tropes, a narrator recalls what the Gogglebox families have been doing since the last season ended. A couples dog died, an elderly couple got a grandchild, some got engaged, someone went to Sweden and back and daughter had a debutant ball. This has nothing to do about TV but is constructed to create a connection between the families and the potential audience. It’s peculiar to note the different shows that they watch in this episode: The Bachelorette, Worlds biggest Pets, Celebrity apprentice, The Australian Story – Malcolm Turnbull, X-Factor, Road Breath Test and Nigella Lawson. It’s is interesting to note that the only scripted, planned show they watched was Nigella’s cooking show, all the other shows are based in reality in one form or another. This might be in order to keep relevant with the reality TV craze or it might be to do with the fact that there is a lot more reality TV shows in TV. Another explanation is Gogglebox might be undermining the integrity of the “reality” in these shows in order to create its own realism.

So is the show constructed? We may never know for certain but I, for one, don’t tend to talk that much in front of a TV! In the end Gogglebox uses its common looking various families commenting on other reality TV shows in order to distance itself from the negative connotations of that genre even though, when you analyse it closely, it is still doing the same thing, looking at drama in the everyday lives of “ordinary” people.

References:

IMDb, Gogglebox (TV series 2013-), viewed 27 October 2015, <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2762330/?ref_=nv_sr_1>

youtube, Gogglebox Australia: First look, viewed 27 October 2015, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZZt1NT14tk>

GoggleBox 2015, Television Series, 2, Ten Network, 1 October.

Exhibition Artefact

As was mentioned in my previous post, it was my responsibility to cut together a 1 minute screener to be shown during the studio presentations. It took my a few hours in the editing suites but I got there.

My main problem was editing out 40 seconds of footage, which is a lot considering the footage that I was using was already cut down into trailers. Have the two trailers as a starting point was really helpful because I already had the footage the idea and the mood of how the video would go. After talking to Paul I decided to cut the two trailers evenly into two 30 second pieces. The first piece (which I titled the explanation) is a more informative piece which describes the back story to the plot and introduces the character and location a bit. The second trailer (titled the trailer) was more of a teaser trailer, it introduced the idea of genre being a common them but a part from the that it was merely exciting and suspenseful. I really wanted the second trailer to look epic and I think I’ve done it well enough to seem it. All shall be revealed come exhibition day.

Here is the edited trailer I created as a screener for the studio presentation and exhibition day:

Second Presentation

So once again we split things up evenly, we decided that we were going to let our videos talk for most of it. We scripted the video to run for 9 minutes which left 6 minutes of talking. Luckily we had 6 group members so it was easy to do the math. we talked for one minute each on different topics and stages through our project. It was my job to introduce the subject and recall for everyone what we were doing and where we left off. Although a not very informative speech we all agreed it was necessary to have that introductory speech.

The rest of the speech went really well! people seemed to enjoy the footage and we got a few giggle during the appropriate places. All in all it was a job well done.

One thing that I was really excited for was to see everyone else presentation, to see where everyone else got to, its the competitive spirit inside of me. I wasn’t disappointed, there was plenty of talent there! It seemed that the rockumentary was a common genre that people were playing around with and to some really different effects! I only wish that I could’ve been a part of all of the projects just to see how everyone else was working, compare to our group to see who had the better way of doing things, not because I want to be better but because I’m always looking for ways to better myself.

Trailer 1

Judging by the trailer you might’ve guessed, I opted to create 2 trailers. Why? because there was so much footage that I wanted to show off and it would’ve just dragged on if it was in the one. So I created a teaser trailer, one which doesn’t really tell you a whole lot about the plot and the other one is a more in depth trailer with the audio of Jack explaining the plot line to camera.

I know throughout this project I hadn’t really had a big chance to show off my creativeness so I decided that this was my chance to play the genre game. With the teaser trailer I decided not to go for a genre that we already had within the show so I went for a drama/action genre. This was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed trying to make everything as tense and exciting as I could in the editing. the music definitely helped with this; using a rhythmic fast paced percussion track, I was able to edit the footage in time giving it quite a professional feel. I drew from a lot of inspiration; trailers such as Batman the Dark night and Inception were some of my main influences when constructing this trailer.

Teaser Trailer:

Worries going into Editing

This was originally going in my previous post about the first day of production however it was getting a bit too long and I feel that this could be an interesting post on its own. As I mentioned previous there are things that i’ve picked up during my experience of shooting, things that you can only really learn or appreciate once you’ve gone through it.

First thing is sound:
I wasn’t too sure on the whole sound set up we had. Because we were shooting on a DSLR we had to record the sound separately, which is fine, as long as your prepared for it. By this I mean you need to make it easy for yourself in post production by writing the roll or the file number on the clapper so that when you’re looking at the footage you can easily navigate to the correct audio file without having to go through and listen to them all, which you can imagine is pretty time consuming (and yes I found this out the hard way, editing my own footage without listing the roll on the clapper just meant I had to open up and listen to every clip, it was a nightmare!). And I did mention that at the start of our shoot, I said that it would make life so much easier, however after a few shots in in turned out we were writing down the wrong number for the roll, I insisted finding the right roll and writing it down on the clapper however everyone seemed to think that it would be fine and we can deal with it later. The said as long as it was in order we could find it pretty easily, which I hope is true but I have a suspicion that it might not, it might become this arduous task that could’ve been avoided.

The other problem I had with sound were the microphones that we were using, we had lapel mic’s on all of the actors plus a boom plus an omni on the actual recorder, we were using a H6 I think. In my opinion: we could’ve done  without the lapel mic’s, I would’ve just had a boom mic and the omni as a back up. A few problems that I’ve found with Lapel mic’s which became evident on the shoot were they always get in the way, it’s hard to shoot, especially with the actors and camera moving around so much, without showing the mic on the actor. The next thing is because they’re wireless they’re prone to interference which also became evident on our shoot. I think we went overkill with the microphones that we used, I know it doesn’t hurt having them because you have backups but it just makes thing that more difficult when you put it on top of the problem I mentioned about not writing the role down and having to listen to all the audio clips in post, the more clips you record the more you have to syphon through.

The other problem I wanted to mentioned was the camera:
The camera that we decided to use for our shoot was a DSLR Canon D6. I don’t have a problem shooting on a DSLR, in fact that’s what I normally use however there are things I’ve learned to look out for when using one. I kind of new the problems that we might have as soon as we picked up the equipment. First of all, if your shooting hand held (which was one of our major stylistic elements) on a DSLR you need to mount it to a rig, anything like a shoulder rig or glide cam, the camera is two small and it’s unstable when holding it by the body with your hands, there is just too much movement. evidently I feel like a lot of our shots are going to be extremely shaky, not sure how much of it we can fix in post.
The other thing with DSLR’s is their lenses create a very shallow depth of field. The lens that we were using was a 50mm static lens at f/1.4 or 1.8, the problem with this is it makes it really difficult to keep a subject in focus when their moving back an forwards in frame. For instance when our character Vincent was stumbling down the hallway, if the focus wasn’t pulled correctly then the whole shot would be wasted, even if everything else went well. A few ways I would suggest to fix this problem is to attach a follow focus to the lens, this means you can actually mark out the focus pull, increasing you strike rate exponentially. Other ways that would’ve helped is an external monitor: this helps because you can see the screen more clearer as its bigger than the small on on the screen or in the view finder and most external monitors have zebra stripes for peaking and focus.

Anyway, these are just a few things that I noticed during our shoot which might come bach to haunt us in post production. but I guess we will wait and see!

Organising the Shoot

Since my last post we have all agreed that the best location for us to shoot is in building 9 as we all have access to that building for the weekend and it means that we are all familiar with our surrounding which we hope will make the shoot run much smoother. The next stage was to find our actors, we decided as a group that the best way to divide up the work was for each writer to find their own actor for their main character. This of course left me doing nothing so I took on the task of creating a call sheet for the days of filming. This involved a lot of correspondence! Working around a lot of people schedules both from the group and from the actors, we had to be really flexible because we weren’t paying or getting paid and people have jobs and lives that they can’t always put on hold. Eventually we sorted out the best days and the most efficient call times for the actors. It was also mentioned that we need to work in a lunch time as well as a rehearsal time, which made sense because we didn’t give the actors a lot of time to read the script!

This was a good exercise for me in learning to focus on other peoples needs and trying to work around them, when I normally work on shoots by myself or with my crew that I’ve worked with we tend to go with the flow and end up shooting for a long period of time and don’t necessarily worry about a shooting schedule or blocking in a lunch break. It is good to get away from my gorilla style filming and work on something a bit more legit. It will be interesting to see how helpful sticking to the call sheet and how easy it is to predict how long a shot will take. I do see some problems sticking to such a strict schedule but I guess this is generally the industry standard so we’ll see.

Here are the call sheets for the weekend:

Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 2.00.46 PMScreen Shot 2015-10-22 at 2.00.57 PM

 

In the Beginning

I’m currently studying first year media at RMIT University. As a part of my course in networked media I will be keeping a blog of all the concepts discussed in this course. My main influences for studying this course is in an attempt to join the the film and TV industry so I will also be blogging about anything I find particularly interested in that field, although will not confine myself just to that. Stay tuned.