Since the first few weeks of this studio, I knew that it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for with studio choices. This semester I really wanted to make a short film, and have a substantial amount of time in the semester to do so, but with the pool of studios given for this semester, Translating Observation was the closest thing to what I wanted to do.
The first seven weeks of this studio consisted of building up technical skills; mostly with the Sony EX3 and with audio equipment. Last semester I spent a lot of time learning audio so this didn’t really benefit me, and I’d also previously decided I never really wanted to pursue camera work so I kind of turned away from this learning, which is a huge regret looking back. I’m pretty stubborn when I make my mind up about something, and when I told Robin I had no interest in camera, he seemed pretty disappointed. I’ve worked quite a bit with camera, and I’m pretty skilled with it, it just isn’t my cup of tea. But especially with how things turned out from our shoot, I really wish I had’ve payed attention to the early classes. I set out knowing I wasn’t going to work on camera, to not really having a choice when I knew no one else really wanted to, or had the skill and knowledge to do so.
When we first got into a group with Monaliza, Isobell and Alexandra, we were set to work on Monaliza’s film pitch which was about “A kind of essay on the nuances of human behaviour and gesture, on voyeurism and desire, articulated through a simple and wordless dramatic scene. A young woman habitually breakfasts on her balcony; her neighbour watches her with equal regularity.” This original idea I think is very real and idiosyncratic, but through our work in pre-production, it changed to be something completely different. We originally wanted an adult male and female to feature in our film, with two locations that would work together for our film. This changed quite quickly, to achieve something more “realistic” in terms of organising a shoot in our time frame. At the time what seemed the most achievable would be to cast a young boy and a teenage girl, both for availability reasons, and it seemed easier that people would actually apply. Looking back at how everything turned out, I think we could have achieved something much better. Not just with better technical things, but with story and content as well. Why didn’t we stay true to the original observation and pitch? We didn’t really even think to use Monaliza in the film, which is strange because the observation was originally about her and she has acting experience. I think if we were to tackle this project again, we would go more into that direction. But instead I feel we created something that has been seen before, and could have had a lot more substance in it than what was there,
When we got to the post-production stage of making our film, I was really disheartened by how the footage turned out, and how everyone reacted. Because of the blame I felt and took on for the outcome of the shoot, I really distanced myself from the group in this final stage. Looking back, I shouldn’t have done this, but I also found it really difficult to sit in the edit suites, trying to cut and fix up the footage, with other members mentioning how bad the footage looked and how much of a shame it was.
Robin did make me feel better about the experience when he mentioned that we would have learnt more with our mistakes than the other groups. Even though we were tremendously disappointed, I really did learn so much through this process. Robin also said that “your greatest ideas turn to dust unless you can act on them with technical proficiency”, that’s filmmaking, and that is one thing I need to consider in future. I would definitely move forward, knowing that I have people that want to work in technical roles, because I think that is really what went wrong this semester for our group, because no one really wanted to work with the technical equipment, so we were all out of our comfort zone.
My favourite part about this studio was really the core of it, the observations. I started looking at my experiences day to day very differently. I started looking at things in a creative way, and after writing down a few observations I noticed what I was drawn to and this was really interesting to me. I noticed that the pieces I was writing, focused on one person and their actions, both in itself or in relation to other people around them. When we turned our focus to the group projects, I completely stopped this process of noticing and writing down my observations, which is something I’m really disappointed about. I drew my focus away from what I really enjoyed in this course, and these observations really benefited me because I now have two really different films that I want to make, if not in this course, some time in the future, and this isn’t something I’ve had before.