Hannah’s Presentation

What do I know now that I didn’t know before the presentation on Monday?

I’d say the most valuable thing that I came out of the presentation with is just a different perspective on what a k-film can be. I had an image of it being a very interview and dialogue based documentary but now that perception has completely changed.

I now have a very solid image in my head of what I want our k-film to be. Brady and I are also discussing various ways to incorporate audio or dialogue.

I loved watching Hannah’s films because they were so simple yet extremely effective. I think this is something our whole class has been lacking. We’ve all been trying to add too much into it and make it way more complicated than it needs to be. So the main message I’ve come out of the lecture with is the importance of simplicity. 

I liked the way Hannah structured her k-films from both a aesthetic perspective and in terms of functionality. I think this easy interface really just lets the film speak for itself.

To maintain a ‘raw’ blog post, here are the main notes that I made during Hannah’s lecture:

After Hannah’s presentation…

DO WE NEED DIALOUGE?

 Short clips inbetween (to create emotion)

Use interview dialogue separately to the clips? General reflective comments from bike goers

One audio track of us talking? Audio Montage

I really like the idea of exploring using an audio montage over all the clips as a single audio track. This is something that Hannah had done in her final project.

Overall, Hannah’s presentation was really great to hear as it gave me a fresh pair of eyes to be viewing our documentary in – and just in time too!

New Doc Panel Presentation

Brady and I presented to a panel for our New Documentary class, I was pretty happy with how it went.

I really like our topic and I’m very excited to keep filming and execute our final documentary. I’m enthusiastic about The Bike Shed and what stories it has to offer.

The main good thing I got from the panel is the idea to get the people we are interviewing to do a little tutorial on how to fix a certain problem on a bike. I think this is a fantastic way to get people to open up and show their real personalities. This is a method that hopefully will portray the real and genuine atmosphere of The Bike Shed.

Our aim of the documentary is to provide a portfolio of The Bike Shed and we are planning on doing this by doing a portrait of all the people who form that community. The main challenge faced by this idea is getting people to open up in front of a camera or recorder. We originally were  just planning on getting people to talk to us while they were fixing their bikes but getting them to show someone how to fix their bike is just that extra step.

This also makes the documentary a bit meatier. People can go to the page online and find out how to fix their bike, rather than just look at a nice documentary on people who they have no connection with.

Brady (our main ‘tech’ man!) now has a clearer vision on how he can set up the Korsakow granules and the interactions with the previews.

From here, we are planning on getting our equipment issues solved over the next couple of days and then going back to The Bike Shed to film on the weekend. Hopefully by presenting this idea to some of the people might mean that more are happy to be interviewed and we can get some more good footage. This new footage will also be a good start to seeing how the documentary might really look.

I’m hoping to come up with some topics that I can get people to cover and really just create some structure in the background so it’s not a mess when we turn up. We don’t want 4 tutorials on how to change a tyre!

I honestly think Brady and I work really well together and are generally on the same page when it comes to things so our group dynamic just works really well. We’ve just got a new group member – Ariff, so he will be more involved from here on out. I’m sure he will fit into our little group easily too! It will be good just to have a different perspective and some fresh ideas, as well as, importantly, another pair of hands whilst filming. Having a 3rd group member will be awesome to help out at The Bike Shed and I’m really hoping he’ll take an interest in Korsakow and be able to do some of the background work as well.

Another main point I took from the panel was really just to keep things simple and make it easier on ourselves rather than attempting to overcomplicate it all.

Anyway, I have a lot of confidence moving onto project 4 and I’m very hopeful for how our documentary will turn out!