Sebastian Murphy

“The stock footage and your footage were too similar, leading to confusion. You should’ve introduced your dog after the title screen.” – Julia ‘Julz’ Darcy

 

This is something I thought about, but I didn’t want to hear the sound of my own voice narrating the clip and my internet was being uncooperative so I couldn’t let a robot do it for me. But I do agree, it would’ve been a good to do so. Cheers Julz.

In contrast, the feedback I gave to a person on my table was ‘use a tripod next time’. They seemed kinda offended and said that most of the time they had, but I resolved it by saying ‘yeah it wasn’t bad, just slightly jittery at times’.

 

 

I was lucky in creating this assignment as I stumbled upon the BBC show ‘World’s Smartest Animals’ in the search for royalty-free footage. I was originally just planning to use some scenes from it to show animals, but then the pieces of the puzzle begun to come together. I started splicing and chopping the footage and attempted to tailor both the audio and video to my dog, Harry, in order to demonstrate him as the world’s smartest animal.

 

Stumbling upon such footage was extremely lucky, a fluke, and I treat it as such. But it did not come without its problems.

 

For one, the footage is filmed on much higher quality cameras than the Sony camcorder provided by the media department, hence when the two are compared, mine looks much much worse than it really is. Also, the colour correction and white balance within the BBC footage is completely different. It is much brighter, the colours much more vivid and saturated. This, in my opinion, makes some cuts, between my own and sourced footage, seem very jarring and can halt the whole flow of the video.

The audio, at points, was also difficult to deal with as the ambient noise used in the clip can be very distracting. For example: the audio used in the main focus of Harry is originally of a dog skateboarding, hence you can hear the skateboard wheels across concrete. If I’d had more time, I may have been able to seperate the channels and isolate just the narrators voice, but unfortunately that would’ve taken a lot of time, time I didn’t have. But whilst the sound is there, I don’t believe it fully detaches the footage from the audio.

 

I believe that I made the right choice in choosing my dog as the subject of this assignment. He added a unique spin on the brief, whilst also fulfilling it.

Rachel (what a GB, not quite a breather but almost) she delivered some truly insightful messages, all of which reminded me of our activities the day before (recording music).

 

All the points she brought up occurred to me naturally, as in I could relate them all to yesterdays group task, and it was really cool to see these pointed out to me in a theoretical sense. But it was afterwards that it all come together.

 

We had just exited building 80 and I heard a person clapping, a beat, a pulsing beat emanating from someone’s hands; then it occured to me… and I just started to clap in time. And suddenly everyone joined in. And music was made.

 

It was unifying. It was collaboration at its finest, sparked in mere seconds and ignited in a few more.

 

 

Collaboration: The unifying of multiple souls, to complete an objective.

 

This has been especially difficult for me as it has truly stumped me. It was helpful watching the portraits in class as it was pretty reflective in noting what worked and what didn’t… Some transitions work, other don’t, it’s the same story with sound. So this got kind of the ball rolling as I researched a bit further into the matter at hand… I was thinking of someone easily accessible, someone who is interesting; but also light-hearted…And the thought finally came to me as I connected the portraiture lecture, I had attended the week before, where the question posed was: ‘What is a Portrait?’.

Debate had fumed over what was a portrait and what wasn’t. Does the subject have to be human? Does the subject have to be a living thing at all?

And it was in that discussion… that I had the thought. Why not do my dog? He’s adorable, he’s funny… and he sees the world in a completely different way than human do… and well he’s a dog? That’s hilarious.

 

The only problem I’ve found (in editing the footage) is that he moves around a lot, dogs tend to move a lot- especially in parks- so it’s difficult to get the right shot duration. Whilst this is annoying, it’s still manageable in post, but it’ll just take a little while.

 

Touching further on the research, there were some really experimental techniques in there, some interesting use of a sound and transitions. It’s hard to accomplish a degree of experimentation in documentary as they’re usually quite straight and narrow- being explanatory in nature.

I’m thinking of using some experimental camera techniques, attempting to express the way a dog sees the world differently, possibly some cool editing techniques that mix sound and video.

 

 

Picking up the Zoom H2N voice recorder for the first time proved troublesome, it looks like a small handheld microphone, and some people mistake it for that; but truly it’s a creative instrument.

 

Julz, Sam, Tim and I chose to deviate from the task, we chose not to record silence, but instead…music, made with our bodies. This tied our group together as we all established a tempo to unify amongst, and utilised improvisation to create the most beautiful sounds in the world.

 

And it was in the process that we all became even further familiar with this little handheld device, we learnt its limitations (such as the high gains in hard, enclosed areas) and how it handles reverb and ‘noise’ in both an omni and bi-directional setting.

 

Most importantly it was the collaboration that motivated us. We came together as a group with ideas completely seperate yet on the entirely same level. It was magical.

 

This seminar was really helpful, and truly insightful, as it demonstrated what we- as a group- are actually capable of. I look forward to working with my mates again, then grabbing some bevs afterwards to celebrate #studentlyf

 

So this weeks lectorial was mainly on studios… so mostly a lecture… but then we did an activity which we had to switch around some post it notes and make it a story etc etc

 

I didn’t really see the point of the activity, it was pretty stupid really, more of an attempt to keep the class interactive… a poor attempt that just ended up in a bunch of post-it notes with funny stuff written on them to form a semi-coherent story.

I’m really looking forward to actually learning something in these lectorials, really looking forward to not being bored out of my mind being told about a concept or an idea which is so utterly irrelevant and frustrating.

 

The comic we had to read was along the same lines. There wasn’t anything really new or particularly enthralling within it, it really just followed the lines of the ‘noticing’ lectorial the other day -_-

 

Two weeks… that’s all we’ve got. That’s all we’ve got to ‘represent ourselves’. How can we do this in just two weeks? I’ve got to demonstrate my self-image in a one minute video with 4x images, 2x video clips, 2x audio clips and text… in 2 weeks. My editing went well on Monday though, I just stitched all my audio together basically, cutting up songs and adding a bunch of effects to completely change the song itself, doesn’t sound like the original at all which is great, except it took ages to do in Premiere, I wish I was better with DAW software (well Windows native DAW software, I can use Logic and Garageband fine). It was nice seeing that others were stuck just as much as I was, most just sat there doing random stuff to keep them occupied.

 

I’m really fed up with this self-portrait stuff, and the next assignment of just plain portraits will not be that much fun either because it’ll require us following someone around, acting like a fly on the wall. Sweet……….

Now this is difficult, it’s stumping me, I’m stuck in a rut. I’m trying to think of what truly reflects me, and then I’ve got to get it all, chuck it in a video and show everyone. But what reflects me… what shows my inner-self, and how do I make it look good. This is a difficult assignment, it needs a lot of thought, and much more time than two weeks. Then I’ve got to show everyone… far out…