Not Obscured From View Anymore

Tiring nights, tirelessly editing away in to the night: shortening and moving sound-bytes, compiling different sounds and tracks to make a soundtrack, adding words, playing with colour, lighting and adding titles.  Lack of sleep, running deficient on patience, getting increasingly excited, being pent up in my bedroom at home, and in the editing suite at school.  Hours of restlessly waiting for the upload to complete - will it upload ok? Will I be able to save it alright? Will it look the same on YouTube and Facebook? After the emotional but exciting journey of editing, my short film has finally been finished!

Reflecting back on the short film that I've completed, 'Obscured From View' was difficult to produce because I was working off something that nobody knew anything about.  I was making a short film off something which didn't have a fan-base already - and it's difficult to get something known or liked as easily as if it already had a fan-base.  For example, if this had professional actors in it, was directed by someone famous, or it had a genre, it'd be easier to produce as there'd already be examples as of how to do it.  There were no examples of films about unknown parts of London, or nobody had an idea in the least bit similar to mine.

I changed the colour, made the overall image darker and added more shadows to the images, with the intentions of making it mysterious, tantalising and surprising.  I decided that there needed to be fades to make the transitions between the shot look smooth, as I wanted a calming effect on the audience.  I added text such as titles (Erthquake font for the title text) and one useful font website that I have used to get fonts is DaFont.com.  I decided to edit the soundtrack last of all because without the storyline, text and tone of the image, I found it hard to get a feel for the film, even though I had a rough idea as to where I was heading.

In retrospect the short film had the effect that I set out to achieve, which was engaging peoples' interest, fascinating them and inducing strange effects.  I haven't shown this to anyone who lives outside of London as of yet, I've shown the completed piece to my friends and family so far, but they live in London they have been to the scrap yards, they've seen all the buildings, objects and views in the video before.  Despite that, it still drew their attention and a couple of shots surprised them, but there needed to be more creative shots and techniques employed, to confound them - as there were some shots where people watching it were wondering what the point of the shot was, what the word that was on screen read, or they were expecting the shots to come up.

There was an excess of text on the screen, as it distracted the audience from the actual shot.  When I was shooting, I wasn't sure of what fashion I wanted to execute the shots, but speaking as an editor, I needed a variety of shots to work with - and the lack of variety showed in the film.  I wanted the audience to feel like exploring London; I'm unsure as to whether or not I have achieved this effect, but some of the shots looked interesting.  Perhaps I should've shot different parts of London or been to art exhibitions to get ideas of what I could shoot.  It has been commented on that some of the shots looked professional, such as the time-lapse sequence, the focus pulls and the sunset shot at the end, but there needs to be a wider variation.

I've had remarks that there's no real storyline to the short film; I've found this quite a challenge to make a storyline because I'm not trying to make a story, rather, document and capture something: exquisite, from my own perspective.  I feel that the structure and shots in the short film are equally as important because I need people to understand how I view London, what angle I see it from and cohere to how I see it.

Criticism that I've received is there's too much concentration on the shots and not the techniques.  Secondly, the panning was shaky (I used the 'steadycam' effect on Final Cut Pro to amend this, but it was to no avail) which made the audience feel dizzy.  This is something that I've realised, but I decided to keep it because the shot was well framed.  It's made me realise that I need to plan and practice before I go to shoot and edit, for practicality and to think about how I can build upon the shots so that it doesn't just look like a slideshow.  I've connected the shots together through text and images so that the audience will know it's in London, but the structure isn't that progressive as there's no change in the pace of the film.

I didn't want there to be change in the pace, I wanted the flow to be smooth, relaxing, gradual and slow.  It was, but to my sister who's 15 years old, the pace was prolonged and the shots were uneventful, she's remarked that "there should've been more people and interviews".  There should've been something human to it that people could relate to, but at the same time move the story along.  Let me contrast that criticism: my mum and my friend complimented that they felt interested and very calm after watching it, which is what effect I had intended the audience to feel.  My short film is intended for an adult audience as they have the patience and don't need so much adrenaline to come from watching a film.  My sister found the subject of the film intriguing and thought provoking, but the pace of it didn't evoke any emotion out of her.  I've realised that the pace of the film elicits more of a response from adults than it does children.

When I was editing the film together, my teachers also said that the shots need to slow down so that they get a chance to look at it.  I felt too that in order for people to observe the beauty in London and feel emotion for the shot, it needs to slow down, fade in and fade out as well as cross fade.

With regards to the soundbytes from the VOX pops that I did, I feel that I chose them wisely and that they accurately illustrate what I feel about London.  I added echos to the end of the soundbytes so as to make it sound reflective and emphasis on what they say.

There've been numerous compliments about the soundtrack and loads of interest as to where it originated from.  I used 3 copyrighted tracks (which I haven't credited in the end credits) for the unseen London:

• Spirited Away OST - A Road To Somewhere
• Event Horizon Soundtrack - Main Access Corridor
• A Series of Unfortunate Events - Curdled Cave

Additionally, I used a plethora of sound-effects and music from Soundtrack Pro.  I went for ambient, sci-fi, environmental sound effects and calm, strange but menacing music.  I slowed the 3 tracks down, reversed one track, and split the track in half so as to mix them up and make them unrecognisable to the original sources.  There was no copyright to the music used the the beginning and end, the actual recording was produced by me, a street performer sung the music - he hasn't been signed on to any labels, but I'm unsure as to whether or not the lyrics and actual song is copyright.  I will credit the street performer who I recorded singing, out of respect for what he was prepared to do.  He'll be credited in the copy of the short film that I plan to give to Southwark council and the London tourist board.

I have yet to show it to my teachers and people who I don't know, but the criticism that I've received from my friends and family has been evaluative - especially from my sister (who studies Visual Arts and Design) and my mother (artist, who used to work on TV and film sets).  Although I worked solely by myself on the short film, I needed assistance with getting access to the wine-bar at the top of a skyscraper, as I wasn't old enough to enter by myself.  I also had assistance from a couple of friends with holding the boom, so that I could operate the camera.  At certain stages in the planning and editing, I'd ask my mum and sister for feedback, because I knew that they could criticise whilst giving a balanced view.

Although my short film isn't nearly as strong a candidate as other, professional short films, I plan on submitting the piece to Virgin Shorts or for the London Film Festival next year, to see where it gets to.  I'll need to edit it down and it'll give me a chance to build upon the alien shots to make it even stranger, as well as getting to the point sooner on in the film rather than later.

To achieve alluring shot movements, I need to experiment with panning and practice panning, to achieve steadiness in order to supplement the shots rather than detract.  During the production of the film, whatever visually attractive elements that I saw in the landscape, I'd shoot, but I should've had more of a variety and should've evaluated the shots, thinking about them deeply before I add them to the film.

Overall, I had a strong idea.  On a personal level, I love my short film and I'm sad to be departing from it.  Editing has taken patience and energy, and I feel I've managed to capture the essence of the alien parts of London, with astounding shots, colour and lighting.  I can apply the editing techniques and framing that I've used to make 'Obscured From View' and utilise it in my next piece.  On a professional level, I need to develop structure and techniques within future films that I make, focus on how to further relate shots and tell a story within them, to maintain the audiences' interest.  Making this short film has made me realise that I want to develop more ideas and themes like this one.  It's a subject that I'd love to further expand upon and reference in my future works.

2011: The Beginning of The End of Editing

It's our first day back, but sitting in the editing room feels like 2010 again.  It brings back emotional memories: same computer, same file, but different me with different ideas on how to piece the short film together.

The new technician, Adam, resolved the problem I had with transferring files larger than 20GB to my portable hard-drive.  The format as previously mentioned, was MS-DOS (fat 32) - a Windows format which can't accept copies of over 20GB for a still unspecified reason.  He reformatted my portable hard-drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (the other option was partitioning, splitting and concatting files, but that seemed too long).  Now I can edit at home and school again!!

Editing is back on track - and here is a trailer of what you can expect to see in 'Obscured From View'.  I've uploaded the trailer to YouTube, to gain as much interest as possible.

Evaluation of Something Incomplete

We started our evaluation today, even thought we haven't finished our project.  My evaluation so far is 2 pages long; I've evaluated the planning, the filming and detailed where I'm at in terms of editing.  I expect that we'll have less paper work to fill out when we get back in January, that's why Ms Matthews is giving us the evaluation to do now.

‘Obscured from View’ is the title of my short film.  My inspiration for it came from walking all the way to the far east of London, beside the river with my best friend.  I noticed some unparallel things whilst walking in London and I found it so unique that I wanted to do something to show how much I appreciated living in London.  At the time, I was working on this unit, but the idea was in my sub-consciousness and not fully developed.  When I was told I could work solo, the short film project arose; I thought I should put the idea I had to work.  I also found inspiration in ‘Rubber Johnny’ which we watched in class, because it had my mind ticking as to what it was about and the purpose.  Like other short films, my short film isn’t conceived with genre in mind and the visuals individually are abstract, as well as the music.  It doesn’t follow a particular structure, nor does it have storylines which are similar to feature-length films. 

I didn’t create my short film for an audience, anyone who likes it likes it, but if it were to be marketed and sold off, the primary audience would be adults who live in London to make them appreciate London more, and the secondary audience would be tourists, to exhibit the parts of the city that most of them won’t see.  When my short film is finished, I’m going to distribute it online because everyone’s using the internet, therefore, it will get as broad an audience as possible.  Websites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace

I planned the film enough to know what the film was going to be about and how I’d do it, but I didn’t have any idea how I’d link the shots together as they’re so abstract, so when I was working on the storyboard, I knew what shots would go where, but I didn’t know how I’d relate the shots at the end.  As for the beginning, I had the opening sequence planned from all along and I knew it’d make a strong opening for ‘Obscured From View’.  The planning was a fairly easy stage of production, despite not knowing how I’d link the shots, I knew what I wanted from the film and how I’d do it, so that was a strong basis to start on.

The filming was by far the easiest stage in production.  My planning was sufficient enough that I could go out to film, knowing what I wanted.  I changed my mind once, whilst filming, because the VOX pops were appalling, due to the lack of thought in the questions and the interviewees.  I rewrote the questions to make them more specific towards London, as that is what the film is about, the other questions were too broad and this was reflected in the interviewees’ answers.  The weather conditions were terrible, apart from one day, but that didn’t matter for 80% of the time because there were only two shots which required it to be sunny: the opening sequence and the shot of the mirror in Hyde Park. 

I needed to reshoot once: for the opening sequence and the VOX pops, but I still haven’t got a satisfactory opening sequence because on the week I rented the camera out, the weather forecast was misleading so on the days it claimed to be cloudy, it was sunny, the day it claimed to be sunny, it was cloudy.  Due to poor reliability in the weather forecast, I shot an opening sequence in average weather conditions.  Filming was enjoyable compared to planning, because ideas kept on cropping up that I wanted to shoot.  It was also enjoyable because I had a chance to explore the city and it felt so liberating as I could enjoy other peoples’ company (I needed someone to hold the boom for me when filming VOX pops). 

Editing is equally enjoyable as editing, but the hardest part in comparison with the rest of the stages of production because I know that time is running short, but there’s so many little things that I want to add which I think would look good.  I’ve found that I usually get very emotionally attached to the filming and editing stages because I’ve got ideas to work with and I see things shaping up. 

For remaining couple of weeks, I need to overlay peoples’ VOX pops over the film, find a couple of clips to link the shots in the short film together, add titles, and find music to put as a soundtrack on the short film. 

Working by myself has felt extremely liberating: there’s no-one to restrict my ideas and I enjoy things being entirely made by me because if I like something and I want to add it, I can add it and I feel satisfied as well as excited.  However, it has been hard too because I have so many ideas that pop up whilst filming and some of them are entirely irrelevant to the short film that I’m making; there’ve been instances where I’ve felt like forfeiting this idea for another one and working solo, it’s hard to say “no” to myself and it’s hard not to be distracted by other ideas that I think are better.  Working solo has taught me that I get distracted and that I’m often unsure of one idea if a ‘better’ one has come to mind, it has also taught me that I can become obsessive over one project, protective and not want to depart from a certain stage of production.  It has ascertained my passion for film making.  The positives heavily outweigh the negatives: I love working by myself because it’s peaceful, it teaches me about who I am and above all, it’s extremely liberating and rewarding to be able to do what ever I want to the project and be proud of it.

'Obscured From View'...........

Not my film, this title is about something different.  This title is an excellent way to describe the situation with the computers today.  I came in to school, turned up an extra 15 minutes early to enquire about the problem with the transfer of files from the school computer to my portable harddrive (which works with every other computer, apart from the ones in the edit suite) to be turned back and told that the media lessons were cancelled for the rest of the week - the school was robbed.

When I was told this, I felt gutted, tearful and angry.  I couldn't believe it at first but now I've come to accept it.  At least the work is safely on the server and the only thing that was stolen was the iMacs in the edit suite and room 907, but it means that I can't get back on track with my short film until January because I don't have the new version of the project on my portable hard drive or on my iMac at home.  I wonder what will happen.....

Mundane Monday

Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting..........

That's what it felt like when I was waiting for the hour's worth of footage I shot this morning to be uploaded.  It made the FCP app run so slow when it was uploaded that it kept on pausing, but that's nothing to do with the actual footage, just how FCP plays back the footage.  At the end of the lesson, I tried to transfer the new edit of the file to my portable harddrive, but it came up with an error message, this is what it read:

I researched the error code, apparently its to do with the lack of space on a portable harddrive with the 'fat32' format.  My portable harddrive had 40GB on it, the folder that had my film project in that I wanted to transfer was only 33GB.  I haven't the faintest idea why the error code came up - there shouldn't be an error! I was going to ask Ashley, but he wasn't in today, so I'll ask him on Wednesday.

3.2.1...Reshoot

On Monday, Ms Matthews and Ms Pemberton granted me permission to borrow the camera and take the lessons off to film.  VOX popping occupied Monday and Wednesday, but it was going dark when I got back from school on Monday and the light was deficient, filming was carried through to Wednesday.

First of all, I reshot the VOX pops in Clapham High Street and on Oxford Street.  When I went up to Clapham High Street, I forgot my tape so I had to get my mum to go back and get it, as I'd already set up the camera, tripod and boom.  I managed to film and I'm happy with the answers on Clapham High Street, but I'm not so sure about Oxford Street.  On Thursday I filmed from the picturesque Primrose Hill in north London, and captured breathtaking shots on to the camera.  Alongside the filming at Primrose Hill, I went to the other side of London, to Dulwich, to film at Canonbie Road.  A very lovely woman let me in to her house to allow me to film the amazing view from her back garden.  Despite it being cloudy, I still managed to get the shots I needed, but she said that I could come back to film from her house any day.

On Friday, I went to the Southbank to interview the street performers there and they gave the best answers.  I'm positive that I don't need to shoot anymore interviews.  I also shot the skate park there because it looked interesting.

The weather forecast has been unreliable this week, when it says it's sunny, it's raining and when it says it's going to rain, it is actually sunny.  I needed to film the timelapse sequence before it's due back on Monday, so I took my chances and woke up early to go to film at Gallion's Reach.  On Saturday morning, I woke up at 4.30am.  I ended up waiting an hour for the tube station to open, got the tube to Gallion's Reach and film, only to find it was cloudy.  Today I tried again because it was forecast to be sunny, only to be stopped by the Police because they thought I was filming London City Airport and the aeroplanes, which I wasn't.  They stopped to take my details down, which took 20 minutes.  I was late for school as a result.  At least I got the time-lapse sequence I wanted, kind of.

When I parted with the filming equipment today, I felt so disheartened.  I've got so emotionally entangled with filming because I've invested all of my emotion in to it and I feel I want to film more, even though I have every shot listed on the storyboard.

"Not enthusiastic" Second Week Back

On a Monday - they're all dull - but that's what editing's in place for.  To make it a brilliant upbeat turnaround.  I carried on editing just fine on Monday.  The Sunday just gone, I had a discussion with my dad about my short film and I've had comments from a few people, including him, my mother, my teacher and even my annoying little sister (who can be great fun to be around at times) and one thing they all said? The shots have no connection - there needs to be a through-line -------------so I spent the remainder of the lesson thinking of how I can communicate the through-line, because I know what the connection between the shots is: they're all in London, but how can I show that to the audience?

Wednesday - editing more.  I've realised that I need to film the beginning sequence.  It is imperative that I do this for the opening sequence because it will be absolutely gob-smacking, furthermore it will set up peoples' expectations for the film.  However, as Ms Matthew's said, if I can't loan the camera out (filming equipment is running low - hence the Year 12s filming their adverts) then I'll need to think of some other way to make an effective opening.  If I can't, I'll need to work with what I've got.  I think short-film is about teaching your to be original with what you've got.  I spent the lesson editing clips to slow them down or rearrange them so that my short-film will look more smooth, impressive and symbolic.  

Ms Matthew's then stopped us towards the end of the lesson and told us that she doesn't see us as that enthusiastic about editing, "I'm not talking about all of you, I'm talking about some of you, individually".  It's a wonder why I didn't stay in the editing suite for the rest of the day and miss out all of my other lessons as a protest against what she said (speaking of protest, there was a student protest yesterday against the rise in university fees).  Ms Matthew's told us that we shouldn't just be doing small bits of editing (in another sense of the word: doing **** all!) but editing with the broader picture in mind.  Speaking candidly, I find it amazing that she even said that because in light of me telling her my plans for 'Obscured From View' she still remarked on our lack of work.  I think she should of left that comment out because everybody - especially me, is working extremely hard and I'm especially passionate about my idea because it's my idea -nobody else'! 

14:00hrs today and we're in room 907, the ICT suite.  I'm typing this away as I speak, whilst everybody uploads their work.  You can see that mine is already uploaded on to the site.  The Year 12s are using the editing suite today, so no chance I can go in.  This is boastful, but I'm so far ahead that I can't see why I need to be in this room updating the blog when I could be doing this at home and advancing my short-film on.  That's what I need to be doing.