Evaluation

As a photographic student, I do not usually work with video therefore I was a little scared by this project, although I was also excited as I know that I can apply some of the skills that I have learnt to my photographic skills. Initially, I thought that memory and stillness was a hard theme to go off, which it is, but I soon began to dig deep into my memories and feelings to come up with ideas. Throughout the project I feel like I hit more obstacles than I would on a normal project, but I solved these problems and overcome to produce work which I am proud of.

Research:
I found the research harder than usual, as there are next to none films which are based on memory and stillness, this is why I struggled to come to a final idea as usually I gather inspiration from different pieces to create my own piece. I also had to concentrate on learning how to create a film and film it, therefore I researched into different short films which I found myself and some which where recommended by my lecturer, I studied hard on looking at the way it was filmed, different angels, different types of shots, the use of focus pulling and so on. I also looked into a book which was recommended to me, "tsai ming-liang and a cinema of slowness", this helped me understand the "stillness" aspect of the project.

By researching into these films, I was able to test my new techniques out, although I was still unsure on how to use video on my camera. This is where a workshop on how to film and edit came into use, I filmed a few test shots and attempted to edit video using Premier Pro. Premier Pro for me was a little confusing, therefore I decided from an early stage that I wanted to use final cup pro which is a editing program just like premier pro, but I was a little more comfortable using this. After the workshops, I shot a short film called "The hangover tea" where I filmed my flatmate getting up with a hangover to go and make a cup of tea. I was very pleased with the final outcome of this short film and felt ready to start to plan my film.

Through my research I felt that I helped myself a lot, although if I was to go back and do it I would probably be able to research into more relevant sources as I now have complete knowledge on this project.

Planning:
The planning part of this project took a while for me, as I changed my ideas a few times and I also got a little lost and stuck, although as I mentioned earlier, digging deep into my memories and feelings helped me a lot with my idea for the project. I struggled a lot with understanding the stillness aspect, eventually I figured that the stillness aspect for my film would be the fact it was all filmed on a tripod with barely any camera movement, it also relates to the fact that I am "still in time", but towards the end of the project it picks up and moves on.

During the planning, I made many different mind maps to figure out my ideas, I felt that creating mind maps was a productive way of displaying and figuring out my ideas as I was constantly going back to my research and taking inspiration from each subject I looked at. The short film "Letters to July" was where I took the most inspiration as I liked the way it was filmed and how it was narrated over, this is the point where I decided that I wanted a narration over my video, I wanted it to be myself who narrated over it as this film is about my personal memories and experiences, therefore I would be the best to talk about it.

The next step for planning was to produce a storyboard, I found storyboarding very challenging as I am not the best at drawing. Although I found storyboard templates online which I printed out, this saved my time having to draw up each template page myself. My draft storyboard was hard to understand and was incredibly untidy, although for the moment it was ok as it was only a draft and I would be the only person to look at it. After finalising the draft, I drew up my final storyboard which was presentable for other people to look at. I also included arrows which professional storyboarders use to show movement within the scene, along with this I included "dips to black" which would tell me where to put a dip to black in the film when I came to editing it. I also included notes, which told anyone who was looking at the board what was happening in the scene if it was a little hard to understand. As well as this, I included what part of the narration would go on which shot so people would understand the shots.

Production:
Filming took me longer than expected as trying to film around my family's time table had proven hard, also on a few days where I planned to film outside the weather was not on my side, luckily for me I had a plan B for just in case it rained and set another day aside for the outdoor filming. I planned to have 2 days free just incase filming took longer than I thought, and as it did these 2 days came in useful to ensure that I filmed everything I needed to film, I also filmed extra shots for just incase some shots didn't fit right when I came to editing.

Throughout the production, I was constantly referring to my storyboard to make sure I was filming everything I needed, I also started to try out new techniques and filmed the same shot on my storyboard several times but from different angles or using other techniques.

I feel that I handled the production of this project extremely well for someone doing video for the first time, my only down fall was not asking my family what they were doing on each day as for some shots I had planned I needed them all to be in one shot together.

Post production:
When I came to post production, I found that different shots that I had filmed hadn't worked as I was expecting them to, luckily I had backup footage incase this had happened. I ended up cutting out a huge chunk of my film as I thought it was a little morbid and I didn't want myself to come across as depressed, but after consulting with my lecturer I showed him my rough cut and he thought something was missing and I showed him the part of the narration which I had previously cut out and he sad to put it back in as it was interesting. I decided to put the scrapped part of the film back in, but re-filmed that part as I felt that the viewers should see what it is like to live in student accommodation.

The program I used to edit on was Final Cut Pro X, this is considered a professionally used video editing software. At first, editing seemed to take a long time as I was not used to the program as well as editing in general, but after a while of editing I started to get the hang of it and even learnt all the shortcuts for different tools within the program.

I knew that I wanted to put a filter over the top of my video so it would look like it was in the past, so I started to play around with the effects within the program. I found that most of the "old film" effects weren't really what I wanted, therefore I took the orange and teal effect and started to edit it to what I wanted it to look like.

I found editing the video was easier that what I thought it was going to be, and I feel that I worried over nothing. Although I felt that playing around with the program before hand had helped me a lot with getting to know how to edit. I feel that I did well in the post production part of this project.

Time Management:
I feel that I handled the time management of this project quite well, although I would have liked to have left myself a little more time at the end of the project just to polish everything up. I feel that I had spent too long on the planning stage and this didn't leave me that long to edit and make my directors commentary at the end of the project.

Overall conclusion:
Even though I found this project challenging, I also found it interesting and quite fun. I feel that I have learnt many more new skills in video and editing, as well as video planning, many of these skills I can actually use within my photographic practice. This will certainly benefit me in the long run as doing this project has taught me to think more about how I set up a shot and make it look aesthetically pleasing. Many photographers use video within their practise, or they use it simply just to promote themselves, which is something I myself am thinking of doing now that I have these skills.

I feel that my video is a success, even though in earlier stages I had my doubts if this would work or not, I also think that I used my photographic skills to an advantage and my shots came out looking very artistic. I feel that I got my story over successfully and the video can be understood well thanks to the narration. If I was to change anything about this project, I would have liked to spend a little more time on it as I feel the time that we were given for this project was not enough to work on a video. I would also change my time management and not spend as much time on my planning.

I feel that doing this project has made a huge impact to myself and I can now manage my time correctly and understand artistic videos, after this project I will continue to use video within my practice.

Dissemination for project

For the dissemination of my short film, I wanted it to be shown in a dark room on its own away from any other noisy exhibitions, this is called a solo gallery exhibition or a small gallery space. The reason for wanting it to be separate from any other exhibitions which make noise, is because my video has a narration over the top of it, and it is important for the viewers to be listening to the words I am saying otherwise the narration wouldn't make any sense, if the exhibition was shown on its own, I can avoid this problem. I also want the walls to be painted black and the lighting to be dim, this is so the viewers can see the film properly, but also to set the scene as the film goes into quite deep key subjects in my life.

I want four benches all together for people to sit on, I want for because I don't want the room to look too overcrowded. By using benches, it welcomes people in to sit for a short while when they watch my film. Originally for the sound I wanted 8 headphone sets which would be attached to the benches, but when I thought about it people might just walk past the room as they might not know whats in there, therefore I decided to just have the sound playing loud so everyone in the room can hear it, but also people walking past can too. I didn't want to use a digital screen to present my film on because I feel a TV would look tacky in the room, I also wanted to emulate the feel of a cinema experience as I photographically filmed this film. I also wanted to make the side walls look interesting, so I decided that I would put 4 stills from the film hanging on the walls, as this is a photographic project and one of the themes is stillness, 2 stills will hang on each side. I decided that one side should have the shots that where filmed at my family home, and the other side should have stills of the shots which where filmed in my student accommodation. The stills that I would use would be the images below:

2 shots filmed at family home:

2 shots filmed at student accommodation: 

This is my early draft idea of what I wanted the small gallery space to look like:

This is the finished plan of what I want my small gallery space to look like: 

My notes

All my notes I made throughout the project:

Tsai ming-liang and a cinema of slowness

Reading

In the empty meanwhile nothing happens or moves in the present and this “nothing happens in the present” could be a way to (re) think stillness.

—Yve Lomax, “Thinking Stillness”

For more research into this project, I have read chapters 3 and 4 of tsai ming-liang’s book “Cinema of slowness”. These 2 chapters are about stillness and silence, they explain relevant subjects and compare the differences between photography and film.

Within the book, he explains that photography stops and freezes a moment in time, he gives the classic example of this which would be Henri Cartier-Bressons very well known photograph of a man jumping over a puddle. This photograph is a great example of this subject as in the photograph, the mans heel is just about to touch the puddle, and it was that split second that Henri Cartier-Bresson captured this incredible moment. He then goes on to explain the relation of time and film, obviously film is a moving timeline but we can manipulate this buy editing the sequence. Film has the ability to depict the flow of time, he explains that some film makers have chosen to film still objects at a length of time then gives another classic example of Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, I also enjoy Andy Warhol’s Screen tests where he films a person just staring into the camera as though it was a photograph but you can see them naturally moving.

He then goes on to explain montage cinema and long take cinema. Within film you can change the idea of time, for example, you can make a one minute sequence look as though it has taken place over many days. You can change the idea of time by many different editing techniques, speeding up, slowing down, jump cuts, montage etc.

He talks about the camera movement and how a static long take will have a different effect than a tracking shot, he gives an example of the static long take which is the shot of an empty theatre in the film ”Goodbye”, then gives an example of the tracking shot which is the nine-minute-and-sixteen-second opening of Béla Tarr’s “Sátántangó”. This is really handy for me as looking at relevant films and shots really helps me gather some inspiration for my film.

He also explains more about camera angel and distance, which helped me a lot as I wasn’t sure how to do this subject, I will take this into consideration when I come to making my film. He also talks about pacing, pacing is something that I usually struggle with when I come to making video and editing, this was really helpful to learn that the camera movement and angle will have a different effect on each shot. For example, I do not want to make my film look like an action film, therefore I will not be using much camera movement, and I am thinking of  using a tripod to film most of it to create the “Stillness” aspect.

Reading through this text has been very helpful for me as I feel I have now learnt some new research sources and I have also learnt the different relation between photography film and time, as well as learning how certain filming techniques will change the overall output genre of the film.

Planning

First Storyboard
Below are pages of the first storyboard I created, included with parts of the narration:

Second storyboard
After changing a few ideas, this is my finalised narration and story board:

Recording the narration

To record my narration, I needed a quiet noise free room which doesn't echo. I thought about recording in an empty room at university, but I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing that, which I didn't want people to hear in my voice. So I decided to run some sound tests in my own room in my flat to see if my microphone would catch any background noise, such as the busy road I live next door to.

To record the audio, I used my olympus voice recorder:

I have used this many times before, the sound quality is excellent.

Attached to this, I also used an olympus external mic to make sure that the sound quality was top notch:

Luckily, when I ran my sound tests you could not hear any road noise in the background of the audio, and the mic captured my voice perfectly. When I came to record the real thing, I decided to wait until a time where the road noise was quiet and there wasn't many cars about, just to be on the safe side.

I decided to record my narration using the quicktime program which is built into my lap top, as this is simple to use and records in the correct format. To record audio, I just selected the "record audio" option on the drop down menu. The recording screen looked like this:

I decided to record at least three tracks of myself saying the whole narration, therefore when I came to editing I would have lots of different options just incase a few of the recordings didn't work out for whatever reason. I did mess up and stumble on my words quite a bit throughout the recordings, but I just stopped and repeated myself and made sure I wasn't saying it too quickly so I could cut certain parts out when I came to editing the audio later on.

Cup of Tea Project

To introduce myself to video and editing, we were asked to film someone making a cup of tea, using different angels and experiment with different techniques.

I decided to opt for my canon 650d paired with a 35mm lens to film most of it, although I swapped to a wide angel lens to do the inside the cupboard shot. I also used a steady tripod with a smooth head which was good for filming.

After I had filmed it, we had a workshop in Adobe Premier pro, which is an industry standard editing program. We were told how to import our footage and audio, how to organise it, how to set in and out points which allows you to cut certain parts of the video off which you do not need before adding it to a sequence, how to rename files, how to add tracks to the timeline, how to do basic edits, how to add text, and finally how to save and export the file correctly.