Monday, December 7, 2015

Film Studies - Entry 5 (Evaluation)

Overall, I believe our group did a satisfactory job, although several improvements could be done. Honestly, I believe my group didn't put enough effort into the project, especially on the editing part (which is my fault). We should try to be more collaborative as most of the time we did our jobs individually and only talked to each other if we needed to ask about something. While our main shooting went well, we could have improved our interview if we took the time to shoot some cutaways. However, I managed to overcome this by using footages from other sources, but they could have been more relevant. Editing could have started earlier to make the final product better and more polished. I don't think our documentary had anything original about, and we only tried to be creative by placing cutaways of certain things Pak Mark was talking about. I think the aesthetics are OK, but on a technical level, there were some problems, mainly the audio because I was unable to remove the parts where there were distracting/loud sounds, such as car calls, bumping into chairs and tables, and whispering between the cameraman and director.

I believe our documentary could have been much better if we put more effort into it and put our creative ideas into it. In the end, we didn't try to make our final product very good, we only focused on getting it done on time.

Film Studies - Entry 4 (Post-Production)

Software Choice
My video editing software of choice Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The reason I like it is because first of all, it is a popular choice among professionals and second because it offers many powerful features and effects. It also performs faster on my devices compared to other video editors I have tried before. On an additional note, I have a very fast computer at home which is able to render videos quickly compared to my laptop.



Reviewing & Editing Footage
The first thing I did was rewatch and review the footage. I made markers on areas of interest, such as cutaway positions, loud background sounds, etc. The next thing I did was to try to improve the audio by making it louder and removing background noise, which was extremely simple. Next, I removed parts of the footage that were not needed, such as when Pak Mark is recalling something or when nothing was happening. To ease the transition between the cuts, I used cross dissolves. Since we didn't have many cutaways, I decided to use footage from different sources, such as News Production clips, and amateur school recordings from previous works, among others. Finally, I added some royalty-free music in the background to remove distraction from background noise and make the video less quiet anyway.

To split the workload, Nadind did the title sequence and Benson worked on the credits, while I did the majority of the editing. There were some parts in the footage where the car call can be heard and made Nadind or Pak Mark's voice unclear, so I added subtitles during those parts. While I originally wanted to put subtitles throughout the entire video to make it consistent, it wasn't needed because the audio was clear enough most of the time and it would've been too much work anyway, especially since we had no transcript.

Film Studies - Entry 3 (Production)

During the original planned time for our interview, quite a number of problems arose, as stated in the previous entry. First, our equipment wasn't ready in the room we had planned. Second, Benson, our cameraman, was absent. Third, Pak Mark was attending a meeting. This eventually caused us to have to reschedule the shoot from Monday November 1 to Wednesday November 3. However, in the end we were able to shoot on time and get the footage we needed.

Equipment
For equipment, were given the school's Sony camera which is able to record high definition footage, a tripod, 2 LED lights, as well as a boom mic. However, since we had no experience with it we just used the camera mic instead.

Setting Up
Setting up was fairly simple and straightforward. The setup we chose was very much identical to the one we used for our lighting workshop. We set up the sofa to be in front of the wall and used 2-point lighting, 1 key light and 1 fill light, with the camera placed in front of the sofa. The total amount of time to set up was around 20 minutes, and we finished setting up as soon as Pak Mark arrived.

Shooting
Shooting was also simple and straightforward. We only used 1 camera and angle, however we did also use some techniques including zooming in and out as well as panning. The shots we used were a two-shot, which doubled as a full shot, and close-ups. We also only ended up having 1 long clip rather than several shorter ones. The length of this footage was almost 12 minutes.

We also planned to do cutaways but had no time for it. We decided to get footage from our cameras. However, we ended up not shooting all the cutaways we had originally hoped for.