Life in a Day - Entry 1

Starting in Semester 2, we have watched a documentary called Life in a Day. The documentary shows how different people around the world do different activities throughout their day. It takes place on the 24th of July, 2010, from 12 AM in the morning all the way to 12 AM the next day. The film is around 90 minutes long. What's unique about this documentary is that it was a collaborative project between thousands of people around the world with varying skills of cinematography. It mixes a variety of camera shots, angles, techniques, lighting, etc. While there are some inconsistencies between the clips, it somehow flows together quite well, mostly due to the work of the editor and director.

The process of creating Life in A Day was a long one, according to many sources. First they had to come up with a theme to tie everything together. The theme came in the form of 3 questions: "What do you love?",  "What do you fear?" and "What's in your pocket?". There were thousands of hours worth of footage from different countries and the editors and director had to view most, if not, all of them to see which ones fit best. After assembling the video together, they had to edit transitions, effects and music. Finally, they chose to publish it on YouTube. The most likely reason they chose to upload it on YouTube rather than show it in a cinema is so that it could reach a broader audience, because YouTube is the most popular video sharing platform on the internet, and also so people could watch it for free, any time they want.

In this semester, we will be carrying over our skills from last semester, working individually to create our own "Life in a Day". Each student gets an hour of a certain time period to record themselves doing something they normally do, while making it interesting. So far, each student made an oral analysis of a certain scene of choice from Life in A Day. The scene I chose was the ending scene where the woman talks about how dull her day had been. In this project, we will be going through a similar process of pre-production, production, and post-production. This time, however we will also be making storyboards to make production easier.

For my part in the project, I will be recording from 1-2 PM. My initial plan was to shoot during school time, in the middle of a lesson. But after some consideration, I decided against it for a few reasons; It may bother the class, and the teacher may not allow me to shoot at all. So, I decided to shoot during a lunch time on Friday because on Fridays lunch happens on 1-2. After making this decision, I made a simple storyboard.

However, on Saturday, February 13, I was getting surgery on my ear. I realized that I could do the shooting then. So, I made another storyboard in case I could shoot in the hospital.

However, in the end, I couldn't film the surgery, and only filmed myself after the surgery.

After finishing the storyboards, the next thing we worked on was presenting tutorials on either aesthetics or technical skills. In my case, I chose aesthetic because I am confident in my technical abilities in shooting video.

I believe there were some things I could have improved on. The planning stage could have been improved to give a better idea of what I wanted to do. The shoot I did so far also could have better quality, but due to several factors I couldn't make some aspects like lighting, framing and sound as good as I hoped, which is a shame especially since it was a one-time opportunity.

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.

Film Studies - Entry 2 (Pre-Production)

In the past weeks we have been very busy planning and practicing for our interview. We did lighting and camera workshops in Term 1, and planned our interview setup. However, we have now completed filming our interview, but we still need footage for cutaways and complete the post-production and editing.

Workshops
The first work shop we did was the camera workshop. We learned how to properly set up the tripods and camera. More importantly, we learned how to perform different shots and techniques with them, such as the close up, midshot, long shot, zooming, panning, among others. In our own interview the shots we used are the two shot and body shot. We also got to use the school's own Sony camera, a somewhat professional grade production camera.

The second workshop we did was the lighting workshop. Here, we experimented with a simple lighting with 2 lights. We experimented using 2 lights, a key light and fill light, and tried using a reflector for the backlight, but that didn't make much of a difference. Because our interview was a two shot, we had to play around with the cameras to get the best lighting, since it needed to cover a wider area. In the end, We decided to use only 2 lights for our interview.

Interview Planning & Shooting
For our interview, we chose Pak Mark as our subject. For location, we looked around the third floor of Building A for a classroom. We originally considered using Pak Mark's own classroom, but instead chose A36, which is currently Bu Catherine's classroom because it had a sofa for our two shot. Initially, we planned to shoot afterschool on Monday, November 1, however, because of a variety of reasons including the absence of a group member, no equipment and Pak Mark being in a meeting we had to delay it to the Wednesday of that week.

During the interview. we were given a boom mic to record audio with. But, we had no experience with it and didn't quite know how to use it and ended up using the camera's mic instead. When we arrived during the day of shooting, the class was still being used for 20 minutes. Luckily, we still had enough time to set up and we just barely finished when Pak Mark arrived. The shooting went smoothly and we did it all in one take, totalling 12 minutes of footage.

Interview Analysis Presentation
For our interview inspiration, we used Smosh's interview of Chris Pratt.

We chose this interview because it mostly uses a two-shot midshot camera technique. We analyzed different aspects of it, such as the lighting setup using two lights, one above and one on the side, use of picture-in-picture in the editing, how the mise-en-scene is used to promote Pratt's upcoming movie Jurassic World use of multiple cameras to record from different angles and others. However, unlike the other groups, we presented in front of only the teacher rather than the whole class because of a time constraint. Fortunately, this gave us the benefit of removing social pressure when presenting, so we were more confident when speaking.

Overall, I was quite pleased with what we've done so far. Our shooting went well, the presentation went well and overall our group did well. However, one thing that we could change is to stop getting delayed all the time since both our interview and presentation got delayed/moved.

Kevin 10A

Film Studies - Entry 1 (Introduction)

Welcome to my blog!

To start off our year in film studies, we learned a few things so far in the past 3 weeks. During the first week, we  We learned about the difference between documentaries and movies. Documentaries are factual video formats that aim to inform viewers about a particular subject or topic, and they show the reality. Movies, however, are more of an 'escape' from reality that includes fiction and aim to entertain the viewer.

There are 5 main types of documentaries; which are

• Nature 
• Culture
• Travel
• Biographical
• Historical. 

We also learned about the top 10 grossing documentaries as of 2014, which were

1. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) at $119M
2. March of the Penguins (2005) at $77.4M
3. Justin Bieber Never Say Never (2011) at $73M
4. 2016 Obama's America (2012) at $33.3M
5. Earth (2009) at $32M
6. Chimpanzee (2012) at $29M
7. One Direction: This is Us (2013) at $28.9M
8. Katy Perry Part of Me (2012) at $25.2M
9. Sicko (2007) at $24.5M
10. An Inconvenient Truth (2006) at $23.8M

Earlier on, we did research about two early forms of documentaries, Nanook of the North and Chronique d'Un Eté.

Nanook of the North, also known as Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic is silent documentary made in 1922. It tells us about an Inuk named Nanook and his family and how they are 'fearless heroes' who are able to survive in conditions where most people are unable to endure. While this film isn't the very first documentary, it is considered to be the first feature-length documentary.

Chronique d'Un Eté (Chronicle of a Summer) is a documentary made in 1960. In it, the filmmakers discuss with random individuals about French society and happiness in the working class. This documentary is widely known to be highly innovative and experimental and is an example of cinema verite which means truthful cinema. This means that the dialogue is improvised and therefore shows more truth rather than being scripted.

We also watched a short clip from a series called 'Bring Your Own Documentary' hosted by Ondi Timoner. The series focuses on documentaries as well as interviews from filmmakers of said documentaries.

The last thing we did in class so far was watch a documentary called 'Cuba 15'. This documentary features a Cuban girl named Tzunami who turns 15 and how it is celebrated in Cuban culture. We learned that in Cuba, when a girl turns 15 it means she has reached womanhood, which is why the celebration is more extravagant than a usual birthday.

Outside of class, I have not watched many documentaries. While I occasionally tune in to Discovery Channel or National Geographic, I have not memorized the documentaries I have watched. However, the last documentary I've watched, on the Internet, was Giant Squid: Filming the Impossible, which also happens to be my favorite. The documentary was released in 2013, and was narrated by David Attenborough, but I couldn't find the director. The reason why I like it, other than it being the only documentary I remember, is because underwater life fascinates me. We humans may have reached the Moon and beyond, yet we don't fully understand our own planet yet. This documentary gives us a glimpse of what goes on deep in the ocean.

My goal in this class I can learn more about different things by watching documentaries, while also improve my skills in video production and editing. When we formed our groups (or crews), I ended up being with Benson and Nadin, who are both new students. While I haven't worked with them before much, I believe we can work well together. I look forward to all the new things to learn in this class and new skills which I can improve upon.

Kevin 10A