Presentation.

We showed our final piece today. It didn’t go down well. We got praised for the technical side of our piece which is good to know we are at least doing things right, however we got badly, but fairly chastised for poor narrative and a lack of any kind of ending. I’d love to argue and say I thought the judgement was unfair however I don’t think it was. If we could have recorded our main idea it might have gone a lot smoother and although we had a backup plan it just wasn’t good enough. I think for my next project I will want to have two completely separate 100% built up ideas just in case so that this cant happened again.

Re-record.

Editing went well today, it was only the first days editing, so we captured all our audio, had a listen and lined it up in roughly the correct sequence and timing. The recordings sound good however it is lacking a narrative in some parts, and we are going to see if we have time to re-record.

Bad weather.

Recording today went very badly. For a start the weather turned out to be utterly awful which ruined our main idea. Luckily we had a back up idea although it was not very developed and we had to rush to try and make sure it had enough interesting content in it to span the length of the minimum time frame required on the brief. I think we got some very good clear recordings and our techniques worked quite well, however I believe our narrative is not too strong and it is disappointing our main idea was not pulled off. Were hoping with some good editing it may turn out to be just as good though.

A backup.

Today we plotted out a simple back up idea involving a small every day sense of space. We are not going to be putting too much time into developing this idea as it is purely a back up due to the fact that our main piece is somewhat reliant on the weather on the day of the recording.

Locations.

We have chosen to go ahead with the idea of the drugs bust gone bad. We are plotting a course through three or four different locations in one real time narrative ending in a climactic finish. We are currently scouting locations and putting together a narrative that is intense yet simple to follow to try and help ensure confusion doesn’t arise.

Drugs you say?

We have met up again an decide to start planning our piece, we thought we would like to use a similar technique to that used in the barbershop piece, but to extend its use from sitting in a single location, to attempting to take the listener on a journey through a number of varied locations while a narrative unfolds, with the listener being the main character, or at least inhabiting there body. We thought something exciting and very fast paced may work well and are toying with the idea of something like a drugs bust gone bad.

Barbershop.

We have looked into ideas and more examples of audio projects which include sense of space and decided we would like to do something along the lines of the barbershop audio project. In this audio piece it feels as though you are the one experiencing the things around you through clever uses of stereo recording with multiple microphones. We really like this idea and hope to do something along the same lines.

Sense of space.

We had our second production meeting today regarding the sense of space project. We have narrowed it down to definitely the two ideas I previously mentioned. Out of the two we said we are going to focus primarily on the “Drug deal gone bad” ideas as we think we would be able to do a lot with this idea.

We also planned out what different equipment we will need to record the different things we are planning for our narrative. We have booked out a morants, a number of rifle mic’s and also two tie clip mic’s.

Sense of Space

Me and poppy had our first project meeting today regarding out sense of space audio project. It went quite well and we got a number of different ideas down. But the two that stood out above the rest for me was an idea to do a drug deal gone bad ending in violence, and a simple peace designed so that anyone will be able to instantly recognise a location and the actions being performed simply by listening.

I think out of the two ideas i prefer the complexity and the narrative of the first idea, however the second idea is technically sticking more closely to the brief in the sense that it focuses solely on creating a sense of space.

Ideas.

Me and Poppy have decided to work together on the sense of space project. We had a Skype call today and decided to plan out a few basic ideas. We ran through a few different themes and ideas and thought we needed more time to evaluate our ideas and look into more research.

New project, sense of space.

We have just been given a new project today based on sound. We have to create a piece with a sense of space, much like the one we did for Edale, but instead of video without sound, it is sound without video. I am not that technically knowledgeable about sound as a standalone product, so although I might find this project difficult, it should also help give me an important insight into sound creation.

Edale: The shoot.

What a very tiring day that was. I think it wouldnt of been half as bad if we hadnt had so much equipment to lug about with us! >.< Although im glad we did as looking at our initial footage we got some very good shots.

We did run into some major problems on the shoot how ever, the main one was the fact that the digital screen on our PD170 broke after noly having filming about 20 seconds footage! Although we could use the small view finder it was in black and white and the inforamtion on it was limited so we did did struggle to do things such as focus and white balance, so we will just have to wait and see what the footage looks like on the mac.

Edale: And now we have a crappy camera.

Because I live in Doncaster and George has been so busy we havnt been able to book our equipment out until today and it turns out all the PD170's have gone! >.< Now we are stuck with the HD Sony camera. The quality of them is good but there light sensors are automatic and poor, so in the changing light levels on a rainy day in the peak district it could cause us some major problems. :(

UPDATE:
So I was moaning about how we missed the PD170's to a friend on Facebook and they told me Dom had block booked them out and we had to tell the people in stores we were taking out the ones he had block booked for the day trip, we checked and sure enough we have a pd170! ^-^ I'm glad we have the better Camorra now, but it's a shame it isn't as lightweight as the Sony! Haha

Edale: Planning planning planning.

We have written up a full prop and equipment list and I think we might be struggling a bit with the amount of things we have to carry but I'm sure we will manage. One of the props we might struggle with is the front of a tv screen. We are planning for all eventualities though, so we have made a cardboard one just in case we don't manage to get hold of a proper one. We don't want a last minute desperate panic for props. Everything else on our lists are relatively straight forward and shouldnt cause us any problems.

Edale: English weather being what it is...

I've been looking at the weather forecast today for next weeks filming. It is NOT looking like it is going to be a fun day. :( I'm sure we won't melt in the rain, but that won't stop us being a bit down trodden when wet through and cold. Haha I'm sure a bit of rain won't bother our filming too much though, that's why me and GEorge are now stock piling plastic bags. XD I can only hope the forecast improves the nearer we get to the time.

Edale: Suddenly, an idea!

Ok, so we have thought about the technical problems we think we will face with our work and we are pretty confident that we will be able to get around the more basic problems we are able to anticipate. Unfortunately neither me or GEorgina have the money to go to Edale to do some location scouting, so we are planning for a few variations on the perfect set and we will just have to see what we can find when we get there.

We have started doing some planning in terms of the equipment and props we are going to need and we have figured out a rough proposal of the video in full. It's only a really basic plan ATM but even doing this basic plan helped us notice some flaws in our logic that has helped us be able to plan for some problems we might face on the day.

Edale: First thoughts.

Ok, so me and George had our first planning meeting today, it went quite well and we ended up getting lot further in the planning process than I thought we would. I honestly can't remember everything that was said, but one thing that was a staple point throughout the conversations was that we wanted to try and do something a bit different under the heading of an experimental film.

To that end we decide we would like to try and stick to the brief as closely as possible, more specifically the part that says "a portrait of place". We have come up with a number of different ideas but one is sticking more than the rest. We have a few variations of it but we are going to discuss it's validity and weather it's going to be possible in a technical sense next time we have a meeting.

So, we meet at last first blog post...

I have been struggling somewhat with the idea of my first blog post. It’s not that I’m afraid of it in any way; I’ve just been struggling with what to say. I thought I would have a look around some of my peers blogs for inspiration when I started thinking about how difficult I find it to "get inspiration" from others creations. I tend to find myself wanting to improve or alter the original idea in a way I believe to be better, but although I had the inspiration to make the alterations, I don’t think you would call that true inspiration.

So instead I find myself thinking maybe I should explain a bit about myself, as I cant of accidentally taken anyone’s ideas in the creation of the person I am. But where do you start? "Hi I’m Stephen and I’m a student" doesn’t seem to really cover my entire psyche and being, and it certainly doesn’t make me easy to compare to others.

So then I tried to flip it on its head, and I wondered, rather than try to describe myself as an individual, why don’t I try and describe myself as part of a collective, the human race. Which made me think of a video that over the last 9 or 10 months I must have watched dozens of time.



I’ll talk about the video in a moment, but if you have watched it (which I hope you have) I would hope you can see where I come from when I say it boggles the mind. 7 Billion people, I can’t even begin to comprehend that. I worked as an announcer at a football stadium for a short time last year and after we had 2000+ people in the stands I started to lose any sense of the fact that they were individual people, rather than a huge sprawling behemoth, never mind 7 billion!

But when I first saw this video, I thought about lots of things like life and death; whether I will add to the population by having kids, whether ill live to see the 10 billion mark, but more than anything I thought about what I could do to help. What could I do to change the world and make it that bit better for even 1 person out of the 7 billion of us. I hope I do get the chance to make a difference in the world, and I hope it’s through film.

The video itself is fantastic in my opinion. It jumps straight in with no warning and starts spewing facts at you. If I were to describe this video without you having watched it I’m sure "It’s a 3 minute video full of facts about the human race's population statistics" would have sounded as boring as hell, but they make you watch. The quick upbeat nature of the video and the way they cleverly link In a physical sense of the text one fact to another makes it so that even if you want to turn it off, by the time you have read one fact your eyes are following the text to the next fact, meaning by the time you realise how much you have read its over!

Of course as the video progress the facts, animations and text all slow down somewhat and the pace of the music slows to follow it. They then hit you with some of the bigger facts and figures, and allow you slightly more time per fact to try and digest the more important information. I think it works really well, because a lot of the time with videos about the plight of the world you just get sadness straight away and you turn off. Here they have managed to get you interested right from the word go, and then once you have an interest (and a slight background in the subject) they hit you with the hard hitting important stuff, that if they had started dully listing from the word go, you never would have even known about because you would of turned it straight off.

I really enjoyed this video, and I’m going to see if I can hunt down some more like it. Maybe i could use a similar style in any upcoming documentaries I do? But I’ll have to think about that closer to the time.

P.s. Sorry if this seems at all disjointed. I’m afraid this tends to be how my mind works and most if not all of my blog posts will be like this. If you read enough of them you might get used to it, but I’m afraid I don’t think you will ever understand the seemingly random connections I make from one thing to another, as I’m not even sure how I do it myself.