06/12/2015 Entry #005 - Evaluation

This entry is basically how I feel about my progress throughout the project.

Evaluation
Success...
After looking at where the group stands currently, I would say that we did pretty well in making an interview, not so much in making a well polished interview. The time and effort spent on the project was almost the bare minimum, as the me and the rest of the group did everything in the last minute. Our finished product would be (Because it isn't even done yet by the time i'm writing this) barely half of what we imagined it to be at the start of the year. The team needed someone to essentially lead the group and ensure work was done, and the absence of such a figure lead to this. 

My group faced a lot of problems due to a variety of sources, and we had been able to make do by cutting corners. The problems with cutaways were replaced by editing in dissolves. Audio problems were simply left in and subtitles will hopefully help people understand the interview better. The framing problems could be refined using editing. Overall, we were creative in making do with what we had. 

The product itself is not really creative because it takes heavy inspiration from some interviews. It can be considered original if you take into account the lack of cutaways and different angles and effects. 

06/12/2015 Entry #004 - Post Production

My previous entry explained what happened during the shooting of the documentary, this is what the group did afterwards.

·       Discuss the type of editing software you have chosen and why.

·       Discuss the creative thinking process behind your editing choices (technical and aesthetic).

·       How does your segment reflect your ability to communicate effectively in film language? Use screenshots where appropriate.

Post-Production
Pre-Editing
After watching the rushes and analysing the mistakes (as explained in the previous entry), I, as editor, decided to use After Effects CS 5 for it's wide range of effects that I could use to refine the documentary. However, after realising the file size was so big (111 GB) that after effects's ram re play couldn't load them fast enough, I moved to using Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5. Here I could cut and edit easily and playback to preview my work fast enough.


Editing
First thing I did was to cut down as much dead footage (footage where nothing happens, usually when Pak Andy took breaks or takes a while to recall something) as possible. This was by far the easiest part, as I just re-watched the footage, took notes on where to cut along the way and cut them when I was done. Then I inserted a blank black image and inserted it into the footage to designate where the Cut Aways would be inserted at. After consulting with Ibu Lis (Last week), she told us that chances are, we won't be able to film cutaways on time so that I had to use dissolves to transition between the jump cuts. To do this, all I had to do was apply an effect to each one of the individual would be cutaway segments.

 She also reminded us how the editing process needed to be split, so I was going to do a bulk of the visual editing, Luthfi was going to help with the sound and end sequence, Min Kee will do the title sequence.

During the editing itself, since I had only 1 camera angle to work with and no cutaways, as explained before, my job was just to cut the clips, organise, delete anything non important, and add dissolves in place of cutaways. Also, I had to add subtitles, just so the viewers can read what is being said incase they couldn't hear it through audio.

06/12/2015 Entry #003 - Production

My previous entry explained what happened before the shooting of the documentary, this is what happens during the day of the shoot.

Production
Setting up
The group was blessed to have Pak Andy as our interviewee. Before the shoot, he explained to us that we could skip last period to set up the scene. So me and Min Kee were able to skip last period to set up while Shona and Luthfi weren't allowed to by their teachers.

We did everything as planned, we did two point lighting, and I sat in the chair where Pak Andy would sit at to test everything out. The group used the school's sony camera which yields high definition recordings and two LED lights, we reduced the strength of one of the LED lights to about 50% so that it could become our fill light.

One thing that we didn't do was check for audio, which we didn't need to at the moment because nothing was interfering with the audio. But what we didn't take into account is the inevitable swarm of kids who were going to be filling the hallways when the bells rang and school was up. 


Interview
So when the bells rang, we agreed that it was time for us to start shooting. However, we had some trouble setting up the lights as they weren't the ones we helped set up during the workshops and Shona and Luthfi just came and they helped us redo some set ups that we did wrong. So ten to thirty minutes after that the interview started.

Being the interviewer, I asked Pak Andy questions and had to think on my feet to ask follow up questions. Andy's responses were very entertaining and satisfying.

The interview took over twenty minutes, and we wrapped it up with Pak Andy praising the school and asking us to pay for his acting services (Which was a joke). It all went pretty smoothly.

Problems
One major flaw of ours was that, we were all procrastinators. By the time we looked at the footage, it was too late. We realised a couple of things that went wrong.

Firstly, for half of the interview, there was heavy background noise and for the other half relative silence. Which caused a problem of course. I recently found out there was no way to edit that out and Luthfi couldn't do anything after taking a crack at it either. We needed to do reshoots but by then, It was too late, and the group doubted Pak Andy was going to accept to reshoot three weeks after the original shoot. However, at least we could still understand what I and Pak Andy were saying throughout the footage.

Second, the interview was too long. We all originally planned for a ten minute interview, we didn't think it was going to exceed that until the actual day of the shoot. I don't know why we didn't think about it sooner, maybe it was Pak Andy's excellent story telling skills, but now we had too many clips in our hand. It was easy to solve this, just pick a focus and cut everything else out, but the group had a hard time deciding what to focus on.

Third, we only just realised that It would've been better to show Pak Andy's whole upper body to utilise his hand movements for the film. It would've maybe helped with the visuals and the feel for the story overall.

Fourth, some of the shots showed the shadows of the crew over some parts of Pak Andy. It just looks bad and creates inconsistencies. This also calls for a reshoot that won't happen.