Term 4 Production

The production blog entry is more about what actually happened on your shoot: what went well, what you learnt from your mistakes (if any!) and your thoughts on the ‘bigger’ picture of shooting for a task like this.

In more detail, this blog entry needs to contain the following:-

·       any special circumstances surrounding the production processes should be mentioned, and any outside help received (for example, technical support) must be acknowledged.

·       Discuss how you arranged the logistics of your shoot on the actual day: organizing the equipment, mise-en-scene, etc

·       This entry should include your shooting plan and a logistical and creative analysis of your shoot/s i.e. equipment used, if you need to reshoot, plan for additional shots, etc.

·       Look again at the Unit Plan (see PPt on Managebac) for your ‘bigger’ picture thoughts: how have you chosen to depict your life and how truthful have you been?

In my previous entry, I went over what my group planned out for this term's project. This entry will describe what actually happened during the two weeks of shooting.

What happened?
2 weeks ago, my group started shooting the interviews. We started shooting on a Wednesday. We got permission to use the studio and to use the equipment the day before where we approached Ibu Lis and got the necessary forms filled out. 

We planned to shoot Sebastian and Nadind at lunch time, so we had to hurry and get the equipment up then. However, due to a mishap with SD cards we had to wait around longer and ended up shooting after school. Since we had the equipment set up already, we did not have to set up the equipment again and again everytime we had to shoot, although that did cause inconsistencies.

The equipment we used for all the shots were 

1x red head
2x LED's
1x Camera

We used the red heads as a prop that you'll see later on in one of the screenshots.

We finished shooting the interviews the next week or so and we borrowed a camera to shoot various sceneries around the school. This would act as the background for intertitles as elaborated on before in the previous entry.

The following sections are about the the good, the bad, and the details regarding the shoot.

Details
My role in this operation was as director, but it didn't mean I did not help out during the setting up of the equipment. Kevin and I set up the lighting and the scenery. We went for a 2 point lighting set up and we used the red head for decorations. Min Kee set up the camera. We did things very systematically and orderly. We knew what to do and when to do it before we started. After we were done setting up, we got people in, asked them questions, and did the interview. I asked the questions because I was the director. This is what a typical shot looks like.

The cameraman centered it on this subject whilst also including the red head and camera. When we were interviewing the cameraman, the camera had to lock the camera in place first and then we started the interview. The two props helped create a sort of technical feel. I was also proud of the fact that everything looked so nice. This screenshot was the first and the best shot we got. We tried to recreate this look, however as you will soon see, it was impossible for the most part. 

One thing to note was that we only had a limited amount of time every day to use the studio and the equipment, so that resulted in sometimes a lack of props or inconsistent framing.

Here are some of the examples of said inconsistencies. 

The first shot did not have the camera, and the second shot had different lighting configurations and a covered table. These two shots were the result of equipment shortage and time constraints. Ever since the first day of shooting, the shots just looked like this.

This mistake basically removed the green screen option from our list. The only way to fix this is to reshoot which we, unfortunately, did not do. These inconsistencies will have to be fixed in post production, where the editor can use transition effects to ease the inconsistencies in the viewers eyes. 

So we had the best shot we could've thought off at first, that unfortunately got watered down the more shooting we did.

Other than the interview, we shot some sceneries around the school to be used for the intertitles. We did this by borrowing a camera and letting Kevin, instead of Min Kee, be the cameraman due to his experience as GJNP cameraman, and we roamed around the school. We got some beautiful pan shots that would definitely add a bunch to the interview. One unfortunate thing that happened was that we did not get a shot from the rooftops of the gym, something Kevin had done before. We did not get to go there due to it being locked off and we had no supervisor, thankfully we had enough shots for the intertitles.

As far as capturing the essence of Life in a Day goes, I would say that we followed the plan really well. The shots we took were all about the people and what they thought about the overall documentary. The intertitle shots we took also represented the school and what people loved to do in their past times. 

Overall, the shooting was great. The only disappointing thing that happened was that the interview shots were inconsistent. However, the shots we got were still more than enough of what is needed for the project.

New Project

7:35 in the morning
The class has entered term 4! And that means new projects are our main focus now. This term, our teacher Ibu Lis gave us a week or two to discuss amongst ourselves on what we want to do, however before we got down to that we did some class work. We watched the short film titled 7:35 in the morning. It's a really intriguing film that does suspense and plot twists really well and it will leave you at the edge of your seat due to its nature. It was directed by Nacho Vigalondo, a Spanish filmmaker, and he earned a bunch of praise and awards for this. The class spent one week analysing the film bit by bit. What Ibu Lis would do is pause after a certain number of minutes and get us to guess what would happen next, and we were wrong every step of the way. It really helped with our analysis skills as well as getting us to see other points of views. Before the climactic ending, each group made a prediction and the class rated each prediction based on certain criterias. I linked the video below for you to enjoy.

7:35 in the Morning

The Trailer

After that week, Ibu Lis showed us three options on what we could do for our term project. We were asked to form groups of three to four, I teamed up with Kevin and Min Kee, and she also gave us freedom to choose so that each individual group can do something different than the others. The three options were, to make a tutorial highlighting technical film skills, to make a trailer for Life in a Day and a behind the scenes clip, or to make a 5-minute documentary. My group chose to make a trailer and a behind the scenes clip for the following reasons:

1. It would not take as much time as making a documentary or making a tutorial as the footage was already there. This was important because the group had to balance out each member's schedule with the exams coming up.

2. The creative freedom of this project allows us to make it more entertaining than if we were to make a tutorial, yet it is less burdening to do so than to plan out, shoot, and edit a full 5-minute documentary. 

The basic gist of the path we took was this: the trailer was going to use footage from Life in a Day and it will probably use music that was already used in the actual documentary and the behind the scenes footage was going to be composed of interviews. After deciding, the group started to plan everything out.

The Plan

First things first, we made a timeline. This was essential as the timeline was going to be our guide to finishing the project with more than enough time to perfect it before the due date. This was our timeline: 

Week 3: Storyboarding and Planning

Week 4: Test shots

Week 5: Principle shooting of interviews

Week 5-6: Assembly editing

Week 6: Re-shoots if needed, otherwise start post production

Week 7: Post Production

Week 8: Exams

Week 9: Post-production

Week 10: Final Edits, export movie then showing at Arts Assembly on June 10

So far, we are at week 6, the week when we were supposed to wrap up filming interview footage. We decided to tackle shooting first because the group agreed that there is some merit to using the interview footage in the trailer to give more of a "we worked hard and we're proud to have made this" vibe to it. The main idea behind the trailer was inspiration, an idea that would entice people to watch our documentary. I personally went for this idea since the documentary, which aimed at showing the mundane tasks that the year 10's do daily, might need to be flared up a bit. This decision is not final, however, as things can change in the editing stage. I felt that the documentary was one thing and the trailer didn't necessarily need to compliment it, rather it was supposed to draw attention, get people talking and hyped up about the documentary while also giving the essential idea behind the documentary as a whole. This all relays back as to why we decided we might need to put in the behind the scene interviews.

In week 3, we made our storyboard for the behind the scenes footage. It gave us a sense of the angles, the background, and how it would be edited in the end. For this, we followed a similar format to how popular media sites such as BuzzFeed handles interviews since it seemed like the best way to conduct these sorts of interviews where you are asking a lot of people. We would use intertitles to ask questions and what followed are the responses from interviews for that question. We also specified the type of song we wanted to use.

We shot half of the necessary interview footage last week Tuesday, where we got Sebastian, Nadind, and Min Kee. During the shoot, we discussed the possibility of interviewing people who have only watched the documentary to get someone the audience can agree with since there is less of a bias for those people. We got a friend, Ian, interviewed and we plan to shoot some more interviews with other non-Film Studies students. We did this in the Global Jaya News Production studio, a place with a green background, a table, and a chair. The interviewees would sit on the chair, usually place their hands on the table, and look at a person behind the camera. We used one of our headlights as a prop in the background to give a more technical tone to it. Other than that, everything followed the format we thought of in the storyboard. 

These are the questions that were asked:
·     What do you think of the finished life in a day?
·      What inspired you to make your segment the way it was?
·      What challenges did you face whilst making your segment?
·      What were you most proud of/what did you like the most of LiaD?
·      Would you have done it any other way?
·      What do you think life in a day means?
·      Rate it from 0-10
·      How would you describe it in one word?

Half of these questions easily qualify for the trailer yet it also sheds some light on what they did, if they liked it, and what they thought about everything as a whole. Perfect for behind the scenes footage.

This week, Kevin had assembled a rough cut with all of the footage we have as of now. He also messed around with green screen effects and the group still has not come to the decision on whether or not we should use it. Hopefully we can stay true to the schedule. 

Getting Everything Together

I have filmed my segment, not it's time to talk about what I did afterwards.

Editing

-The Tools

After I finished filming with my phone, I imported my files to my MacBook Pro through an application called Air Droid. This allowed me to transfer files through wifi.

After which I imported the footage into Final Cut Pro and created a new project.

I chose Final Cut Pro mainly because of it's easy to use stabilisation effect that I can use to help better the quality of my footage. Other than that, Final Cut Pro is easy to use (at least it was for me), and was very versatile in terms of effects and clip manipulation. I opted to use Final Cut Pro even though I wanted to use Screen Flow, which had an easier interface and usually finalised projects quicker, mainly because of the stabilisation effect. However, I did revert back to Screen Flow just to add finishing touches in the end. The other editing software I considered was iMovie which also had a bunch of basic effects pre-installed, but it had an interface which I wasn't used to using and didn't allow me to quite export the way I wanted to with the other two.

Overall, it worked great and I managed to finish the editing process in one whole evening.

-The Process

My first export of the video didn't please me that much. What I did was put all of my shots together, cut out the rough edges, color graded it a bit, and hit export. It was very dull, even after I chose to include classical music, and the whole thing felt like an overblown filler with unnecessary shots all sewn together. 

It started with me watching the TV, then the camera focused on the clock which told the time, went back to me turning off the TV, turning off a bunch of lights, then going to my room to play some games before finally doing some homework.

So I decided to waste the next hour or so improving it.

First thing I did was cut out a bunch of shots that I felt were unnecessary, but not enough to fall below the time limit. I should've done this the first time around, but that's what sticking to the plan gets you I guess. After that, I took some inspiration from a movie called Deadpool, where the main character broke the fourth wall a lot using narration. I wanted to do that, however, I did not want to do a reshoot nor did I have time for one. So I decided to write up a quick script for the narration, and I managed to tie in some 4th wall breaking elements and I managed to recycle the background music and used narration to kind of explain how the music was there. 

During this time, I also decided to include some bloopers and using narration to tell a joke for some comedic effect during that time. I also added some inside jokes during times I felt were a little too drawn out. For this, I constantly switched between Screen Flow and Final Cut Pro, the reason being Screen Flow is way easier to use to edit this sort of stuff. I could've done this more gracefully by finalizing everything in one software first before moving on, but I put these jokes in as it came to me whilst editing. 

After all of this was said and done, I recorded the narration and started editing the sound.

My phone managed to record the narration in high quality and the classical music I put on was also in high quality. I chopped the narration up into parts and put them where it belongs accordingly. Afterwards, I synced up the background music to my narration, which only required me sliding it to the appropriate place. I mostly muted background noises for the most part from my footage, there wasn't much to begin with but It helped in some parts. When I narrated what I was doing, I lowered the volume on the music just a bit so that the audience can hear me better. That was all I did with the sounds involved in this project.

I put in the subtitles last and in screen flow as it was easier to do so. It was really as easy as just putting the text box in the bottom center and creating a new one every time I said something different.

-The Message 

My segment, in my eyes, could've been better, but it did what I wanted it to do, it effectively showed the audience what I did during that time the way I wanted them to see it. The way it came down to it, the original plan and the original final version was basically what showed up, however, I just edited a bunch of things to distract the viewers on what was really going on in some of the long overdrawn parts of the cut.

What it effectively told the audience was that during that time of day, what I usually do is play games and do homework which reflected the part of me I wanted to show. A few examples would be the fact that I joked about playing snake, when in reality, I was checking managebac in the footage but it was not really seen. The main idea of what I wanted to show was still there, however, the details were left obscure purposefully. Same thing goes to when I did my homework or watched TV at the beginning. Or the fact that I didn't really show my room or my family at all. What I really tried to do, is try to warp reality and hide reality as much as possible whilst still selling this idea of the truth, of my life in 9  PM. And what I found, which I aimed for, was that people bought into the narrative and never thought of what I actually hid in some of the scenes where I used camera tricks to hide big portions of rooms etc. Of course, the viewers could just regarded it as a joke, but the main narrative stuck with them. I found a way to use comedy and other distractions, to hide details, which believe it or not with some more testing can be more useful.

Opening Scene

Snake Scene

 Homework scene

Self Reflection

I said before, my sole intent is to show this idea of me, and I would say it worked. People seemed to think that everything I showed in that clip was real, and some people even reference some of the things there in conversation. I would say I did a pretty good job.

This project showed that I really can think of a million ways to try and solve problems like I did by revamping the whole video or how I got around to choosing a video software. My segment reflects what I can do with 2 and a half minutes of shaky footage, and the fact that I added my own narration, set my own tone for it and put in a bunch of hit or miss comedic references, some more subtle than others. Really, it shows that in projects like these, I can make something and truly call it mine and also turn something I planned was going to be boring, to something I would say was worthwhile enough for a watch.

In terms with the whole piece, my segment was the first one to contrast a whole of the other segments. You saw Nadind only getting ready to play futsal, some people choosing to record them eating, some people jogging, but what I did was took that whole concept of actually doing something special to highlight yourself in the piece, and flipped it upside down. My segment just featured me staying at home and doing stuff with my laptop when it came down to it, and It certainly added diversity to the whole piece.

·   

10/03/2016 Entry #007 - Production Blog Entry

The Shooting

This week I shot my footage and it went smoothly. I shot the whole thing in two days due to the events going on in my house during those two days. First I shot on Thursday last week, where I got some footage of my clock making a loud gong as it is 10 O' clock. The second shot I took on Saturday, as my family had a gathering on Friday, which I left out because I opted to stay true to my storyboard. I had to redo my first shot this Thursday because It turns out I got the timing wrong as my segment was supposed to start on 9 o'clock, not 10. I was fortunate as the footage I took had nothing to indicate that it was shot on 10 o'clock as it was shot mostly inside.

Before I talk about what exactly happened during filming, another thing to note was that I drastically changed my storyboard. I did this because the storyboard I had drawn up, was not that interesting nor was it long enough to be deemed acceptable (It was around half a minute). I added some scenes of me turning off the lights and extended the scene where I did my studying in my room.

The Specifics
My segment starts with a clock in the living room turning to 9 o'clock, then it shows me get out from the couch, turn a bunch of lights off, and go to my room to play games and do homework. It sounds boring on paper, it is, but I am relying on narration and music to spice it up a bit.

Here is my shooting plan.



What Actually Happened

I started shooting last week Thursday, it was a holiday so I had time. I used my handphone to record the scenes because of two things, the cameras I had weren't able to capture footage in higher definition than my handphone camera, and that I was not able to find my tripod meaning that it was more beneficial and easier to use. 

My sister helped with the majority of my shooting as my segment featured me. However, I told her what to shoot at and I directed the whole thing entirely. The only shot that I shot that made it into the final version, was the clock shot.

On that day, I shot the clock turning to 10 O'clock. Then I continued shooting at Saturday, where I basically completed all of my other shots. I re-did the clock scene on this Thursday, as I shot the wrong time.

Things to note on Saturday was that I left my house the way it was and I just played on the angles, narration, and what I showed to really convey the message which I want people to get. 

For example, I shot the scenes in my room in such a way that actually hid a bunch of the stuff that I didn't want people to see and I had to play on angles and mainly misdirection to do so. I do not want to spoil the segment so I won't go further in depth as to what I hid, how I hid, and why I hid it.

Was this timeline efficient? Not really as I had to hurry up to get things done on Saturday as I felt it was better for me to do everything all at once. However, I felt satisfied with the results and decided to only re-shoot one of the shots on Thursday.

I compiled a script and finished the narration today, all that is left is to edit all of these things together.

As stated before, the narration plays a big part in the segment, and it is up to the audience to decide how to interpret said narration. If it was intended to be what I thought of spontaneously or if it's a look back at how I perceived what I did afterward. 

Bigger Picture
As you may have picked up from reading the previous paragraphs, I had a certain message that I wanted to convey, a message that I would leave to the audience to decide. Is it the truth of how I usually spend my time at that hour? sort of, I had to bend some rules and conventions, and my sister, who was my cameraman, took a note of that.

So I didn't do it as truthful as I set out to make it, but I did it to be able to convey a message which I believed summed myself up in that little amount of seconds we got to make it.

16/02/2016 Entry #006 - Our Lives in a Day

New Year, New Semester, New Goals

This semester, the class was assigned by Ibu Lis to make a documentary based off of Life In a Day which is a documentary directed by Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald. The class-made documentary will feature a collection of segments filmed by each student in the class, arranged in chronological order, to tell the story of how the Year 10 Media Studies class spends one day. She told the class we had to go the whole nine yards, meaning we had to create storyboards, shooting plans, etc. before we were able to shoot our segment. 

Life in a Day [IMDB] [WIKIPEDIA]

Life in a Day is a user generated (or crowdsourced) documentary created by, as stated before, Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald, with an emphasis on the latter as he directed the whole documentary. This one and a half hour long documentary showcases the lives of over 80,000 (According to the submission count) people during the 24th of July and it's all shot in one day (Technically not due to timezones and whatnot). The big concept here is how people all over the globe live differently and how we can see that from seeing what they do in one day, not even a year. It highlights the differences in culture and traditions between countries and continents.

It was edited by the director, who put the clips in a linear fashion (No time cuts, chronological) and also edited certain clips together to make them feel more natural. For example, when there's a clip showing someone catching a fly which then cuts to another clip of someone releasing a fly. 

The documentary presumably starts around midnight and ends in midnight and you can feel the time progression, although subtlety, whilst viewing.The director also used several non diegetic sounds for background songs, some composed some taken straight out of certain clips, and he did a really great job of it as it helps separate segments and when going from a clip with non diegetic sounds to one without, it feels very natural as if the director actually segmented the documentary and the clips properly. See what I mean by watching a trailer for the documentary below. (Full version can be found on YouTube)

It is quite obvious MacDonald put a lot of time and effort in to it. In an interview he stated that, "I always want to give an audience something new, something they haven’t seen before. And of course experience something new myself. It keeps you stimulated as a filmmaker to know you are trying something that might fail, that is an experiment. And Life in Day was a risky experiment." This means that MacDonald saw this as a challenge and used his experience working on past feature films like the Last King of Scotland, to bring something new to the table.

They made it like this because it is displaying/representing the different lives around the globe and giving this sort of "We are all connected" message. Making it feel as natural and as connected as possible is one of the ways MacDonald used to make the documentary as fluid as it is.

As an added note, we were only able to view the full documentary on YouTube because the producers teamed up with YouTube, allowing the crew to use YouTube as the platform in which the participants of the project were able to submit their footage.

The Dirty Work

Before watching LiaD, Ibu Lis told us to keep an eye out for any interesting segments and to pay attention to the. Why? Because afterwards, she told us we were going to

A. Produce an oral analysis on a certain segment of LiaD

B. Work as a class to make a LiaD-esque documentary

Oral Analysis

For my analysis, I chose to do the noon segment which is accompanied by the sound of african women singing whilst working. It starts at 41:07 and ends in 45:16. Thankfully, Ibu Lis gave us a table to fill in with all the questions we have to answer for this analysis. Afterwards we had to record ourselves reading the analysis out loud and we were given the chance to use Power Point to help get our point across easier. 

To sum it up, here is a brief run down of my analysis.

I chose this segment because of the way the music stood out and how the director used a bunch of editing tricks to organise the segment in a way that helps send his message. The footage was taken at around noon as evidenced by the daylight and showcases people working and eating, so around lunchtime. There's a subtle theme regarding how food gets on people's tables, example in one of the beginning segments people were farming then it cuts to sushi in a conveyor belt then it cuts to people diving underwater and fisherman. The segment tells the story of how people spend their afternoons. The cinematography is quite varied as it is user generated, however MacDonald edited the clips together to form a linear documentary without any special effects. In this segment, he also used non-diegetic and diegetic sounds as the sound the african ladies made was carried over to the other shots in the segment.

Class Documentary
So, first thing she ran us through was how exactly we were going to make this and the process in which we had to abide by in order to make this documentary. To summarise, we had to go make a storyboard (We also watched a video on this from Indy Mogul), a shooting plan, and a timeline (Which we made first).

Then, Ibu Lis went to a random number generator website and assigned us on a specific time frame accordingly. The class documentary would show the life of the class from 6 AM to 11 PM. My time frame was around 10 O'clock. Before I could properly plan it, I had to make a timeline.

This was my timeline:

"Week 1: Brainstorm without writing things down

Week 2: Proposal and finalize concept and theme for segment

Week 3: Storyboard

Week 4: Planning

Week 5: Shooting footage

Week 6: Re check footage and editing

Week 7: Hand segment in"

The time line was a part of our proposal as well and we did it to organise ourselves to get the storyboard and shooting plan done on time. In the proposal we stated a rough idea for my segment and how I'm going to film it.

"For my segment, I want to show me, an average student, studying and finishing up on hw before playing on my phone before sleeping.

To accomplish this, I will be holding my camera whilst showing the different object I’m going to be interacting with while also providing narration. I will also ask my sister to help film in scene’s where I’m not doing a pov shots.

This will be interesting because it shows the life of a student and a break from whatever the other people will shoot."

I stated what, how, and why. 

My intentions for doing this is to show the basic constant boring and dull life on a normal school day. I figured, this would help contrast what the others are going to be doing as I heard that one of my classmates, Kevin, was going to make his part about this surgery he was going to have. So my segment's main idea is to show the cold hard dull reality of what most people are usually doing at that time frame, whilst the other segments will be showing some really cool things I assume. It's both different yet kind of fitting with the other segments at the same time. This also goes in line to the original LiaD intentions, to showcase the true daily events of the people around us and to compare and contrast them.

To do that, I will make it as realistic as possible, long continuous shots, no music, purely diegetic, and all in one take (If I can trust whoever will film this).

After that, I went ahead and made my storyboard using storyboardthat.com, as Indy Mogul showed me. Whilst doing so, I decided to add a bit where I would be showing my whole house from the second floor (After showing how I get up the stairs) as my house is usually empty, to maybe emphasise on that lonely boring life message. This made me realise how much this project relates to the Statement of Inquiry as choosing what to show or alter during this project can really show who you are.

My story board

After storyboarding, all that's left is the shooting plan and the actual shooting itself, which I haven't gotten around to do.

I could imagine that the LiaD team went through quite a similar process. They planned out their documentary after deciding on the intention/message and decided to stick to it. The only difference would be that they didn't storyboard nor have a shooting plan, although it is possible they would do the former afterwards once they had all the submissions they needed.

By just going through what I already had, I can tell that making this documentary will allow the class members to develop their skills individually as everyone will plan, shoot, and edit their segment without any help from others. This refers back to the Global Context and Key Concept of this unit as well. Showcasing what we do on a daily basis helps us show who we are as individuals, our identity, and our relationships with the people around us. 

Technical and Aesthetic Tutorials
The most recent thing we did in class was give a short presentation on a tutorial we found on YouTube that will help us in our segments. Every individual was first asked on whether they wanted to find a tutorial on how to improve technical skills whilst filming or aesthetic skills. 

In a nutshell, Technical skills basically meant how to manipulate the equipment in a certain way whilst Aesthetic, how to make the surroundings go with the way you want it to go.

I chose Technical, as I wanted to see the different possible ways I could go with for shooting my segment. Then the class was divided in to groups depending on what you chose. The groups then had to choose 1 tutorial that they all liked and present it, explaining why the group chose said video before showing it.

That was our video. We chose it because GoPros were known to be practical and high quality in terms of recording definitions. The video taught me especially, the different types of lenses to consider using and how to smoothen shots out to make them feel more natural if I end up using a GoPro. In the grand scheme of things, this video convinced me to highly consider using a GoPro.