Big Bang Big Boom

Since I'm holiday blogging, have a cool video:



Be sure to watch til the end, it's worth it for the beautiful narrative structure even if the awesome graphics don't make you want more. And, as fantastic as the painting is, I think the making of this video is the soundtrack. It creates so much atmosphere and meaning.

Summer filming

If you've been in the academy in the last few weeks you've probably seen me haunting the place, often camera in hand, plus a rather… eccentrically coloured mic. I've been filming the dramaworks courses, and very interesting it's been.

Like with most filming, AV is a mixture of long lull periods interspersed with periods of intense activity. I found a good way of filling my long breaks, when I couldn't really go anywhere: I made use of the RSAMD's many pianos and got to learning a very dificult new piece. Bad Romance will have to wait til I've cracked Gymnopedies II, sorry Murray. No. 1 one took six months and I had a teacher, let's see how this goes.

For one thing, I've learnt that while a camera is a distracting force at any time, with children you can multiply that a hundred-fold. With the younger groups I had to field many questions a day about just what I was doing, and what that furry thing on top of my camera was. I also got the unfortunate nickname "camera lady" and it seems to have stuck. Fifteen year olds called me it! I'm only three years older than you! I'm no lady! Next people will call me madam in bars.

I've also put some of the advice David Liddle gave us to good use. Rather than just keeping the camera on all the time, only capture something if it's worthwhile. Makes life in the edit suite (aka: my bedroom) a lot easier.

My lurking skills, too, have come on a lot. I got a compliment from one of the members of the Devising class on my ability to blend in. Not the best thing for a narcissist to hear but I was very happy, since the problem with filming something which isn't a performance is that you can't help but affect the process. The quantum theory of documentaries if you like. In fact, I used some of the skills I learnt back when I acted to not disturb the discussion/rehearsal/whatever.

One final thing: never, ever buy your tapes from Currys. Three for fifteen pounds. Not three packs, three tapes. Ordinary tapes, too, not gold plated and packaged in carbon fibre. It was an emergency and I needed them, but that is extortion, plain and simple.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod touch

Filming log: The Root of Love

Let's start by saying what we all definitely, scarringly, learned:

• don't go out filming for ten hours in the scorching heat without factor 50 sun cream
• no seriously, don't

 That aside, day 1 of Root of Love went very well. We whizzed through the schedule, had excellent co-operation from the Glasgow Fort staff, who went as far as to turn off the music from the whole complex for us. There were a few crazies (a NED who barked like a dog to ruin a take, and someone who insistently asked to be an extra and who apparently knew a brilliant location nearby and would we like to take a look?) but not nearly so many as I expected.

My role was to take note of the timecode, and I'm glad I did because it made capturing so much easier. Day 2, when I wasn't there, is a different story.

I wanted to be as efficient as possible with my duties as editor, because I think that if I leave it for three months, the enthusiasm and the energy just won't be there. Besides, it's not too much to ask that I put in the hours now, when the pre-production team have been working so hard before.

Therefore, I didn't go on set on day 2, but came into the academy to capture and then organise everything to appease my OCD tendencies. It was all very straightforward, though it did give me the chance to try out the trick I learned from Murray, using an excel document to log the clips. Saved a lot of time, allowing me to put together a very rough edit of the rushes, enough to advise Meg on whether we needed more coverage.

And so, I've just been editing away, and I'm really happy with how it looks. There's one small problem of coverage, which I haven't been able to find a way to fix aside from cutting around it, but all in all that's not a bad result. The process has given me a horror of filming in shopping centres, because dear god they're noisy. I don't know any way to fix that unless we actually dubbed the whole thing.

Personal reflection: long case clocks and subway stops

While half the class has been busy polishing their producing teeth on our own films, I was doing the same on the second year film, Broken Bubbles, trying to avoid breaking the budget.

As assistant, my main job was getting stuff, and I'm not half bad at it: I sorted out a green screen which was cheaper, closer and more convenient than the one they had. Score: one to Flurry. I also got to help setting it up, which was a learning experience. For instance, I found out that after staring at a green screen for half an hour, everything takes on a magenta tinge.

I was also sent out to get props, which you'll know if you've read he script are many and very specific. The TPA people Murdo and Phil are working with are crazily talented and could build some amazing things, but me and Amélie had to pick up some of the slack.

By far my biggest job was trying to find a grandfather clock. My quest took me across Glasgow, into some of the rudest antique shops imaginable. Eventually, in a funny little enclave off Byers Road, a helpful gent gave me some obscure directions to a warehouse down at the riverside and off I went. Luckily no one was there to risk assess. Through sheer luck, I found the warehouse and it was a treasure trove of antique goodness, from Victoriana to 60s retro, with a dozen suitable clocks. None quite as suitable as the one in the props store, though, which while it was short cased, had the distinct advantage of being freely available and portable.

Amélie and I set out together to get a convincing chemistry kit from St Aloyius school, and they were astonishingly helpful. The receptionist was a little taken aback by our initial request but the staff couldn't have been more accommodating, lending us heaps of kit, the kind of which my old highschool didn't even have.

The main thing I learned from the experience was that to produce, you need perseverence and the balls to ask perfect strangers to give you stuff. Luckily, I've been doing that for years and student life has only honed my skills.

Audition and Valentine's Day (no, not those ones)

I've just finished the final touches on Audition, and it's uploading to Youtube as I type. It would already be up, but my internet connection faltered two minutes before completion and I had to start all over again. Woe.

I'm very pleased with this little film, it was a lovely concept and everyone really pulled together to make it as good as possible. Bay is a tremendous performer (the dance he does was improvised on the day, and he put up very well with our requirements for repetition. I especially like some of the lighting effects we got in the Ath with just a single redhead as a backlight - it isn't great as illumination, but you just get this outline of a dancer in a dark auditorium.

Cutting was a fairly straightforward process for most of it, choose the best shots for performance and framing, match on action etc. It's testament to Sam's direction that scenes like Bay leaping out of bed cut together so well. My biggest challenge was the dance sequence, which was shot from many angles, with the added excitement of slight variations in the routine. Very tricky. I ended up using six different video tracks before honing them down to a single one, trying to balance between using the best shots and cutting according to the music. I'm pleased with how it turned out, I think it looks very good.

The rest of it was fiddling with the sound (never underestimate the importance of good sound), colour balancing an exterior shot which was rather rushed and over exposed and adding titles. There was also the issue of the time, which had to be under 2 minutes and 20 seconds for the Virgin Shorts competition. Sam and I sat together at my monitor debating whether or not a shot could stand to lose two frames, or just a single frame. Several things were cut in the interests of timing (including one of our actors completely) but I think what we have now is a very sharp story. I used a bit of a tv trick with the titles, layering them over the final shot in  a way which intrusive, but which does keep out time down. The finished article came in at exactly 2 minutes, 19 seconds and 24 frames.

And here it is:



Also, long long overdue, here is the film Chris, Meg and I made back in February. Meg wrote, she and Chris also starred, I edited and we shared the camera responsibilities:

Inspiration

Over the year as a whole, but especially these past couple of weeks, we've been bombarded with what I think is supposed to inspire us, to make us want to be better filmmakers. Martin Scorcesse is talking about how his generation would just go out onto the street and make films (the whole world may be a sound stage, but you can definitely tell when the sound has been recorded away from one) and the stalwarts of British political drama are bemoaning the standard of modern television, where real people are never shown.

I'm glad the course covers this kind of thing, it's as close as you can get to teaching art and if it produces thirteen people who make a better kind of film then fantastic.

It's also good that we're taught something about the moral responsibility of programme-makers; I'm not a believer in the everything-must-be-suitable-for-children's-consumption doctrine, and I do think that people have a responsibility to take care of themselves, but there is a line to be drawn. The film we were shown yesterday made me hate reality tv with even more of a vengeance, and it opened all kinds of questions - put bluntly, some people shouldn't be trusted to say anything. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to have their voices heard and what results is page upon page of drivel, much of it untrue.

Putting together the two strands, it seems that what you get is reality tv being the only respresentation of "real" people, while drama descends into more and more fantasy. I loved Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes but it ended up being a bizarre representation of some belief system I've never heard of, casting Gene Hunt in the role of Charon. Where is the BBC's The Wire? There needs to be reality outside of reality television, and I'm painfully aware that I'm writing this when my script submission deals with the question of dieting through the medium of sci-fi.

So, I have been inspired - to write and contribute to things which do have something to say. And, by the filmmakers of the 70s - to just go out and do it. They produced a lot of indulgent nonsense movies, but they also produced some of my favourite American films. I suspect that what they can't see is that the current democratisation of filmmaking, where anyone with a mobile phone can make a movie, will have a similar effect. There will be (and is) plenty of people falling down stairs, of pretentious hat wearers plonking together "meaningful" and "symbolic" images which you're just too sober to understand, but then one day someone will make All the President's Men, and it'll all be worth it.

Easy Rider (1969)

I've heard of Easy Rider, always in reference to its landmark status, its position as a game-changer in Hollywood. It's emblematic of America's counter culture and the film industry's flourishing in the 70s. So, I was very glad to be asked to watch it, though it came at a tragically apt time as Dennis Hopper, director and star, died just the other day.

Along with my other group members, I don't feel it's aged too well. Some of the stylistic tics (the flashing back and forth between scenes) got on my nerves, and as a whole it celebrates a lifestyle which I don't respect. Some of the more improvisational scenes were really dull - it's a top tip not to give your actors marijuana and then let them say what they want.

Still, I felt it had a much stronger drive than M*A*S*H and better photography too. Some of the images were truly beautiful, and I didn't mind the long scenes which were just Steppenwolf music videos. And it gave a window onto American counter culture: from the communes to the way you could be hustled out of a diner because of your long hair. I don't know whether it's true that looking a bit hippy-ish could earn a beating or a bullet to the gut, but it bears more research.

The ending does seem to be a bit of a cop out: everybody dies. But how else do you end it? Either they die young, still riding their awesome bikes and looking cool, or they live for another 40 years, settling down, voting Republican and tutting at teenagers drinking beer until they die from cocaine related cardiac problems. Characters like Captain America and  Billy either die young or live long enough to become the villains. (How did that Dark Knight quote sneak in?)

It did, however, give me a powerful need to get onto my own two-wheeler, possibly to go on a road-trip across Scotland, popping blue smarties and snorting sherbet.

Filming log: Audition

This past weekend we finally got to shoot Sam's excellent little script, Audition. (Genius title, right?) I think it's an excellent example of how to make a film short and sweet and still contain all the dramatic beats you need: Noah wakes up on the morning of his dancing audition but takes the wrong music.

My role was (well actually, still is) editor but I went along to the shoot too as a general goffer - pouring glasses of water (which we really, really, needed), set dressing, heavy lifting, CD cueing and since Murray wasn't there on Saturday I stepped in briefly as a kind of Line Producer. Producing isn't really for me I think but I can, at a pinch, ask someone if we can use their path and gate. I also composed the music since we were trying not to include any copyrighted material, and after the shoot we digitised everything so I could get to work. I also did some setting up of lights, camera and sound, and it's rather shocking to realise that I can do all of that automatically now while carrying on a conversation about which shots to get.

It was good to see Sam working, and how he covered shots - very thoroughly. As editor I'll have plenty of choices and I think it'll cut together very well. My aim is to be finished by the time we start work on our end of year films, so watch this space.

Personal reflection, all the small things

We're supposed to blog about our little eureka moments, right? This is a small one, but still: I can now coil BNCs and XLRs, in a way not likely to break them, and so they look all neat. You just have to... twist... as you coil. Which is what I've been told for several months, but which means nothing until you actually get it.

Anyway, woo!

The Cat Piano

Here's an absolutely lovely short film, which uses voice-over, in the form of a poem no less, very effectively. I love the noir aesthetic even though it's an animation.