Thursday 11 December 2008

BACKLOG 3: pleeeeeeaaaaaassssseee don't make ken ill

on the whole i feel that my images assessed piece could have been a lot better. one of my main concerns was the ridiculous overexposure and brightness in some of the shots such as the tourist's POV. at the time of filming we weren't sure how to ease the problem which was something that on reflection we should have looked further into by spending more time in pre-production because these particular problems tend to arise from the shoot and are not easily fixable in 'post'.

now....

you may be wondering why i have mentioned ken in the title of this post. earlier in the week prior to our shoot we were scheduled to have a camera workshop with him but unfortunately, the good man was feeling unwell and so it was cancelled. we later had this workshop anyway as it was rescheduled to our reading week and guess what we learnt in the session?!?!?!?!?!?!?! I think that I used enough exclamation and question marks in that last sentence to not need to explain further.

ALSO...me needing to be in bournemouth on that day for the workshop led to me missing out on the opportunity to meet and speak to the woman of my dreams...Nicole Scherzinger ;__;

BACKLOG 2: Japanese gameshows are for outside the editing suite

today i found another thing to add to the list of 'Things To Keep Out Of the Editing Suite' (which had previously only contained fire, giraffes and sandals) and that is japanese game shows.

if you're bored in the editing suite, DO NOT WATCH JAPANESE GAME SHOWS because the combination of the sounds of japanese people in pain with rupturous (sp?) laughter and loud and questionably racist statements - "this is genius", "this is only funny because they're Japanese" - make for difficulty at times in hearing your own piece of work as well as distracting other members of your group who had been there to help.

i'm not disrespecting japanese game shows as i have enjoyed a few in my time but ya'know...there is a time and a place guys.

BACKLOG 1: Patience isn't all it's cracked up to be

while i'm here i'll have a go at backlogging. i'm not sure what the best way of doing this would be so i'll just write about lessons that i have learnt so far and how i learnt them.

the editing room can get very busy at times and the occurence (sp?) of more than one person wanting to use the same equipment at the same time is quite common. i learnt today (not literally today but i am backlogging now in the style that i would have adopted had i created this post on the day that it happened) that if you get to that piece of equipment first and another group asks to borrow it for "literally just 15 minutes"...don't believe them. i had deliberately sat at the front of a lecture to be able to leave the room first at the end in order to get into the edit suite. as it transpired, on that particular occasion i needn't have bothered because when i arrived to the edit suite there was no one else there and it remained that way with me on my own for 10 minutes. by that time i had already logged in and got the VT ready to start logging and capturing some footage when another person arrived. he saw that i was using the VT despite needing it himself and so asked if he could use the machine for "literally 15 minutes" because his group only needed to log and capture 2 more takes. i gave him the benefit of the doubt and so his group came in and proceeded to log and capture. an hour had passed and they still hadn't finished. i asked them how long they were going to be a few times and each time they reassured me that they wouldn't be long and so my softer side kept on prevailing. eventually they had managed to finish capturing their desired footage when the big twist came. they had been capturing using a slow method which meant that they had to batch capture everything. the process lasted for over half and hour meaning that when i did finally get to start editing, nearly 2 hours had passed from the moment i became the first person to leave my previous lecture..

"this is the quick way to log and capture" was a particular statement that i overheard which i found particularly irritating.

LARYNX LET-DOWNS

NOTE TO SELF: BUY A NEW LARYNX. if the volume of your voice is lower than those of others around you, you're in trouble. i had a disagreement with the majority of my production group today regarding our next film project and felt that i should let them know what it was that i disagreed with. as usual my group had a lively discussion where ideas were endlessly bounced off of one other which i am a big fan of - i think its a great way of getting the best out of everyone to form a piece injected with a little dose of each person's creative talents. however, it got to a point today a few times where whenever i began to speak i would automatically be cut off by someone else and despite my attempts to continue speaking, my voicebox was unable to match the power and the levels of the other person and as a result most of my ideas went unheard. as i mentioned earlier, i am part of a very talkative group which in addition to reaping obvious benefits as i forementioned also has a downside in that if you were my position..you can't just wait for others to finish speaking before you say your part because several different points and issues get raised before any hopes of a quiet moment arrive for you to speak. this leaves you in the tricky position of struggling to remember how you wanted to present your original point as well as the multiple new points you had to make in response to the new issues raised.

today we worked on the script for our next piece which was where the disagreements arose. our director emailed a first draft to us all to give feedback and having read it myself last night, there were a few things i wasn't very keen on surrounding one of our characters. what i did next was maybe a wrong move on my behalf because it seemed to cause more problems than progression. what i did was i made tweaks to the script on certain lines to create my own edit of the script with my logic being "my director wants to know what i think of the script and how i would change it in any way". this included a change in one line from "where's the lucky layday" to "where's this mysterious layday?". i changed it this way because i didn't think the character should see himself as God's gift to women but instead just be a person who thinks that he is funny when in fact he isn't. i used the word 'mysterious' but in truth i didn't really mind what the new word may be as long as it changed that characteristic of the character. this caused more problems than i think was necessary in my opinion because it was just one word in the script that i would have been happy to change and that my group were also happy to change yet it was complained about for a few minutes. fairly soon after we read that line, my group decided to change the word to 'lovely' which i was fine about, job done, everyone's happy. this was not the case. whenever i made a new point about a new issue, for some reason the discussion would fall back to that one line and why the word 'mysterious' was the wrong word to use. this puzzled me because we had already compromised and changed the word away from 'mysterious' to one that we all agreed on in 'lovely'. i didn't and still don't understand this to be frank because i felt that instead of moving on to the other issues surrounding our film, we found ourselves stuck in a rut. i tried to voice this out again but as usual the quality of my voice failed me.

in conclusion, i am still unconvinced with our idea but still respect my duty of putting every effort into the piece because i understand that i am priveleged to have got onto a course as prestigious as this and that i cant stand it when people dont pull their own weight in a team through moping. i do feel however that the maximum volume of my vocal chords has let me down although at the same time, if someone starts to say something..perhaps letting them finish before you come in with your own point could help.