one quarter of audio left to go, end is in sight, uni is quiet and still, think im going a bit mad

The Filton Suburb Project Is Complete
well to a certain degree anyway, enough to hand in. It is dedicated to Ivar Lewis Veux seeing as they were created in around the same time and I could not have done it without his mother, Emilie Lewis, lending me her camera, which I am very grateful for. Also I forgot to get her flowers so this is a more permanent sentiment. I have also thanked Marcus Lynch and Bill Cargill, for guiding the project. Bill also transcribed several interviews which is about the dullest most helpful thing you can do. 

Hello World

I am currently at university pulling a late one due to an over indulged nap which means I will not be sleeping for a good few hours, so I might as well get some work done. I've just done the first 40secs of audio for the film, which I believe is the most important. I'm using snippets of conversation and gradually fading them in and out. 2 tracks of audio ambience (mostly birds, occasionally traffic) will be running continuously panned hard left and right. I think a smattering of chatter will also be in the background pretty much constantly and dip in out according to if the main narrative is present.

First Edit of Film Complete

The first edit of the film has been done. Tonight I will add atmosphere and wild tracks to the film and render a copy safe. If there is time I will re mix the audio of the interviews. But I honestly think they sound okay, possibly a bit of level tweaking but I can do that in Final Cut Pro, and that means I have them exactly placed where I want them. I will be doing the atmos etc in Logic, bouncing it as a single audio file then putting that into Final Cut. 

Into Eternity - Trailer

Did not like, cold and boring

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

This documentary was a bit more difficult to understand, possibly because the kind of manipulation these people were under seems so obvious yet clearly was very devious. Use of a lot of speech recordings. I appreciated the end credits where it showed the people being interviewed surrounded by the lights and the microphones, made you aware of the conditions the people were talking in. It's strange the transition of this documentary because you mentally change your mind as the people in his church did. At the beginning I thought 'wow great, what a great idea, a racially equal society that looked after the elderly, and who's kids seem healthy and happy, what could go wrong'. Then slowly throughout the film the accounts begin to be tainted by Jim Jones offering to have sex with them etc. I think because of the amount of death this documentary affected me less then cat dancers. Call me cold hearted I dare ya.

Cat Dancers (HBO)

This is bloody awful, I didn't know what I was getting into, I thought it was going to be fur and giggles. It was just so tragic, the three Ron and Joy Holiday and Chuck Lizza, train wild cats to do tricks etc. And are also in a unorthodox sexual but apparently very happy relationship with one another. One dies when one of the white siberian tigers gets frightened, accidentally ripping his throat leaving the other two grief stricken. Joy, the lady, becomes depressed and through a strange incident also gets killed by the same tiger. I'm pretty sure she wanted to die. The tiger ends up being inbred which explains its violent tendencies after so much training. But tragically leaving Roy, who later has his land taken away from him which means he's forced to put down his remaining cats. And these animals are gorgeous, it is quite impressive how relaxed they are when they handle them, I felt quite envious, only a few remarkable people are given that opportunity and in this case they made it for themselves.


fucking hell, I was in tears, it was quite difficult not to like the guy, he was pretty camp, candid, thoughtful and clearly in a lot of pain, and can you believe he was 70. 

Wild Tracks

Today I recorded several tracks in addition to the ambience recordings of the shops. This is because the raw audio of the interviews are quite bare and the transitions between them need to be masked to create fluidity. A problem I am having is that the audio doesn't match the visuals and if the shot is showing the interior of a shop and the backing track for the film has birds it will make this more obvious. This cannot be helped but I am not sure how this will appear in the film, particularly as I am a music technology degree so the main audience for the film will be more conscious of this than most people.

Audio for Film

I have now finished transcribing the interviews. Now I have begun to highlight sections of the transcripts which connect to one another. I begun with the interviewers describing Filton and then explaining why each of them are there, the subject then moves onto who lives there and the students population and the effect on the community. I am working by creating two logic projects, one with the full interviews in, which I cut up and paste into a separate project, going between the 4 different people and their perspectives. The background audio is the ambience of the charity shop. The ambience introduces the film with some light chatter between the customers and the sound of the till and such. Cutting the audio is a little fiddly at times because sometimes I intervene and I have to try and carefully mute these parts out without disrupting the natural flow of their speech. I am hoping that the characteristics of each voice will be enough to show that different people are speaking, all the interviewees have quite distinct voices so I think this will work well. This afternoon I will try to begin to put visuals to the beginning 3-4 mins of the film in the Multimedia Rooms in Q block. This is where the film will begin to come to life.


I will do two versions of the film, one with the social commentary of the interviews the other with the film of Filton with the intimate conversation between the Barber and his customer. 

I HATE TRANSCRIBING

Comparison

I've used photographs I have found of Filton in the past as a framework for the shots from my film. Here is the same chemist.

Reflexive Documentaries

This is a reflexive documentary. This is the most difficult type to define yet. It incorporates a lot of the characteristics of the other genres but also uses film forms and conventions. Humour occurs more frequently and is mostly provided by the soundtrack. 


An example of this in the documentary below is when the voiceover talks about the poison the cane toad excretes when threatened, it then cuts to a compelling young child innocently picking up a cane toad, (accompanied by jaws type music), only to be saved by his mother just in the nick of time. There is also a short pyscho esque scene with the toads etc. The facts are definitely in the film yet it is interjected with humour and small skit like scenes.

Cane Toads: An Unnatural History

Interactive Documentaries

Interactive documentaries are separate from the other forms by explicitly acknowledging the presence of the camera and the crew behind it, making the type not interactive in itself but documenting the interaction which took place between the subjects and the interviewer. This shifts the weighting on the factual elements, which is crucial to the expository documentary mode, to personal accounts and opinions in an exchange which took place as a question and answer.

Sad Song of Yellow Skin

This is a great documentary, it allows all the insecurities of the makers to be made transparent to the viewer. Though it is a really difficult situation, It is about a group of 3 Americans in Vietnam, they aren't soldiers but aren't really distinguishable from them in the Vietnamese eyes which is understandable, they look the same and speak with the same accents and appear to have the same amount of money. The film explores these men trying to get under the surface of the Vietnamese people but are finding it extremely difficult because the amount of resentment and anger which is felt. 

Chronicle of a Summer

The film below is an interactive documentary. An interactive documentary is where the camera crew and co are involved within the film, you can often see them physically in the film interacting with the subjects. The clips below follows a conversation of real 'normal' people living in Paris in 1961. The man interjecting with questions is part of the documentary makers crew. The focus not on the performance if the camera WASN'T there but the performance of the subjects when the camera IS there.

Scene from "Chronique d'un été"

AND THE KILLER SHOT

And the second batch

Some stills from the second batch which came out exceedingly well also. Some parts are a little out of focus but on the whole most of it is in focus, it's is similar to the polaroid SX-70 so my eyes was a bit trained. I begin to edit it next week!!!! This is from the minolta camera. You can see the part of the next frame at the bottom which is the fault of the projector and I could make a fuss and try and get it re digitised. Not sure I can given the time I've got left which is less than 4 weeks and I am going to London this weekend to see Emilies brand spanky new BABY. I'm going to need to do a crash course in FinalCut Pro.

Stills from first batch of film

Here are some stills from the first batch of Super 8 Film. There are a few dud shots and sometimes it moves too quickly but the overall effect I am extremely happy with. It makes Filton look very nostalgic and softens its appearance some what. Though check out the permanent dot and hair at the bottom.