Personal Evaluation of Semester 2

So its the end of Semester 2, I have written release forms, AV scripts, news articles. Filmed documentaries, music videos and a drama. Edited films, news items and did sound design for a film. I have learnt camera and microphone techniques, overcame badly behaved computers and got stuck into new editing software... It has been a bit of a journey to say the least! Here is a brief evaluation of the semester.

Writing

Admin has never been my strong point, but I do understand how important the writing module is. From writing press releases to scripts, film treatments and briefs all of these different scenarios are used in the broadcasting industry on a daily basis, and is vital for anyone going in to the industry to be able to write these with confidence. Although I felt some of my work in this module could have been better, I feel that this module has helped me overcome some of my fears of writing and should lead me into year 2 with a little extra confidence which should help me improve.

Personal Project. (Fonthill Documentary)

This project has been my favorite in this semester. To pick a subject to research, film, edit it and to be pleased with the final result was very satisfying, especially as film making is completely new to me. Inevitably, I made mistakes the making of the Fonthill documentary, the sound was poor, lighting was bad and the camera work was all a bit wobbly, but this should all help me in my learning. My computer at college was a bit of a problem too as it seemed to struggle running the editing software. At first it was really frustrating, but I accept that these situations do occur in real life and just had to get on with it to the best of my abilities.

Group Project (Beach Body)

This was a good chance for me to get more experience in a film crew and production team situation and hopefully use my skills with the skills of the other people in my group to produce a good piece of work. I wasn't really interested in producing a drama originally, but this gave us all good experience in working with actors and gave us a bit more creative freedom. I was also given the opportunity to edit the film and design the sound, which I really enjoyed. The sound was a particular achievement for me, as the some of the audio in the footage was unusable due to the wind on location forcing me to reuse some of the ambience we had recorded on the shoot. It was also a great chance to use music to set the mood of the film, something that I have always wanted to experiment with.

Editing - 'Body on the beach'.

Now that we had all our filming complete it was time to knuckle down to the editing. There was a lot to do and I was appointed main Editor!

As we loaded the rushes into Final Cut Pro, we logged as much as possible. We made sure we had a good idea of what takes we would use and which ones to scrap. We were immediately faced with a problem as we reviewed the footage. It appeared that the visuals and sound were out of sync by a couple of seconds. We tried to reload the footage but the same problem occurred. Unfortunately this meant we had to painstakingly re sync it all manually which took some time. Luckily none of the other footage had the problem.

I started to piece together the sequence which due to good logging and preparation was very straight forward. It was satisfying to see that the hard work on the filming day had paid off as we had plenty of shots to choose from. However, on some shots we made the mistake of not double checking them on the filming day. For example, the shot of the car driving past the woods seemed to be a perfect take on the day so we didn't redo it. As we went to edit the shot, we noticed Sam the Director was clearly visible! We had to use the scene so I used a zoom filter in Final Cut Pro to remove her.

The hardest part of the editing was the beach scenes. We were trying to put together a powerful film with a message, but the footage sometimes looked like it was a comedy! Also, as I mentioned on a previous blog entry, I really did struggle with the blowing winds on the beach. I overcame this by reusing some beach ambience we had recorded on the day. We needed to use some of the dialouge from the shoot as well, so I had to carefully mix the actors with the ambience and EQ out the wind as much as possible.

As the scene develops and we reveal the 'body' the family ignore, we flashed up some shocking images of war, famine and disaster. It was important as editor to choose the appropriate pictures and to display them at the most effective times.