FINAL - Project: 'Marcus Jefferson's - My Inner World'

(Notes: A problem happened in the uploading process which meant that a while line comes down the right hand side of the screen a few times throughout the film. This was unintentional and is not on the original, something caused this to happen, as it was being uploaded and happened every time.)

Week Twelve.

For the final week of post production, it's been all about finishing up both the essay and film and getting everything completed to a high standard. Once I had the audio completed, I went through the film and finalised all the text and tweaked a bit of the colour and contrast throughout the film to make sure it's to the best that it can be. For the text I still feel that it may be a bit to revealing and let to much of the story unfold to early, loosing some of the surprise for the viewer. But the story needs to progress as the film does and I feel this was the only way I could get it across.

      Here are some shots of a few of my story boards I drew up in the early weeks, my scanner didn't work so I just took a picture of them on my phone. Here are some examples:

Story Board 1 - The Introduction.

Story Board 3 - Streets Sequence.

     Overall I feel the project this term has gone quite smoothly, only facing a few minor problems as the film progressed. I still feel the concept of the film is original and interesting. I have also learnt from some mistakes I've made this term and also from things I've done well to. I will take this on board and make sure my project next term is even better.

Week Eleven.

In the penultimate week leading up to the deadline, work has solely been focused on both post production and starting to evaluate my progress and reflect on my project so far in the essay. I also had a few last minute shots I had to capture, including some close ups and alternative angles for the in house sequence making it a bit more interesting.

    After I sorted out the audio last week through Soundbooth, I took all the audio, cut it up into each section of the film then placed it all into the Logic Pro file where I had already been messing around with different sound effects. I then fine tuned these, using just a fraction of a variety of different effects to create my sound.

Heres an example of the sound I've created. The clip consists of sounds of the toilet, the shower and then the washing machine. Effects I used to create these were a Channel EQ, Compressor, Autofilter, Space Designer, a Pitch Shifter and a Flanger. Take a listen.

 Householdsoundstest by Dynamik

Bare in mind this is still a work in progress and the sounds will probably be edited further before deadline. But I wanted to display a taster of what the sound is going to be like. To create the washing machine effect, along with adding a number of other plug ins, what I did was, with auto filter, I latched the lfo rate and then manipulated it while playing the sound back, I sped it up as the washing machine went faster and then slowed it down just as the machine did to stop. Creating the sort of helicopter sound which really intensified the noise of the washing machine.

As for editing the footage has all been put together and now needs some tweaking to get it right. The text also needs a lot work, as it needs to tell a story while not revealing to much about why your hearing like you are. This information will all be displayed in the last shot of the film.

Finally, I've been trying to create my project to fit with the surrealist movement of film, as this is quite an unordinary piece of work. While researching the topic I came across a great quote from Linda Willams in her book Figures of Desire: A theory and analysis of surrealist film. She described the key objective veyr well by stating that 'the main goal of all surrealist art is the liberation of the expressive powers of the unconscious from the inhibitory and rational powers of  the conscious mind.' (1981, p.41)

Week Ten.

I found a big issue with my audio this week. Because you have to plug the microphone into either the left or right channel, and use the camera microphone for the other, it creates a very unbalanced sound, having one output record very loud and clear and the other only picking up fragments of the audio. As my film's key element is sound this couldn't do and so I needed a way to fix this. How I went around doing this was to 'render and replace' each sound file on Adobe Premiere to Adobe Soundbooth CS5, and it came up like this:



As you can see, the sound has been picked up perfectly on the left channel but only fractionally on the right. To fix this problem firstly was to turn the audio into one mono track, so both left and right would be merged into one. This looked as so:



Now the audio is even but only coming through one track, which is not right for film, audio for film needs to be in stereo, so to solve this I had to save the file and convert it to stereo so it finally ended up looking like this:



Now the transition is complete and the audio is both stereo and even, now it can be put back into Premiere and then later on edited through Logic to create my fictional hearing. I had to do this for every clip on my film, but now the problem is sorted.

Furthermore I gathered a few more shots over the weekend and now my film looks ready to complete the structure and start sound editing. I may need to grab a few more shots over the next few days to pad the film out but other then that the filming's done. The duration is only seven and a half minutes long, it may be eight by the time I add a few more scenes though. Its not quite ten but I feel its more effective this way, I think it might of dragged on a bit to long if it was the full ten minutes and I feel my point is made in the space of time I've used.

Week Nine.

Over the past two weeks I have really got on with both production and post production so get this film into motion. To start with I done some post production work on the shots I had already filmed (see the edit preview) to see what I had done so far and what more I needed to film. I found I had mainly collected most of the middle montage shots which connect the film together but not much of the main content that when edited with sound, would be the interesting parts of the film. To solve this I went out onto fishponds high street with a camera to film some building works for the climax to the outdoors section. I had a few problems while conducting this shoot.  Firstly both the camera and tripod I rented had faults, mainly the tripod's spirit level was broken which meant we had to line it up by eye which wasn't perfect. Also the builders I went to film where being typically British and not working much. Which meant I had to spend a long type collecting a range of mundane short clips to put together and then in post production, include some added sound to make it more interesting.

       Another important scene I filmed was the concluding light scene for the end of the film. For this I used a special light which displays a constantly changing stream of red and blue lights across the room. With myself sitting in the corner of the shot, looking out onto the light, I placed a a backlight behind me which created a nice shadow of myself on the wall, placed on the other side of the screen, fitting into the rule of thirds nicely. Problems I found filming this were that the light I was using wasn't as bright as I hoped, and I couldn't make the background light to strong otherwise it would over power it completely, so the shot looks slightly grainy. I'm going to have to spend a while tweaking the colour and contrast in post production which will hopefully sort this problem out slightly.

     So I almost got all the shots I need now. Most of the introduction, outside section and the conclusion are complete. I'll be having another filming session over the weekend to get the last ones, mostly indoor shots of appliances and other loud objects, for the indoor section. This should be able to be filmed without to many problems.

As my film relies on the power of montage for it's visual shots, I researched around montage to gain a better understanding. One example is from Sergei Eisenstein (considered a forefather of montage) in his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin and one scene in particular, the Odessa Steps Sequence. Throughout this scene Eisenstein uses a fast edited range of shots from long establishing shots which set the scene and capture the size of the action. Combined with lots of close ups displaying the people's emotions as they run for safety and deal with the death that surrounds them. This is also all done without speech and so the power of the scene is told through the music, a very select number of subtitles and a very well put together montage. As my film will also not include speech, this is a great example to watch so gather ideas for my own film and how to express emotion without any script.

This is the clip.

Edit Preview.

Heres a preview of the editing for one of the first sequences to introduce the character. This is still a rough edit and needs some tightening up plus some work on the quality and edits themselves. There is also no sound yet because that is still a work in progress.

Test Edit.

Heres a test edit for how I think I'll be creating the sound and displaying the text creatively. I choose to use the basic scene of the kettle boiling to see how much more interesting I could make. This is it:


Untitled from Peter Bailey on Vimeo.