ARTS2065 Working with Image and Sound

Madeleine Burston ARTS2065 S2 2015

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To Kill a Mockingbird Adaptation

This is our final assessment adaptation. The original scene is in the earlier post.

Producer: Abhi Dutta

Director: Claire Bird

Sound Designer: Suhong Ma

Cinematographer: Madeleine Burston

Exegesis:

This assessment was an interesting exercise in group organisation. Overall, we were a pretty effective group given the various constraints we were working against, as we made a reasonably polished final product that I’m pretty pleased with. Each team member performed their given role well (Abhi as Producer, Claire as Director, Suhong as Sound Designer, and myself as Cinematographer), but we greatly employed group collaboration to get many tasks done effectively.

In terms of pre-production, Claire deserves a lot of credit for building the costume and showing up with a large storyboard sheet. I created a shot list from screenshots and listed all the angles and lighting set ups. In the end, we found examining the original film much more useful as a quick reference to the scene. The team worked together for the management of schedules and equipment collection and drop off, as well as the provision of on-set snacks. Abhi, Suhong and I did a secondary screen test of Claire’s initial location scout, where we assessed lighting, did some sound tests, and collected some footage to practise our darkening effects in editing.

During production, we all enacted our roles pretty well. Suhong recorded pretty clear dialogue, Claire was a prepared and efficient director, Abhi managed the overall set as well as acting for a large portion of the film, and other set help. If I could have changed something during the production, it might have been to spread it out over a couple of nights to give us more time to perfect each shot and take a couple of each, but storms throughout the week meant we had to postpone our shoots a couple of times, and as such a few of our shots are rushed. And again we were limited by the battery power of our lights and equipment, neither of which were easily chargeable in the park. I would have also tried to use tracks for some of the shots where the camera is moving, but I think the shots came out clear enough and almost add to the intensity of the suspense. I would also have tried to record some foley work while we were out in the field, but the volume of the traffic and a broken zoom recorder again limited our options there.

Aside from all the camera work during production, most of the work I did was in post-production. I volunteered to edit the piece at the very beginning of this project, because I enjoy developing my skills in this area, and I think that’s where the work really comes together in the detail. We managed to match each shot, but in some cases our shots are a bit longer in a way that I couldn’t cut, without creating extra breaks in the scene. As a team we decided that we’d prefer the longer shots to random cuts in the middle of scenes to maintain similarity to the original. I edited together the final sequence with the music and dialogue, with Suhong, who was a great help in locating and placing sound effects for us to use.

The biggest obstacle we struggled with was time, in a variety of ways. As we filmed in the late evening, we were faced with rapidly changing daylight, which Claire came up with a neat solution to, in the form of adding the additional line “It’s getting dark”, and doing the earlier part of scene in the light, to improve the continuity between shots and explain the lighting change. That problem was compounded by the fact that our battery powered lights had a 2 hour time limit, so we had to limit how much of our filming was done in the dark, and spread it out over two days. In some of our shots, one of our lights had died, so we tried to judge the most effective placing of our remaining light to maintain visibility but retain the original lighting effects.

Despite our difficulties in filming, I’m pleased with the outcome and how it compares with the original.

Link to our pre-production google document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IV0dKhvFd0ITzbxfM4FO_jNMIPoSSb6hPDAjXhX56AU/edit#gid=0

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To Kill a Mockingbird (9/10) Movie CLIP - Boo is a Hero (1962) HD

To Kill a Mockingbird movie clips: http://j.mp/15vV0dT BUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/tGAzK7 Don't miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6pr CLIP D...

This is the original sequence from To Kill a Mockingbird that we remade for our final assessment (next post). Our scene starts a few seconds before this clip and ends at 2:40.

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Some production shots from our location scout last Sunday. Featuring Producer, Abhi, and Sound Technician, Bonnie.

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This is the lighting activity we did for week 8 (?). We didn’t get any good videos, so I’ve uploaded some stills that I thought had the most interesting lighting effects.

The first two shots demonstrate how we used lighting and shadows to give the face some depth and dimension. It would have been better if w could have set up a low level backlight from back quarter east of the subject, to create the slight halo effect and make her stand out from the background a little bit.

The second two use a green light which gives it a sort of unearthly feel that one might find in science fiction movies. The light has the effect of displacing the object from familiar and relatable surroundings and placing it somewhere ‘other’.

The second last photo is my favourite. We used one of the large lights and it gives it a sort of sunrise/morning effect. The long shadow is reminiscent of a low/level sun beginning to rise over a city. It also seems a little warmer than some of earlier stills that had a cooler palette. I particularly like the way the edge of building is picking up the highlights of the light.

The last shot we tried close ups. The warmth of the light makes the scene very personal, especially in conjunction with the framing, It creates a very intimate  and contemplative shot.

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Two edited pitches for the week 9 workshop activity

These are two pitches from the week 9 class that I’ve edited (one after the other). Probably the most significant edit I made was the re-framing of the shots. The original camera frame was too large with excessive blank space around the presenters. In post, I zoomed these shots in to give the viewer a more intimate shot of the presenter and their expressions. The downside of this is the inevitable loss of quality on the shot, but I feel the change was justified. I added clip from the scenes they were referring to give a more dynamic and engaging presentation, and also to cover cuts in the video. I’d like to have cut out further Ums and Errs but I feel like two many cutaways would have given the clip a jumpy, choppy feel.

I had difficulty with the audio, as the second pitch didn’t have better quality audio from the zoom and so is using the camera audio. I also don’t have decent enough editing software to clean up the audio without distorting the quality. I also had problems with how quickly David spoke, so some of the cuts are not as neat as the could be.

I chose these two pitches because I felt they were reasonably clearly spoken and articulated and gave opportunity to include relevant cutaways.

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Exegesis

This assessment gave us an opportunity to develop not only our ability to create a story dependent on nuance and plot, but to also learn to do it within a working relationship. We worked well as a team, with Josef Arbiv and Claire Bird acting as scriptwriters, and myself as the producer.

We initially struggled to come up with an idea that would be have limited dialogue but still be carried by action and character. Josef came up with an idea and wrote out a solid first draft with the key plot points and introduced the characters. Claire brought a little more life to the story and her perspective of the scene. I read through their combined product and noted areas of improvement that I included in my final edit, trying to make conceptual connections and round the characters out so their personality filled the gaps of their hidden identities. We used this process of passing around an initial idea and building on it in all of our work, including the synopsis and treatment, and it seems to have worked well in getting all of our voices in while still improving on a single concept. We had only a few creative differences, one being our use of description, but my writers convinced me it was useful for setting the scene considering we gave no specific details as to the setting.

I particularly wanted to use what we’d learnt in class about interaction and relationships. As such, my edit attempted to flesh out the relationship between the couple. The wife originally played much more of a passive role, so Claire’s edit gave her some more independence and introduced the motif of “leave”, and I extended this by giving her equal involvement in the action. I tried to include hints that she was a little more resolved than her husband and as such, she is the one who nudges him with encouragement or warning.

I also tried to develop their personalities beyond just their relationships. While Claire’s addition of the diary informs one of both the woman’s situation and level of desperation, I wanted to give her more personality. I gave her a little more control over her emotions, so while she definitely exhibits hesitation, she is able to overcome this and resolve herself to the task at hand. The addition to her character makes her agreement to leave seem more like a consensus. This also opens up questions of what she is leaving for, and perhaps hinting that it may be the child from the photo is on the other end of that train.

In a similar vein, I tried to make the husband a more rounded character. In Josef’s original edit, the character exhibited elements of nervousness in the apartment when he knocks over papers and spills his suitcase. I wanted to elevate this anxiety to more of a character trait, partly because there were hints of it in the original, but also because it paired nicely with the way I envisioned the wife. I made him a little more hesitant and a little less certain, as he is apprehensive about entering the apartment complex. I also wrote him to be a bit more prone to rash decisions, such as upon seeing a police officer, he instinctively turns and walks away regardless of how he would find his wife afterwards.

Claire’s edit added a flashback to the theft that Josef wrote, where we see the thief greedily pocketing the passport, to present more motivation than in the original. I thought this was a good idea but wanted to explore the motivation deeper, and as such I reinterpreted the character as another way of demonstrating the hard times of the country and just another victim of the looming ambiguous system.

As a self-contained short film the ambiguity adds an element of intrigue and encourages the reader to draw their own conclusions from the clues given, but also forces their attention less on the action and more on the people. In the absence of names, the reader needs to consider what it is that defines these characters. As it is, I think we captured the nature of relationships, and how they are impacted under stress, with a particular focus on the intimacy of trust and loyalty between the couple as they overcome obstacles by their allegiance to one another, even if it leads them to separate.

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Uploading this a little bit late because I couldn’t work out how to upload a pdf. Ended up just doing a photo series.

Week 5′s homework activity, write an 8 page script including five characters that attempt to commit some crazy illegal crime.

It’s more dialogue heavy than I would have liked. If it were a proper script I would definitely have paced out the story a bit better and worked on developing the relationships in a more nuanced way. I also would have included a bit more variety in my characters as they all turned out stubborn. Otherwise I think it works well as a brief examination of character interaction under abnormal circumstances.

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Falling and Fading

Madeleine Burston

This is my Digitale regarding my Grandmother. Exegesis as follows:

In this photo-essay I wanted to document the emotional impact of ageing on a loved one, and how life can slowly break you down. The intention was to give insight into how someone, my grandmother, can change over the course of a lifetime, both in terms of appearance, physical health, and mental health. The first half of my work reveals insight into my grandmother in her earlier life, as I originally knew her: a strong person, full of humour. I particularly chose to work with images of her with my brother and I as children to demonstrate not only what she was like when she was younger but who she was in relation to other people. This theme extends throughout the work, as I show how she pulls away from relationships, and becomes more isolated from people and life itself. I try to create this feeling of isolation by using more current pictures where she is alone in frame. This is particularly emphasised in one of the last images, where the frame moves into a close-up of her sombre face, increasing the sense of isolation.

The second half of the work builds off this idea of remoteness, where I use images that don’t feature any people at all. The attempt here is to emulate my grandmother’s point of view, whether literally, as in the desolate shots of her hospital window view, or metaphorically, when I contrast images of her home being packed up and emptied, and try to recreate the harshness of the reality that is selling the home she has lived in for over 50 years. As the intention is supposed to represent her perspective, the absence of people in these images further reinforces this idea of loneliness as she pulls away from people and focuses on the distressing changes to her life.

I also try to create this feeling with a brief glimpse of my own perspective, as with the collection of blurry hospital hall images. The intent is to show that I too am becoming disconnected from the situation, and my grandmother, and that every new development and problem is starting to blur into one. This carries on the idea of separation.

The piece ends on slightly hopeful note to show that fading is not the same as disappearing completely. It tries to uplift the audience with a shot of my grandmother being silly and light-hearted on her birthday, while the audio also undercuts this happy image with words of “clutch” and “glimpses”, reminding the audience that there are moments of hope, but there is also concern and worry underneath.

Another effect used throughout the piece is colour correction of the images. For the early light-hearted scenes, I’ve left them with their original warm tones, or like the last one, I increased the yellow hues. For the more solemn images, I’ve dropped out some of the colour, and in places added bluer tones to reinforce the contrast between the emotional states f the piece.

I had a few difficulties in obtaining the material for this piece, as I was trying to work with archival images from both the distant and recent past. As such, there is inconsistency in framing and quality of the images, that I have tried to work in as stylistic devices to create a sense of unease and constant conflict, to represent my grandmother’s ongoing confusion in her ever-changing environment and circumstances. There was also a limit to what I could show concerning her various locations, as they weren’t visually documented at the time. Any new footage obtained from the hospital had to be recorded on a camera phone, as I wouldn’t be able to set up properly framed shots in a functioning hospital, and as such they were not of the highest quality either, but again I attempted to work this into the sense of confusion I am trying to instil in the audience.

Another minor problem I had was that at the time of recording the audio, I was sick and hence my voice is not as clear as it could have been. I feel that my the obvious sickness in my voice directs the focus somewhat off the message.

If I were able to recreate this work with ideal conditions, I would have made an effort to maintain consistency in my shots, using landscape format, and being more adventurous with the framing, as the only real variation I have is in the close-up.

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Week 3 video on the topic of “revenge” and the rough storyboard we made for it.

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This is another copy of week 3, this time including the original storyboard and some sound design by Louise.

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This is our video from the week 3 workshop, where the theme was revenge. We tried use as many different camera movement methods as we could but we were somewhat limited by our lack of tripod and dolly equipment. The result is some zooms, handheld, over-the shoulder, shot-reverse shot, high-angle, and following the action (I’m not sure of the name for this). Our panning shots didn’t work out in the space we had, and we also didn’t have a tripod to steady the shot. We originally planned to pan over to where the victim was, but it was difficult to given the character’s location. And our tilt down to hands didn’t work due to poor planning, because if we had included the pan down we would moved from one shot of the character’s face to another similar shot. In our storyboard we had planned for it to be the same shot that pans down, but we unfortunately didn’t film it this way and didn’t realise the issue until editing.

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Our video workshop from Week 2. We had a lot of problems with our camera, which kept turning off every few seconds, so we had to film quickly with minimal adjustments. Hence why some of these shots are so overexposed and blurry. Otherwise, there are shots that we could have improved the composition of, by cutting out unnecessary, and distracting, items, like the window frame in the sleeping shot. A few of our shots were a little too centered without reason, and we could have made better use of camera framing to make these shots flows better. Similarly our shots would have been a little more dynamic if we’d moved the camera in closer, as we had a few too many long shots, that meant the character was lost in the scene. In addition, our audio could have been better, as the street scenes are much louder than the dialogue. However, some of our close-ups were well framed and composed, so I’m pleased with how they turned out.

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8 panel storyboard for week 2′s lecture prompt. Not the one we used for our video workshop because it wasn’t finished then. Photo is not great quality.

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Week 1 Tutorial video. A life-changing moment.

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First week storyboard. Day in the life of me. Unfortunately couldn’t get the other person in the lecture to add any audio/dialogue effects, but I’d like to think ‘All Star’ by Smash Mouth is playing in the background.