LMD07105 2021-2 TR2 001 - Representing the Real
NAME: Cayla Ferguson
PROJECT: Jack In The Box
DATE OF CRITIQUE: 27th April 2022
TUTOR(S): Sana Bilgrami / Joe Li / Tomas Sheridan / Leo D'Andrea
VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT OF FEEDBACK:
Tomas: I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the first three cutaways that, because I feel like they sort of prove that point that if you have them a little bit longer, they don’t feel like you, you’ve to squeeze them there. They were doing exactly the same thing. There were some points in the edit you could tell something was thrown on top of a cut of the interview. It’s not what cutaways are for. They are visual narration, so they’re not just there to cover jump cuts on the interview. A little note, just advice for the future. Same as masks, sunglasses really separate us from the character. The eyes are windows, so we want to like, and feel her emotion or character, or personality. Those sunglasses definitely don’t do any favors, especially when they were reflecting you guys on the pair during the interview. In fact, even though it’s quite shaky and stuff, you know, at the end where you just got stuff underneath you just see her moving around on the pier and it’s shaky and you’ve got the credits, yeah that was when I started to feel I was getting to know her like the archive was used quite nicely. It was nice that it was a mix of different eras and I felt that was and they were held up, they could have been held up for longer because I didn’t need to see her in her sunglasses and new haven pier. But yeah, so cutaways were definitely like marginally better in terms of not feeling too much as cutaways. Um, there’s some like little things like the sunglasses, like flipping the interviews they create, like weird spatial things. I think you noticed that watching it. OK, sound levels.
OK, this is actually useful for everyone in the mix. So both as a recording stage and when you're when you're outputting, you check sound levels and the little bouncy, colorful lines on the side. That is what tells you that you've got the levels, not your headphones because good quality headphones plugged in with the arms of the computer, crimes of the computer stuff, they will make things sound better than in the output. So the way you check your levels and in the mix, you check, you check all you individually that it stands. So for example, the spoken stuff you want, it's to hit those minus 60 beats and zero will be like, it's the yellow bit before it hits the red before it’s technically orange, like yellow-orange in the output. That's what it has to look like. Yeah. So when I'm talking, that's unhealthy. You kind of want it to bounce into the orange, but you don't want it to be hitting red. There are two different purposes. The headphones are there to hear the truck reversing the airplane, passing the dog barking, which your brain filters out. While you're interviewing, we're not really filtering out noises that we're not interested in all the time. So you can't trust your and your naked ears to catch those background noises that are going to spoil and edit. That's what the headphones are for, for the levels. That's the visual reference, both on the input recording and on the output. When you're when you're doing the mics that is how Abbey, I think, was saying you weren't sure you had headphones and stuff. That's how you check that the audio output is. It's audible you can see it. Whether that's oh, sorry. Last thing about the pregnancy, it was such an interesting thing when you brought it to me. I mean, I understand that you lost a bit of interviews and stuff. I feel like you left it quite late and it was meant to be like a twist. Haha. Look, she's pregnant, but I actually feel it could have reframed the way we saw her as a person and a woman and prefer if it had been in the view of she is a person who cares about the next generation and her baby, if it had been in the view of she is a person who cares about the next generation and her baby, the downstairs of Edinburgh. So I feel like that was something maybe I would have liked to know soon. I know we talked about it being a twist, but I think that we would like to know it sooner to reframe the way I'm looking at her as a businesswoman and as a dancer. The first part, especially with the non-stop music, was like this promo thing about the House of Jack and Life composer Jack. If you want to do hip hop and then all of a sudden we've got like this very personal note about the pregnancy, which I think would have earlier on would have reframed all that promo feeling stuff.
Joe: Yeah. So although I'm doing the film, I think Kushal asked me the same question. You just found out she was pregnant like last week and I'm like, OK, yeah, I said, I encourage you to include in the film. I'm very happy that they told me I was giving you very similar encouraged encouragement to really contribute to the character. And I think the production quality is really above standard. I enjoyed that, but we are here to give you some comments for improvement, so you need to give yourself a critical feedback. And the first one is about the character construction. I think it's a little bit weak and particularly we are looking at interviews and we are also looking at her dance on stage. We are looking at dance sequences. They're mostly like, Are you using the camera just for recording? And there's a difference between using camera for recording and using camera for constructing the character. I'm not the ASP. I think my colleague Andrew Davey did about that. So using your camera to use for dance performance to contribute to the character, that's very important what he's built. That's what is unique about his character. So I think it's something you work on. The other thing is about, I think the director already mentioned is the story is a bit flat. So you also mentioned about is a story about success, but the journey to more success is full of failures, and struggles and we are not seeing anything. It'll die and you need to ask any questions about that. If you can bring on that struggle, that emotion, that failure. I think the film will be much more powerful in connecting to the audience and particularly for the dance sequence. I would like to see like if put on the people on the dance shoes, she does the makeups on her, you know, the toes are supposed to kept her. No, actually, the interview dance recording you off a little bit. This is what I would say by enjoying the film I will say in the production qualities a while
Sana: OK, I'm just going to read my notes. I want to watch her dance. I know you showed us, showed her dancing, but I wanted to watch. I felt cheated at the beginning of the film for the first half of the film because you just saw little bits. If you could just hold the shot so you could just watch her dance. I really wanted that. So watching it on that was what she does. Breathing space. I wanted you to stop talking. I just wanted to watch her dance, so I felt that was missing. And you know, if you wanted to construct this journey of failure and then achievement, you could have started with just showing us bits of her dancing, like just like her feet or her hands that we don't see the whole the clearly she's a great dancer. So if you could just be, if she was pregnant, then you could have asked her to do something which might not. You have been as achieved and stylised it to as a prelude to building up to this amazing building sequences that we then watch later. And I would have liked to see them longer other than these little. I think told is kind of touched on that no cutaways, you know, you would see them as sequences. And the place where I really connected to her is there's a one. There's just she's she kind of it's when she's not dancing and she's interacting with another character. Do you remember that little bit with her friends? And I was like, Wow, I feel like I'm getting, you know, that was a real insight. So I just observe. I felt like if we could observe her that we would have gotten to know her more. I loved all the stuff when she said, I won't just want to be in it, and that's what I just. And I was thinking, and I want to be in it, so I would have watched her dance again. So. So that's kind of my feedback. She talks about teaching classes. I guess you didn't have an opportunity to film the teaching. OK. Because again, I mean, even if we had seen you did film her in her studio, you could have seen her prepping the class. And that's enough of a signal. The other voices at the beginning of the film, I couldn't hear what they said. So if I don't even know what they were saying, but I felt that they didn't come in at that point because we don't know about the studio at this point. So you don't think about gradual process of revelation when they were more interesting towards the end of the film. Yeah. But apart from that, I mean, she's what a character, and she's brilliant dances. Really well done. And you know what you have got. And I mean, I don't want to take away from what what you've achieved, but this is just to if you go back to it and want to want to improve it, I think this is what I would do.
Leo: if you like it specifically in this film, but it's something that I've seen kind of for all the projects to date is that it feels like, well, this distribution specifically with this film, it feels like the editing is working against the story they are trying to tell because in so many moments you have like head interview actually talking and she's talking and use cut to the footage of the dance as literally a cutaway. And you have this music that is constantly like going in the background and kind of, you know, low level so you can hear the words. That is not allow you to take in the beauty of the dance, like dancing is intended to like, say, something about a cinematic movement or steam. So I feel like I should have been less of a built-around interview with cutaways peppered into just a short, some dancing. And it should have been should have had much clearer sections like now we're talking, listening, now we're watching the. And also in terms of sound mixing, you should have the music blasting way louder when you're watching them dance. And ideally use the same music they were dancing to do so that you can just, you know, take a moment to sit back and appreciate the beauty of the movement and everything that they're doing. What I'm seeing in most of the projects today, and this is well using that expression being is damaging. He seems to me that many of these projects are building the film around the interview and then considering everything that's observational footage like, you know, be class citizen footage like, you know, using it as saying, Yeah, we have things to do. And yeah, I guess with both something to consider to cover the cuts, whereas observational footage is incredibly important, especially if you're, you know, representing a character. It's not just, oh, well, yeah, I don't know how to cover this got let's put in this this thing that we want, so you should getting should be giving the same weight to both kinds of footage and use it to do different things like I think what Joe said it’s like its exactly like that sometimes, and you are using the camera to just record, but you won't use it in a creative way. But you actually like representing five of the presenting at the dancing in the movement and whatever the other projects through as fast as you can. So always in a manner like you're making a documentary, both parts you're using Sunday interview and you're observing them in a natural element, but one does not have like more weight than the other. We should be using both and questioning why? Why you may, you know, we shot you had this beautiful footage of the dance. Why are you just relegating it to kind of covering it up with this, like very low-level music where you could be like, literally take one minute of the uninterrupted dance of footage without even hearing her speak? Because I think I feel like watching them in their element for people is, as you were saying, is so much more useful to understand them and just listen to them, speak about themselves. Tomas: If you haven't had the music track on, you wouldn't have been cutting on the beat and you're the best looking at the action. Where does the action begin and where does the action end? And then you would have kept the full action as you were like cutting the action really short because you were cutting to the beat because the music went on before the cutaways. And so you were like, Oh, let's go until cuts don't into. Cuts tan-tan-tan cut, and then that was undermining the dancing. I'm very much making it feel like the music had more importance than, you know, just, you know anything, it should. And it wasn't the music they were dancing to. So, yeah, you could build a scene around one person dancing to the music and hear that music and be in that moment and get some feet and get some hands, get some head, get some lights and that nice interaction together.
