Referenced Documentaries

So far I have studied three documentaries and have been applying the concept of the 'Big O'. This was originally a short story for children that the Cultural Philosopher Slavoj Zizek examined and believed explained how people psychologically have a 'lack' which they have to fill. Zizek explains this concept theoretically as how everyone is a metaphorically a circle with a piece missing, as a consequence we constantly strive to find this missing piece to fill the void.

In each of the documentaries this idea of a 'lack' is essentially what is being explored, in my opinion this appears to be the central narrative role for any documentary. The concept applies most strongly to 'Married to the Eiffel Tower' and 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' more than in 'Grizzly Man' as the woman in M.T.T.E.T has found her missing piece through loving objects. In E.T.T.G.S all of the street artists featured constantly search for that one special spot for their work and are always doing more graffiti every night and when will enough be enough? In 'Grizzly Man' the subject matter. Timothy Treadwell, follows his desire to be a as close as he can to a community of bears with disastrous results. All of these characters desires are fairly extreme but they do explore a very human experience, if an individual has a 'lack' they are consumed with pursuing something that will complete them or fulfil them in some way.
 
By watching these three documentaries I have made a final decision that I will be making a documentary film for my practical work. From these documentaries I have gained a psychological insight into what drives individuals to follow certain pursuits as a desire to fulfil needs. This is the type of question I want to answer in my own documentary on graffiti. I will need to establish what are the drives lead graffiti artists to go out in the middle of the night to write their name on a wall whilst risking getting arrested and in some cases their life. The questions will be asked in a formal interview technique as some of my reference documentaries contained with the protagonists of my film, as I have stated also in my production log.

Oxford trip

                               
         
Recorded meeting 2

We held another meeting for the Oxford trip as it was a day when we needed to be really organised. In the meeting we discussed what locations we would visit, what shots we would take and how much time we would allow for each location shoot.

                             

Recorded Meeting 1

When we started to go out and film on location we realised that we needed to be more organised with what were filming, where we were filming and different shot types that we were doing. we realised that the best way to get around this was to have meetings and record them. this way we could listen back over the recordings to see what was said.

Shutter Speed

  Shutter speed

           
      In this footage we were trying out some innovative camera movements so that we had shots in a new wave style. In this shot we were driving around and filming out of the window. Unfortunatley this shot did not look good as it is really blurry. This is because the shutter speed was not quick enough and was set at around 1/50.

          

This is another innovative camera movement in the car but this one is much clearer with no blurs because we made the shutter speed quicker at around 1/500

Evaluation

Overall I think the course so far has been successful. At the start of the course we started our research for our contextual work. The research went really well as I had a lot of books to look through which i got a lot of information from and we also took a trip to Coventry Uni Library . the trip to the library really help0ed as there was books there that i may not have been able to get my hands on so i took the opportunity to photo copy every bit of information i could. Once i had finished my research I made a start on the contextual. I think that my contextual work went quite good as I have never been very good at writing essays but I feel that my writing skills are now at a higher level. it also helped having plenty of research to write about. I also learnt How to use Harvard referencing which i thought was going to be really hard but turned out to be not that difficult.

The filming in the course was really enjoyable. I really liked going out and filming on location and learning about different camera techniques. When we first went out to film on location every one was a bit nervous about it as we were worried about people looking at us which, in Nuneaton we did get. This changed when we went to Oxford to film as it is a popular destination for tourists so we just looked like any other group of tourists. We used Nuneaton to film more "gritty" scenes or locations especially at Fife Street Park as there was vandalism on the kids playground and used condoms on the floor. This all added to the gritty feel and we managed to get some really good footage. Oxford was the complete opposite and thats why we went to film there. everything was really picturesque there and we got some really good footage from there. Before we went to Oxford we made a plan of what we were going to film and where. we decided on three main locations which were The Turf Tavern, Jericoh Street and an old record shop. We managed to get two out of the three as we didn't have time to make it to Jericoh Street as we were stopping on the way to different locations to film at other good locations such as an old fashioned sweet shop. The sweet shop was a really good place to film and we got some of our best footage filmed in there. We also spent quite bit of time in there because we were getting really good footage and we had permission to film in there for along as we wanted to. Another really good location we filmed was in an old record shop/coffee shop as the owners were really nice and said we could film as much as we wanted. In the record shop we got some really good cutaways and we got to try using the Boom mic. The boom mic did not go successfully as will did not realise that he was holding it next to a speaker, but we got to practise with it.

I feel that my "Blogging" could have been better as i should have put more videos of footage and i should have went into more detail when discussing various things. The reason why i didn't spend as much time on my blog as other work is because I'm not a strong essay writer, i spent most of my time worrying about that and writing draft after draft trying to get my grade up as much as possible rather than putting more effort into the blog.

The editing of all the footage was my favourite part of the unit as it finally gave me the chance to put my own creative feel to all of the footage we filmed together. at first I wasn't going to have a narrative or theme to my film but when i got more into the editing i realised that i was creating a theme with out realising it. The theme is of a journey to different locations and i have shown this through how i kept cutting back to a shot of a car wing mirror whilst the car is moving to represent the travelling part. Then i have used different shots of different locations along with different cut away shots. Because i have taken influence from New Wave cinema i have put innovative camera movements in my film to show this. We had to put music over the top of our film and were told that a sensible choice would be Post-Rock as this starts off slow and builds up. The music I chose was by a band called Peace and the song is called 1998 and it works really well with my film as different sounds at the start of the song fit the timing of my jump cuts that i put in.

Editing for lighting

EDITING

At the moment i am currently editing my montage of shot types. It is so far my favourite thing that i have done on the course. The soft ware i am using is Adobe Premier Pro on a mac and is really good for editing. The film has to be between 3 and 5 minutes long and has to contain a variety of different shots and filming techniques we tried out. Whilst editing i tried to create a theme and it is the theme of traveling to places. for example between all the shots i have edited it to keep cutting back to an innovative shot of the wing mirror whilst we are moving in the car to show moving to different places or scenes. Depending on the outcome of the final product i don't know whether or not i will keep this theme. You can also create meaning through the use of montage. I have tried to do this by cutting back to the shot of the car wing mirror, this combined with footage of different places gives the meaning of traveling.

This is more footage from the low key shoot. the studio was pitch black and our key light source was a phone. in this shot we used a creepy looking doll. This worked really well in the low key light because it gives the doll a much more scary feel to it. the equipment we used for this footage was a cannon 5d, a tripod and the phone for key light.l we were shooting on aperture f/22 which worked really well. We used the iPhone as our key light because we took influence from French New wave cinema by using innovative light sources due to budgeting.

This is the exposure triangle. To get a good shot you need to take all 3 corners into consideration. ISO is how sensitive the cameras lens is to light. Aperture is how small or big the opening of the lense is. shutter speed is how long the shutter is open for. an example of how this works is, if your camera lens is very sensitive to light then you need a higher aperture like f/22. The higher the aperture, the less light it lets in. finally you would need to make the shutter speed quicker so that it lets less light into the shot.

White Balance

ISO is how sensitive the image sensor is to light. If i was filming out doors and my aperture was set at f/22, i would need to either slow down the frame rate or turn up the ISO. This is because the lens opening would be really small and wouldn't let in much light. If there was movement in my shot i would have to turn the ISO up because if the frame rate was slow the image would be blurred.

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This is an example of some footage we had problems with white balance on. as you can see the whole shot is effected by the grainy blue colour. We were filming on aperture f/22 but we had not adjusted the ISO or frame rate. this is what caused this grainy blue colour. once we had realised we increased the ISO.

Prep For Oxford Shoot

Prep For Oxford Shoot

This is an example of pre Oxford filming day prep. We all got together and discussed what equipment we would need for the day. Sammy then sent an email around confirming this just incase we needed anything else or forgotten  something. The whole day went really well and to schedule and this was down to planning.

Lighting

            

We filmed this footage in the photography studio. It is an example of using innovative light sources. for this shot we used two light sources one was a light on an iPhone and one was a small barn door light. This is one of my favorite shots we did because it creates a really nice low key light and the colours of the table cloth reflects the light really well. the barn door light was located towards the bottom right corner of the table to get a highly lit area of the table. we then had the iPhone located above the bowl towards the top left corner. The camera was at a high vantage point. This shots influenced by the "Kuloshev effect"and it is when you create meaning or emotion of a character through the use of editing. you do this by having a shot of the person then cutting away to a shot of food in this case. By doing this it tells the viewer that the character is hungry.

Aperture

Aperture

This is a diagram showing how to use aperture and what each one does. For most of our filming we shot on aperture f/22 as it lets less light and creates a deep depth of field.

        

As you can see in this shot, the actor is in focus but the background is out of focus. This is because the aperture would have been set at around f14 which creates a shallow depth of field. If i was to go back and do this shot again I would set the aperture to f22 to create a larger depth of field. we were using a dolly in this shot therefore next time i would also increase the shutter speed slightly. I would also make sure that the surface we were using the dolly on was smooth as the slightest bump on the ground could cause the shot to look really shaky.

New Wave

This shot was supposed to be influenced by new wave as we wanted to get a nice zoom out using the dolly to show how he is "trapped" by showing him behind the cage. Unfortunatley the shot did not work out as the surface was so un even.


Health & Safety

When filming this piece of footage we had to take some risks into consideration. One of which for this shot was that nothing was behind the dolly operator to cause them to trip up as they are walking backwards.

Recording Sound With an External Microphone

             

Sound

This footage we filmed in an old record shop. We basically wanted an interview with a worker about the music scene in Oxford so we could use the boom mic. As you can hear we had some problems with the boom mic as there was a speaker right next to where we had it positioned. The camera position and framing look really good and like a documentary style its just the sound that lets it down. For this shot we had the aperture set at f/8 so we had the ISO set at 400 and the shutter speed set at 1/250. We put the ISO up because we wanted to make the most out of the small amount of light that was in front of him. All of these made the shot look really nice and documentary style. The equipment we used in this was a Canon 500, tripod and the boom mic. Looking back on this shot if i could do it again I would make sure that we scan the room for anything that could damage the sound on the boom mic. This mistake with the boom mic led me to notice that in the American new wave film Easy Rider that I've researched for my contextual study, the opening scene is the two protagonists taking part in a drug deal but you can't hear anything they are saying because it has been smothered with the sound of aeroplanes flying over them. Seeing has made me realise i can still use the footage as a new wave influence.

Lighting

We chose to film in the window of the shop because we thought it would look good having the street behind him, which it did but we did not consider him being poorly lit. Looking back if i could have done this shoot again i would have ensured that we used the reflector to reflect light from the window onto the man so that he was evenly lit.

Health & Safety

For this shoot we were in a small record shop so we had to take a few risks into consideration. We had to make sure all bags and equipment we weren't using were stored out the way of any aisles so it weren't abstracting anyone walking. we also had to make sure the tripod wasn't in the way of any walking space so that people wouldn't trip over it. Every one had to be aware of the wires from the boom mic also.