My Street Evaluation

Evaluation

Connor and I are happy with how the finished film has turned out. I feel that we have portrayed Tintagel in a respectful and appealing way.  Although in retrospect, the choice of equipment was not to the standard that we would’ve expected; lowering the overall video quality, giving the video scan lines and screen tearing. However we believe that the project does not rely on video quality but rather content. The process of finding interviewees didn’t go as smooth as possible with many people declining or outright refusing, although we finally found three willing interviewees.

The interviewees themselves were of high quality in their responses. The only thing letting one interview down was the overall background audio quality which unfortunately rendered the interview unusable.

Exporting the video didn’t go quite as planned as it left us with a 6 gig video file. I’m still trying to reduce the file size to something reasonable. The last render was 500mbs but the audio was out of sync. We’ve also decided to make another version of the film that says thank you at the end to the interviewees and to the one that we didn’t use.

My Street – Tintagel, final film

My Street – Release forms

Here are the release forms for the interviewees in our film. Only one of them, Mr Daniel, was not used in the final film due to unusable audio.

Risk Assessment

My Street Project: Initial Project Proposal Form

 

Crewing Arrangements:

Connor will be on camera and in charge of interviewing people while I will be sound operator along with producer and editor.

Initial Film Ideas:

Showing a simple street to be more than what meets the eye going through the small town of Tintagel, a seaside town noted for its links to King Arthur, and asking the shop owners, visitors, and residents notable times there. We will be trying to get people interested with showing a town that normally people would only see for a week or two before they returned from their holiday. We will be going into each shop across the road and asking each shop owner about their lives and daily life. We’ll also ask them if they have any interesting stories about their life or Tintagel.

Shooting Style Ideas

Steady cam and shoulder rigs to achieve the cut a ways and establishing shots of the street and surrounding area. Also single tripod camera and zoom when shooting interviews. Shots will be long and mid shots for cut a ways and mid portrait for interviews with the camera op asking the questions.

Resources Required & Timescale:

Tripod, DSLR, 18-55mm lens, shoulder rig, Zoom, top mounted DSLR mic During the project we will schedule 3 days for shooting a Thursday, Friday and Saturday to ensire store owners will be around and then schedule 3 days for editing 2 days to actually edit and a day incase of delays.

 

Documentary

Dan P gave a lecture on documentaries. We spoke about how the viewer immediately takes anything of the genre as fact without questioning it’s authority to inform, and the power they possess to make the viewer accept all ‘facts’.

So, for example audience seem to take documentary as fact when actually they can be biased and politically steered. For example we were shown an 11 minute documentary with mainly audio. The point was that it made you focus on exactly what they wanted you too. So because there was just audio of people chatting you could not make out anything apart from the stress in peoples voices. There was only around 40 seconds of visuals.

It did not seem like a documentary because it didn’t inform, it’s purpose seemed to be to just evoke emotion. Because of the massive media attention to 9/11, Dan said that we as an audience are almost desensitized to the event.

I think that the event of 9/11 was blown up in comparison to Hiroshima. When the devastation occurred in Japan it seemed a lot less composure than that of 9/11. Probably because the Americans didn’t want any attention towards their killing of over 150,000 innocent people.

I believe in Attenborough. I don’t watch many documentaries but have made one about video games. Ultimately I think that if you can back up your footage/claims with facts, then you can take it as fact. However, it’s all in the edit and to a certain extent documentary is manipulated to be whatever the filmmaker wants it to be!

28 Days Later Foley

https://vimeo.com/55113685

28 Days Later Foley Evaluation

Working in a group of three, we investigated the foley and sound designers of the movie ’28 Days Later’. We would then analyse their styles throughout their other work so we could correctly add audio to one of the opening scenes of the movie and keep it true to their styles.

We split up who we’d analyse between us. Whilst my group members looked at the foley artist and soundtrack designer, I looked at the films sound designer Glenn Freemantle. According to the Internet Movie DataBase, he’s worked on over a hundred box office movies as a sound designer. I chose to analyse a movie he’s worked on called “127 hours”. In it a mans arm is trapped under a rock for the majority of the movie. Good tension and emotion is created by choosing to have absolutely no wild track on certain scenes. Absolute silence will be accompanied by the sound of the main character struggling franticly to free himself. This use of silence is also evident in 28 Days Later and is very effective at creating a lonely yet dangerous post-apocalyptic world.

After deciding upon the core sound effects we’d use for the foley recording, we set off with a video camera and recorder to get them done. In editing, the audio was imported and synced to their corresponding videos.  The videos of the sounds being recorded were placed at the corners of the screen for a separate export to be used as a making of video.

Originally the project was very silent. With no wild track, only the actions of the actor would be heard; identical to Glenn Freemantle’s style.  Upon watching our clip on external devices we found that the sounds had quite loud ambience therefor making the transition between them and silence too obvious. Because of this we decided to add a wild track throughout the clip, which helped greatly and blended to the foley sounds.

28 Days Foley Making Of

https://vimeo.com/55113683

Audio research

For my foley project, I’ve decided to research into the crew behind our groups chosen clip. Our project is to add foley from scratch to a scene from the movie ’28 Days Later’.

The sound designer of ’28 Days Later’, Glenn Freemantle, had the same job for ‘127 hours’ according to the Internet Movie Data Base. Both movies use complete silence during intense moments. For example, in ‘127 Hours’, while the main character is relentlessly trying to free himself from the rock and is panicking, not a single ambient sound can be heard. This stays true to most of the scenes in the films, where the characters are the only sauce of audio. I think it creates a contrast between the peaceful silent world and the loud and worried characters. This technique works well in ’28 Days later’ to express the silent yet zombie infested world of the post apocalypse.