Jonny Walker gets in touch...

This evening, I had a call from Jonny Walker. I was quite surprised at how quickly he'd gotten back to us but he seemed very positive about working with us and I think he'd be a great interviewee as he has working in busking for 7 years in Liverpool and through the discussion on the phone I learned that he has been in discussions with Liverpool City Council about the proposed busking legislation as they are keen to try to make the policy work for them. I gleaned that the issue with these new policies wasn't so much about being charged but more about the restrictions that might be put on buskers.

I am more enthusiastic about working with Jonny since the conversation but there may be one issue that causes us to not be able to interview him. He is only really available on the Thursday as he doesn't live in Liverpool and travels to work there - he hadn't been planning to work in Liverpool but has said he could arrange to work there that weekend so we could get our interview. If he did this, it wouldn't cause him too much disruption but to do it on Tuesday would be extremely difficult as he would have a long way to travel and would need compensating for his expenses which we aren't really in a position to provide. Jonny said he was still interested in working with us on the Thursday if we could do that. Therefore, a discussion with the group and our tutors will be needed to see if this is viable. I am really hopeful that it is because I think Jonny's input will be perfect for the documentary considering his involvement and background.

Treatment Meeting

As producer, I attended the production meeting at stores to ensure we had all the equipment we needed booked in time for collection on Monday. I have made an equipment list so I can make sure we have everything we've booked on Monday and also so I can make sure it is all returned on time.

After this, I met with Lewis and Rhys to start refining the pitch. The first thing we discussed were the sources I'd found the previous afternoon and we decided that we should contact Jonny Walker to see if he would be available for an interview. I sent an email off and also called up his manager which after an unsuccessful attempt became very useful as she said she'd call him to discuss this and get back to me. We also decided to try and find a local councillor that could shed some light on the legislation from Liverpool Council's point of view so I spent some time enquiring with their council services to find a name and sent an email off there too.

We began writing up a treatment but unfortunately Lewis had to leave, so Rhys and I continued on with the two treatments. By now, the busking idea has progressed and is looking a lot more viable than the Banksy exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, so our treatments are very biased in that we spent a lot more time on the Busking one. We even have a script of questions written out for the various segments of the documentary and have some fairly solid ideas of how we want to present buskers and what angle to take - humanising the busker and giving the audience more insight into their lives and why they do what they do.

First Meeting

Today has been our first meeting as a group because Tom has been away in Amsterdam and with other projects, this is the first day everyone has been available.

We began by deciding which roles we were going to take. I decided to try out producing as it's not really an area I'm familiar with and I want to give it a try. Tom will be director, editing will be done by James and cinematography is going to be done by Lewis, leaving sound to Rhys.

We began to look for viable news stories that we were interested in to pitch on Thursday. We found one on the Liverpool Echo website about Liverpool City Council introducing new legislation for buskers which seemed like an interesting story to cover. The other articles we found were about Banksy sparking controversy over his project "Cardinal Sin" which is targeting Catholic church priests that have been in scandal's over molestation in the news.

I personally would like to base our documentary on the buskers of Liverpool, I think there are many interesting angles we could cover from multiple points of view - such as the buskers themselves, the residents of the area, the local council's comments.

When I came away from the meeting, I decided to get some further insight into the situation and in doing some research I found a busker (Jonny Walker) who sometimes plays in Liverpool had a webpage. I did some more research and found out that he has busked there for around 7 years. I decided to bring this up as a possible interview at tomorrow's meeting to finalise the treatments and pitch ideas along with some websites I found that discussed busking in general, here and here.

Apology Line

Above: Still from The Apology Line

James Lees directed another short documentary called The Apology Line, it's a ten minute short this time but Lees employs similar techniques to those used in Pockets, mainly the voice overs. The voice overs are crackly as it is clear they have been recorded from the phone calls coming into the phone line. I think the quality of the recordings and sometimes the accents or distressed nature of the callers can impair the viewer's ability to understand them and sometimes this made me feel more estranged from the piece than intrigued by it. This could have been remedied through the simple use of subtitles.

However, despite this, I think the visuals for the piece are brilliantly put together. Images of the high rise towers and streets connote that any of these situations that have caused the callers to ring could happen to any of us. There are images of people changing or in their underwear, which could be viewed as the people the callers are phoning to apologise too. I think having the characters wearing very little could connote that these people are vulnerable and are 'laying bare' their apologies and internal feelings.

Overall, I think the documentary is successful as it caused reactions within the audience, laughter and shock being juxtaposed, however, it may have been more powerful if it hadn't alienated the audience at some points by not having subtitles to create understanding. I can see that in some cases, this may dehumanise the callers - the instance where a woman is very distraught during her apology but I think that the understanding of what she is saying will contribute towards the feelings you can hear rather than make a viewer feel as if they don't want to watch because they can't understand.

Pockets

Above: Pockets

Pockets by James Lees is a 3 minute documentary exploring what Londoners have in their pockets and the stories or reasoning behind the items. The concept is very simple and accessible and the execution of the idea is great.

The main thread of the documentary is the underlying music, which brings together all the different stories and people from different walks of life. I think that the documentary is successful because it focuses on the items and the faces of the people carrying them in all cases, it has a clear compositional structure and keeps the answers short and concise which keeps the viewer interested in the items.

The depth of field in the film is used to great effect, focusing on the items being held forward and the faces of those carrying them, using this establishes the voice-overs context and allows the director to bring in the voice over at different points, due to displaying images that relate to the interview but aren't sync-sounded - this gives the piece it's pace and dynamics.

Pockets achieves a well-balanced view of all walks of life and establishes it's concept early but changes so regularly and so diversely between stories that the viewer does not get bored of the idea. I think that it has been very successful in creating a sense of story within three minutes and is well self contained.

Skateistan: To live and skate Kabul

Above: Still from Skateistan: To live and skate Kabul

Skateistan: To live and skate Kabul is a short documentary by Orlando Von Einsiedel which we watched during our session today.

Firstly, I thought that the composition of the shots was very well considered and this was a major aspect of making the film accessible. It helps to create a clear picture of the world that these skaters are living in and even just through the juxtaposition between the skaters and the surroundings they were skating in showed the lifestyle of the area.

I thought the use of sound in the piece was very well put together. The sounds of the street life being interspersed with the sounds of the skateboards as the kids came through the shots really put an emphasis on the imagery. The voice over was very effective, it unravelled the story of the young skaters using imagery to reinforce what they were saying. I think all of this was especially effective in combination with the poignant music which underpinned the whole piece nicely but did not overwhelm the other elements of the piece and I think the music is registered subconsciously by the viewer.

In conclusion, I think the piece is considered and concise, which allows the viewer to understand and think about the points the documentary is trying to make.

End Product

Well, three weeks of hard work have finally culminated into two discs and although we've had our fair share of problems, I think keeping organised and working together to re-film things that needed re-filming and editing together kept us on track and helped us to produce a rounded piece.

If I'd had more time, I'd have liked to of focused a lot more on the stop motion aspect of the film because when I got some feedback from my peers, they were positive but I did get comments on reusing some footage of dots across the wall in reverse. They said that as it was a different effect it was passable but I did agree that having had more time, we could have tried to realise our idea of the whole wall being covered and showing more of the room with all these dots appearing.

Creating a five minute film in the time we're used to creating a three minute film was a challenge but it has brought home the importance of organisation and I think we were fairly ambitious with our original idea. Having had to mould it into something else to get the final film has brought us away from what we were intending at the beginning but I think this new direction has given us more flexibility and more space to actually experiment with the film.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with how we've worked together and the film we've created.

Final Edit

The edit today was a lot longer than we had expected it to take but we were still happy at how it had turned out.

Part of this was due to media going offline - we had to reconnect it but it didn't take too long, it was just a minor setback :

After that, everything went smoothly and we got the final minutes sorted:

I started out by importing more segments into soundtrack pro and working alongside that but we did a final sound mix by exporting the final edit (seen below) so I could add the sound.

I added the sound track on and then exported it back so we could align the sounds and images in final cut and export them:

Unfortunately, none of us had any discs once the process was complete so we arranged to go in tomorrow to put the discs together and test them.

Editing Again

During today's edit, we worked on putting together a stronger edit. For part of this process, I gave input and did a small amount of cutting but mainly I worked on the sounds, adding more sounds as they came up with ideas.Firstly, we tried out the atmos against the current edit and we were all happy with how well it fitted. I was even happy that I'd managed to get the beat to be steady throughout but that it already fit some of the pacing in the edit we had.Adding in the sound effects was a lot harder, we had to negotiate between the three of us and I was only able to work on little segments at a time when Jen and Dan were sure they weren't going to make any changes to the segment.

The result at the end of a long day editing was that I had some segments of sound finished and ready for them to match up to the images and the atmos track was in place. The film itself had only another minutes worth to be made and then the final components of sound could be added and we could tweak anything we wanted to change within the design.

These are some of the segments I worked on:

Here are some of the editing grabs of what Jen and Dan were doing:

Sound Design

Today I went through all of the sounds on the Marantz, there are some sounds on there which were saved to the machine that I think are could be used.

The main work for the day was cleaning up the individual clips, trying out various manipulations on the wind chimes and then beginning to create an atmos for the piece.

Here I was attempting to use the ring shift effect and then when I was happy with that I added a reverse:

Here I had renamed this as WindChimesAtmos so I knew which track I wanted to extend to be the final atmos and I was in the process of extending it by overlapping the tracks using fades in order to make sure there were no skips:

Jen and Dan completed a rough assembly after they'd captured and labelled all of the footage we'd reshot. Now that I have the sounds ready, I'm confident that once we've completed the final edit, I'll be able to add the sound to match. We've discussed working in segments in order to allow for a faster easier process and then we can amend the segments in the final review.

Alphabet

The Alphabet by David Lynch

As I couldn't get Eraserhead out of the library in time to watch it before I'd need to do the bulk of the sound design, I began to research David Lynch's other work to see if there were any other works that might have the sound design Esther was talking about.

I found The Alphabet and was intrigued to find some stop motion with colour and a predominantly black and white live action sequence together. The sound is interesting as it is the sound of the alphabet being recited by first some children and secondly a man singing but the underlying atmosphere is an air vent kind of sound with some sucking and blowing of air. Then some pitch changed sounds with grotesque imagery of blood and finally the girl singing the alphabet accompanied by images of a woman's horrified face and her twisted poses with letters of the alphabet as they're sung.

I think I can understand what Esther was saying about getting an atmos track that was something mundane turned into something more sinister or eerie when combined with the images on screen.

I'm going to stick with my idea of wind chimes, however I will be editing them so that they are less recognisable as wind chimes.

Reshooting

Production today was so much better and I think we all came away from the day feeling pleased and refreshingly more confident that we had some good footage.

We added to the list of shots we wanted to film that morning and we got all of them, plus some extras and things we hadn't thought we'd have time or would be too complicated shot as well. I think the group felt much more uplifted after a good day of filming with no hiccups or major problems. Jen and Dan are going to capture the footage on Saturday and I'm going to start work on the sound design. I'd recorded a little sound today and some sounds were left on the Marantz by the previous group so I've decided to investigate them when I begin to work with our sounds tomorrow.

Tutorial

The morning of the tutorial, we got together with Jen, as she had fresh eyes, to see how the piece was coming along. She was able to point out some areas that weren't working and we changed these around before going to see Esther.

The tutorial was really helpful because it gave us a fresh insight into our work and Esther came up with some suggestions that I think we can expand on to the benefit of the piece.

One of the suggestions she made that I was really interested in and was wondering why we hadn't thought of it to begin with was getting the protagonist touched by the colour - she suggested having the dots that appear on the wall begin to appear on the protagonist's face. I think this is something we hadn't considered because trying to keep a face still whilst spending time creating a stop motion would be difficult but I think if we think creatively then there will be a new way of approaching this.

The structure was a little weak and she said we could definitely do with paying some attention to tightening it. She picked up that the candles lighting up were our weakest shots - we agreed and decided to reshoot them. She suggested taking out one shot which I hadn't considered removing but once she'd mentioned it, it appeared glaringly obvious it needed to be removed.

When we screened our rough edit to Esther, we had yet to add any sound. Esther again suggested some interesting ideas for a mix such as contact mic on pipes with interesting internal sounds such as water or electricity, a kettle coming to the boil with a whistle that could increase tension and perhaps the juxtaposition of happy music over depressing scenery.

She also suggested some points of reference such as David Lynch's Eraserhead and Jacques Tati in Playtime and Monsoir Hulot's Holiday due to links with mimes in our piece.

I was very pleased with the outcomes of the tutorial because the group had been feeling a little defeatist in terms of our footage and edit - we weren't sure if we'd gone too far off track with all the issues we'd encountered along the way and so hearing that the piece still had potential and was just needing tweaking and some fresh footage uplifted us somewhat. We resolved to reshoot some footage tomorrow and sat back down to edit. Once we'd sat down and were reviewing the footage, we made a list of what we had and what we thought needed doing. We stopped for the day and decided to be fresh for the following days filming.

New Ideas/Direction

From editing today, Dan and I have realised that the original idea was very linear and almost narrative based. From the footage we have, we don't feel we can communicate the same idea we had at the beginning. We are going to take a much more abstract feel using repetitions and begin to splice in frames in segments and make the pace of the film much faster using rapid cuts between objects.

We still want the emphasis to be on the colour that begins to seep into the character's life and mindset but we want to do it in a more abstract way, without having to explicitly explain the characters motions to getting there.

When we'd first envisioned the piece, the character was going to be static in most shots and one important shot would be the character's interaction with a different self in a mirror before the colour began to seep in - we also wanted the colour to come from a malleable figurine which would be stop motioned into the character and would trigger the colour transformation. However, the mirror we intended to use was never delivered and the stop motion idea with the time we had and now have left is too complex for the amount of on screen time and it's effectiveness will have, so we decided to change these ideas subtly. Instead, we show the black and white character trapped in the television and the colour balls represent the colour beginning to seep into the protagonist's life. We were going to use the veins stop motion in conjunction with a solid ball object appearing in the protagonist's hand but again, this caused problems when we tried it and the footage of the stop motion was good aside from the lighting which made the shot unusable.

Editing

Today we captured the footage from the previous day and began to edit the stop motion together. During this process, I learnt that a setting can be changed before importing pictures which creates a duration for every picture that is then imported. So, when changed, the image will be imported as a 00:00:01 clip which is very useful when importing images that need to be used for just one frame.

We set out a rough assembly of which order we wanted to begin with after viewing the footage we had (above) and then we began to refine the shots.

More Filming

Today we aimed to get some of the stop motion footage that we'd been allowing time for and so hadn't shot yet. Although it is perhaps one of the most time consuming things I've done, working well as a team made the process easier. We co-ordinated by having two people changing the stop motion and one person operating the camera, swapping every so often.

As well as shooting the stop motion footage, we took some more footage that we thought hadn't turned out as well when it was reviewed. Our lighting hadn't come out the way that we'd thought when we were setting up with the small viewer on the camera, also some of the scene that we had counted to be out of shot was in shot when the footage was uploaded to the computer. The screen omitted a larger amount of space being captured than we'd thought and this made some of our shots unusable.

Capturing and Reviewing

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go in to capture and edit the footage over the weekend - instead, I was filled in on the progress by Jen and Dan. We had been worried about getting enough footage to fill 5 minutes as our main elements of the film were stop motion and we knew this was time consuming to produce but once edited amounts to little on screen time.

Our suspicions that we wouldn't have enough footage to fill the time were confirmed and once Jen and Dan had told me, I began to try to think of some ideas that I could bring to further shooting. After some deliberation, Jen and Dan decided to continue with some editing today and to begin more shooting on Tuesday.

I was unable to go in today because I'd been unwell, so I again got some feedback. The reshoot tomorrow will be the last opportunity to get some footage before we begin editing on Wednesday for our tutorial on Thursday.

I hope that we can get enough to make a decent rough edit so that we can get some much needed feedback.

Filming

Above: Materials for stop motion and stop tricks

We got off to a disappointing start on Wednesday as the actor called us half an hour before we intended to start shooting to say that he had just been injured and was in the hospital! This left us with no alternative but to try to get as many cutaways and shots that we thought we might be able to do without the actor needing to be present that day. Unfortunately, because our idea is to have the black and white section then the colour, we couldn't shoot out of sequence as this would create an issue with continuity - the colour stop motion meant using the wall space and this would invariably be in shot when we wanted to shoot blackand white scenes if we didn't shoot chronologically.

Therefore, this set back created a major problem for us that day however, we did try to get as much done as we could.

Above: Filming the clock cutaway/stop trick

On Thursday, we did a lot more. Dan was now going to be the protagonist as we felt we had little alternative but we did lose some time trying to find white face paint that would cover enough - the stuff we'd found on Wednesday was useless!

We worked our way through a fair amount of shots on the rough list we'd written out but we'd anticipated we'd get through more. A lot of what we need to do is stop motion and we decided to do that in one big chunk, so we finished the shooting with the prospect of using the weekend to capture and edit the footage we already had and review which gaps we had that needed filling in terms of shots we had wanted and if there were any new ideas that came to us after seeing what we'd already got.

Below: The ending image for the veins stop motion