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.