Filed under: media industries 2 | Tags: editing, overview, post-production, seminar
Eric and my job as post-production team was to edit the footage from the seminar into a short (under 10 minute) highlight video. This ended up being a lot more difficult than expected because it is hard to make short snippets of good words of wisdom into something that has structure and makes sense, especially since our guests rambled quite a bit and their stories were long. Our approach to editing was to go through all the footage pick the best bits and then form the structure from there. What we regarded as the best bits were moments that we could apply ourselves, so in a way tangible tips, advice or stories that were new, innovative and interesting, and also things that we could apply ourselves to our own practice.
When we had all our bits and pieces of highlights what we realised was that whilst Dennis and Steve fed off each other with things generally on documentary a lot of Natalie’s stuff was particularly related to her Tote documentary, therefore we realised that we could structure it around Dennis and Steve’s advice with Natalie’s words as examples of that advice or general documentary information.
This still didn’t quite work, because whilst we mapped out some key theoretical groups such as: the ideas, subject and filmmaker relationships and funding they all didn’t quite join together, and it seemed very disjointed. Therefore what we decided to do was to form the content around 10 tips to documentary filmmaking in which we would introduce text and voiceover to give the footage some shape. The tips were quite easy to come by because all guests had something to give in terms of advice for budding documentary filmmakers and therefore we used to text to form a tip in short term and then for them to elaborate vocally on that tip. In which we would add some more text to re-phrase the tip after they had elaborated.
We used voice-over to tie the seminar together into a narrative and to introduce new themes as the occured through the piece. We kept the voice-over to a minimum, yet we wanted to provide context in terms of what the seminar was about and also to give the video some rounding with a beginning and concluding voice just to make it a bit more circular for whoever is viewing it.
I forgot how much I enjoyed editing, because I find it a really creative time, where your footage can turn as you find more threads and themes in the words given to you. Therefore, even though we weren’t editing anything spectacular you can make it better and more thought provoking in terms of how you place things together and then by adding small things such as text, voice0ver and also some of the clips from the trailers of our guests to add a new visual dimension and give the viewing something stimulating to view whilst hearing words that relate to those words.
Overall, I enjoyed this role as part of the seminar team and even though I’m not really keen on the super technical elements of editing I like thinking about editing and how everything relates and then how it could all work together to create something sensical.
Now that our documentary is finished I thought it would be nice to do a series of reflective blog posts on different areas, which will also include reflections on other people’s documentaries after the screening. I am going away on the 3rd of November, so I really need to get these done before I leave.
I didn’t write a blog post on our own in class assessment because I thought it would be more worth while to write this after the editing process had finished so I could talk about my role as producer, director and also editor, and then reflect on my changed attitude to filmmaking or really what I’ve learnt about group work and the processes of a documentary production.
Producer
I would probably say that this role was the most difficult and frustration, especially when your subject is constantly on a rollercoaster of massive mood changes and therefore made the process of organising film dates almost to the point of impossible. I think I did well to deal with this myself, yet didn’t really communicate the difficulties I was having to my group members, which I assume would have been very frustrating for them. Producing is the most stressful because people are busy and you have to finalise dates and always be on the ball communicating between your subject and group members. It is also about being on top of all that pre-production stuff and being extremely organised. In having produced our drama last semester I have to say that producing drama is a lot easier because it’s formalaic, with everything lined out. Your director gives you a shot list and you strategically and practically go through it to create a schedule you cann actors who legitimately want to be in your film for rehearsals and everything is very formalaic you can write a step-by-step list of everything you have to do. In documentary because it’s less structured, a lot of the information is in your mind and you write down some shots that you need but all in all you have to work around your subject who is often unpredictable. What I learnt was a large degree of patience and that it is more important to make your subject happy than really anything else because you have a great crew that will organise everything else in terms of technical requirements. Especially, with Maggie it was about reassuring her making her feel as comfortable as possible in front of glowing lights and a camera.
Director
Perhaps I’m not cut out for this role, because it’s really difficult. I worked really well with Meenal to come up with a visual style and then was happy to let her go with the camera because I had built a trust with her and was fully trusting of her capabilities to use a camera. This is one area of the group work I was really happy with as it made me way less stressful on the day because all I had to worry about was communicating with Maggie and making sure we got the stories and information we wanted. Again, with documentary this is unpredictable; things that she had talked about previously with me she didn’t want to talk about to the camera. Yet, I was happy with this as she seemed in control of what she wanted and didn’t want to say, which was one of the ethical things Liam brought up when you’re dealing with vulnerable subjects- that they told you things that they didn’t want to. I would always say I don’t want to trick her into saying anything because that is being unethical and taking advantage of that vulnerability. In the first interview I probably didn’t go in as hard as I would have liked and talked to my group about what we NEEDED from the next interview, which made it a lot easier, except that Maggie wasn’t in the best place. Ultimately, what I learnt is that you need a lot of time with subjects like Maggie and heaps of flexibility so maybe if this was not a uni subject and I had infinite time to interview we would have kept building the trust and got a lot of information. However, I think all my previous research into aesthetics and what we were dealing with really made me prepared for what Maggie was going to offer.
Editor
I really loved editing. I literally edited as much as I could and it really paid off on the final days of editing where we could really focus in on fine-tuning. What I learnt: editing makes a film. That is it and also mastering Final Cut to a higher degree. I really understand now the reliance Observational doco makers have on editing because it allows you to embed meaning and make what your subject says more important mimicking how you saw it on the day. This goes back to all that pre-production stuff of really knowing your subject and being able to use your editing to convey what they want to say as truthfully as you can, because sometimes when they say something important to them they rush it and it now emphasises something unimportant. This was all about timing. What I also learnt: give your subject time. When we started editing we knew that Maggie was very spaced with her words or rushed through them and I think we were too eager to cut everything down to being really precise and fine, when we really needed to give Maggie’s words space, to let her ponder and let the audience wait to hear what comes next. When we gave Maggie space everything was a lot clearer, you could hear Maggie clearer and her words meant more, which was really important.
Overall
I want to edit. If I spent my life editing I would be happy. Editing is when you can really just think about everything and get to know your footage, whether it is good or bad and just let it speak for itself. It allows you to be 100% creative without having to worry about technical limitations, things going wrong, etc. It is also very inspiring and I often found myself going home and just thinking about the footage how we could structure it and how everything could link together to create a whole. I think I like editing the same way that I like writing essays or watching films, it’s about analysing each bit of footage and then putting it into a context that gives it meaning. It’s like making your own topic sentence and then filling in the gaps that convey that topic. Except, with the structural freedom that you don’t get with an essay. Editing is right up my alley it’s about seeing what isn’t there, what is there and then analysing it, creating and forming meanings that you didn’t think were there in the first place. It’s like being utterly shocked and suprised when that film makes that fatal twist.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: cutaways, editing, finalcutpro, fine-cut, soundtrack
On Monday, we spent the whole day fine-cutting our documentary with precision, with the emphasised focus on our audio mix and overlays. We also re-configured the ending so it was less jarring. We also learnt some great editing tips along the way, which made it all in all a lot less time consuming. Firstly, lets talk about cutaways.
Cutaways
Cutaways need to be put in the right place so they do not jarringly pop out of nowhere. Therefore, you need to correlate them quite significantly with the running dialogue. When I went into the editing suites on Monday I had a feeling that we had just chucked in our cutaways without considering how they flow into Maggie’s words. Therefore, we spent some time alloting carefully where to have each cutaway cut in and cut out. Let me give you a tangible example:
In the cigarettes and milkbar story we have 5 different overlays throughout: two of milkbars, one of her arm in a sling and one of a packet of cigarettes. The milkbar cutaways come in when she talks about the actual process of robbing the milkbar, yet they came in right on the middle of one of her words, which made it seem very jarring and then there was a gap (a pause in her speaking) which was cut halfway through with a second milkbar cut. On the whole it was quite jarring. Therefore, what needed to be done was a slight shifting of the clips so that they sat at the end or beginning of a word to make it a much neater transition into the cutaway. With the packets of cigarettes the shot was too short and just looked like a flashing image. Therefore, we just extended it and it worked much better.
In using cutaways you have to make sure they’re not redundant. Gina and I spent about half an hour putting a cutaway in to cover a messy cut by using an emotional blank shot of Maggie’s face. Because we were messing around with this for so long we thought that perhaps it didn’t work and took it away realising it was not the cut itself that was clunky but the audio cut straight into the word, which brings me to my next amazing editing discovery.
Audio tip, especially helpful when someone links all their words together
Maggie talks throughout her interview in two distinct ways; either very slow with lots of space or very quick linking her words together. Whilst the slow works well and is easy to cut around the quick is very difficult as we can’t get any space before words as they are linked intrinsically to the previous.
Solution # 1 attempt to cut right at the beginning of the word (This doesn’t work very well and is what we used for our rougher cuts, because she comes in very quickly and half the word is usually cut off).
Solution # 2 put a gap in your audio to give it some space. This works quite well except does leave a gapping hole of obvious silence, and because Maggie does breathe quite heavily between words the gaps are even more obvious.
Solution # 3 add a gap fade in fade out. This was seriously the ultimate solution and eliminated the clunkiness of Maggie starting a word. We would extend the clip slightly and then fade into the beginning of the word we needed. Sometimes we did need that gap just to make the process of her telling the story less rushed and more poignant. So we would fade into and out of the silence, which made it a hell of a lot less noticable.
In working through these problems Gina and I realised that you really just have to persist to you get it perfect, we had the time to make each cut perfect so we had to ensure we did this, even though it was time consuming. What we realised was her part 1 Rodney story was very rushed and just seemed unimportant, when it is something that is really important to Maggie, and therefore by putting in gaps and making it longer it made it a lot more significant connecting more truthfully to Maggie’s story.
On a final note it is important to edit to the music, especially if it is particularly rythmic. In our beginning montage Sarah and Meenal edited each cut to the changes in the music, which made the edit ever so more impressive and because we used the same song in the credits it was important to do the same, where each change in credit links causatively to the change in music.
Overall, I think my editing has become a l0t better in terms of mastering short cuts and really thinking about every cut. I remember Paul saying in one of the lectures that your group should ‘high five’ for every great cut and as we edited on Monday I really understood the merit of what he was saying, because in documentary every cut is signifying something and you need to make sure that it is signifying the right thing and if it’s not ever-so-slightly you need to change it. I felt like I was being a meticulous snob, but atleast we’re all happy with the final product.
Since, it’s coming to that time to hand in our documentaries I thought it would be a good time to refresh on all those bits and pieces needed to hand in our documentaries. This is covered in Paul’s last lecture, yet it is very dot pointy and that 2 weeks ago feels like a lot longer than that. I thought what I’d do it re-visit Paul’s video manuals and write a check list for each component and what we have to check, etc.
compressing to mpeg2/ac3
- cntrl + click on the sequence you want to export and click export>using compressor
- in compressor click the preset media video from the left menu and check the following specifications: width- 720, height- 576, format- M2V (in the summary tab) and check that the video format is PAL and aspect ratio 4:3 in the encoder tab, the quality tab within the encoder tab should be set to an average bit rate of 5.0 and a maximum bit rate of 7.5
- drag the media video preset onto your sequence in the top panel
- drag the media audio preset as well, the file format should be dolby digital professional with the extension ac3
- right click the media audio preset that has been dragged onto your sequence and select the destination as other and select where you want it to save
- do the same with your audio preset
- click submit
media managing
- control+click your sequence and click media manage
- in the pop up window, under Media: make sure the drop down menu is set to copy
- tick ‘delete unused media from duplicated items,’ and ‘handles’ and set this to 02:05
- click the ‘browse…’ button and select where you want to save your project and call it ‘mm title of film’
- click ok and name your project
- click save
So, there is no video on DVD Studio Pro so I will revist my blog post on the lecture and see if there is anything written on it on the tv2 handbook blog. When I went on the handbook blog I found a document on doing the web compression, which is optional, but we didn’t do it last semester so this is probably a handy thing to know. It is a google doc link so I don’t think it is worth re-writing out, just a link here will suffice.
DVD studio pro
Hmmmm, so there is not a lot written on how to do this, basically from my lecture notes are 4 points:
- just keep the setting at 4:3 otherwise it will double squash
- set your display mode to 16:9
- build your project in DVD Studio Pro, don’t Burn
- burn using toast
Toast
- select the Video_TS and burn
- click ‘fit-to-DVD video compression’ if needed to fit your files on your DVD
And that’s really it. I know it’s not that an enthralling of a blog post but it will be easier when we have to do all this stuff to just have it written out and to avoid making mistakes. We want our film to be presented well at the screening and sometimes this just means knowing all those little technical details, but know them rather than learn them while you are actually going through the process so you are prepared!
So I was researching for my cinema essay today on the use of time and space in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994) and began really thinking about time and space within our documentary especially through interior and exterior spaces and what Maggie experiences. One of Gina’s thoughts on our documentary was that it was a bit of laugh, not necessarily in a bad way but that we kind of don’t truly relate with Maggie because she almost covers everything in a veneer of laughter. When thinking about this I thought that I needed to think about what Maggie wasn’t saying more than what she was and convey this on a visual level as well as the possibility of being reflexive. Anyway, Maggie’s story is about overcoming the fear of going outside or being part of this world. I think this brings up a very common theme of the ‘outsider’ and also a common theme across women’s homelessness, where the outside world is a daunting process as Maggie says ‘she’s scared of falling back’ so I think Maggie’s story is overcoming being scared of the world, even though things do hold her back, which is revealed at the end. When thinking about this I divided our story into 3 parts, which are quite explicitly: past, present, future, with a slight flash forward at the beginning as to where she is now. Her past is brief made up of fleeting stories: why she barracks for richmond, her son getting taken away and stealing cigarettes with a toy gun as well as Napier street. This stories make up her past, which are a lot longer than now and her future, these seem more fleeting, where the past is imbedded. Her past is where this fear of leaving is intangled especially in the Napier street story, which is embedded within our documentary our of chronological order, near the beginning, even though it was the place previous to where she is now. The Napier street story harnesses her fear but on a health level rather than metophoric she didn’t want to leave because she was overweight.
Even though, I am sure this is the case it seems that she is covering over other issues with physical embodiments of herself. Being overweight was an excuse not to go outside, her shoulder now his a physical attribute she can use to explain and justify who she is, without expressing this on an emotional level. Her story is defined by illness, yet at the end we realise that really it is men that she is scared of that we get fleeting accounts of in Rodney getting taken away from her and the cigarette story.
Our approach with visuals was be as obvious as possible and we also using this to create soundscapes as well to make Maggie’s story away ambiguity into the realm of understanding. I think we can heighten this. Her past is defined as the rough area, the area she won’t go into and I feel that we need to get the sense of this further with a slight reflexive moment where I ask her to talk about her childhood but refuses then we actually hear her talk about Richmond. In these instances the outside world is out-of-reach she is confined within interior spaces unable to see the world that is out there. Therefore, I think that the interior-ness of the interview should be blatantly clear in terms of some slight colour grading. The outside world, which we have shot bright and colourfully should appear completely out of reach.
When Maggie talks about getting her son back I think this is the moment when the story lifts and goes into the world of the new Maggie the colour grading of her interview should lift to begin to match the bright exterior shots and when she talks about actually going on holidays with the girls it should lift even further. Basically, the colour grading should place an even stronger emphasis on Maggie’s feelings. The last section where she talks about the future should be somewhere in-between because it is unknown it is untangible, there is a world of unexpectedness and things to overcome, yet it almost seems unforeseeable as well.
I also think we should have a time-based soundscape here. Even something such as a ticking clock or something like that. We need to feel the intensity of not knowing what’s going to come next. Something that we all do feel.
All of these thoughts are really fine-tuning without changing what we’ve got already but layering a more dynamic feel to the documentary. One that conveys more meaning and makes Maggie, well Maggie. She talks about things on different scopes. Things that we as general humans can comprehend and some feelings that we will never understand; this makes Maggie’s story both universal and insightful.
After Gina did the voice-over and we put it into the cut originally I thought it would be alright, however when I got home I realised that it totally killed the mood of our entire documentary turning way too current affairsy. Luckily over night I had another idea to creatively use text to get the message across even stronger.
When Gina and I looked through the footage yesterday we realised there were so manygreat shots of Maggie’s emotion when she doesn’t speak, that convey a lot of raw emotion and make Maggie more three dimensional. I thought, with some inspiration from Tarnation that we could intermingle text with footage of Maggie’s interview. One of the things that Liam pointed out was that there was not a lot of movement from Maggie and I think in a way this gives Maggie more movement as we show her outside, standing up and looking directly at the camera. We also added some overlays later on that shows her curiously looking around the room as we set up. I think these add little moments of reflexivity and help make our documentary more sophisticated.
Today, I also found a really great track to put to the text sequence that Sarah and I worked to cut the sequence with the music to make it stronger. I was really glad Sarah came in and gave this idea as it makes the opening section of our documentary much stronger. We have also used the text quite dynamically by allowing it to cut in over the image and then the image to go away and have the text on black. Using text in this way makes it more than just text, but makes it a visual component as well, which I think is really important. It also makes a more substantial beginning to our documentary and gives it more life.
Yesterday, we got some feedback from a few co-media students who said that we need to break it up. We need to have a break from her talking and we need it to linger longer. Gina and I thought that perhaps we were too keen to cut Maggie’s running monologues down and making them precise. However, now after we got this feedback I realised that perhaps we need to have more space, allow for space, especially since Maggies speaks very quickly and therefore give the audience time to catch up and think, yet also linger with Maggie.
After I’d done the beginning section we really are on our finishing touches, which include colour correction and audio mix. Sarah and Meenal were set to finish the colour correction today and Gina and everyone that is there on Monday will do the audio mix. I do really think that it’s coming together really nicely. A huge leap has been taken since our rough cut.
Today, we went on a filming expedition to film some much needed cutaways for our documentary. Like Liam said in his feedback to us we can afford to make our cutaways quite literal since Maggie is quite difficult to understand at times. We went as literal as we could and went driving around Melbourne’s inner suburbs on a search for street signs, milkbars and cigarettes. Along the way we filmed houses so we could do some tracking shots. These ended up being fantastic as the broke away from the very interior and stillness of Maggie’s interview and also provided a much needed break into the outside bright world, a world that Maggie is missing to some extent. We also wanted to make her cigarettes and gun story much more visual because she speaks quite visually about it so we filmed two milkbars that were closed down, which Sarah led us to. These milkbars were great because they were old-styled and had a lot of really good advertisements and decour, which provide a visual lift to our documentary in providing colour and light, especially since today was so sunny and bright. While we filmed most of these shots we got audio as well to create a more dynamic soundscape to our documentary, because we felt that a lot of the songs didn’t fit as well as we would like so we thought some atmos would be quite nice to add some change. We also filmed some interior shots of staircases because Maggie brings back staircases quite a lot through her story so we thought it would be a needed addition to our documentary. We filmed these at uni in building 2 and captured a more darkened aesthetic, which I think works really well in the context of her story. At 1:30 we went in to capture and begin editing this new footage. Unfortunately we had another break in the time code, which made capturing a bit of a pain, but we managed to get through it.
We then started to piece together our documentary with our new footage and found that it was much more visually intriguing, where these new visuals really break up Maggie’s interview and also give context. We used the drive-by footage quite extensively to break up each of the different stories Maggie tells. We also thought it would convey more strongly that Maggie was homeless in the sense of moving from one place to another, which is also highlighted through the street signs. I thought of this idea from a film that a really like called Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986), in which the film opens really strongly by tracking through the town in which the beginning of the film is set. Originally I thought we could use it only as an opening sequence, however I really like it embedded throughout to move the audience along with Maggie from not just one place to another but from one point in her life to another. It helps create a flow to the story without Maggie’s story needing to be told by her structurally.
We all agreed that because Maggie doesn’t explicitly talk about moving we thought that we needed to address this in the voice-over, which I am finding very difficult to write. However, I think I have come up with something both reflexive and informative, without over-sentimentalising Maggie’s cause.
Women’s homelessness is commonly caused by relationship breakdowns and domestic violence. We put this documentary together because we wanted to show a woman, whose experiences of homelessness break the common perception of people living on the streets. Maggie was homeless, but her homelessness was confined to insecure housing, places that didn’t represent a home or somewhere safe. She now lives in a home with 10 other women. Nearly half of the homeless population are women, yet they are hidden as images of homelessness.
Overall, I’m really happy with how our documentary is coming along as I think there is a lot of charm in its simplicitly.
Today, I realised that I have spent everyday this week in the editing dungeons and I realised that I really love editing. There’s something so creative about it and it seems more creative than technical once you know your way around final cut and I feel that this semester I really have got used to all those technical editing aspects and have found myself really engaged in the editing process. I talked to Paul today and said that I really like editing a lot more than filming and he told me that he felt like that for a long time too. That he liked the pre-production and editing processes a lot more enjoyable and the filming part usually was anticlimatical. It was really reassuring to hear him say that because this semester I have really been doubting if this is really what I want to do because I kind of despise the whole filming technical process because it doesn’t feel creative it just feels numerical and ordered, where in the editing suites you get these bangs of inspiration, which are fantastic and really assuring.
Throughout editing I have felt my inner literature student come to the foreground and analyse everything that Maggie says to find meaning and to find links that are more metaphorical than literal. There is this constant need to find structure through chronological retelling and I feel as though sometimes this can be a bit rudimentary and also makes the person’s life rather static because in a 7 minute timeframe you cannot tell a person’s life from beginning to end and therefore you have to find those moments that are truly telling and more than that you have to find the moments where emotions speak louder than words. I think it must have been on Wednesday when I edited I re-discovered a moment where Maggie talks about her son, where she says “he turned 20, he turned 21, he fell in love.” Even though the words themselves don’t really say much it is obvious through her actions that she is saying as much about herself as she is about her son. She is referring to her own mis-opportunities and how happy she is for her son in gaining the opportunities she missed out on and how happy she could provide them for him. When you find a moment like this I think it’s really important to work around it contextualise it and then see if it fits in with your story.
A lot of our feedback told us that they wanted to know more about her son so I thought this would be a great way to do it. Therefore, I wanted to split the story into two halves at to have her son’s childhood in one part and the other part after she got him back when he was 16. I split this up on either side of the cigarettes and toy gun story because the story needed time to breathe I didn’t want it to seem like a shot easy amount of time that she spent without her son, but an extended hard time for her, therefore by breaking the story into two parts you give it extra meaning.
As much as you are editing for yourself you are editing for your subject and I think you can lose grasp of this sometimes because you watch the footage over and over again and it desensitises your character and you end up over-analysing. I want this weekend and Monday to be a break from the project to think of Maggie and what she constitutes and what she’s like in person rather than thinking about her as our documentary subject. It’s important to make her 3 dimensional and complex and representative of who she actually she. Therefore move our documentary towards being here rather than being us.
Tomorrow’s shoot is going to be a filling gaps interview as well as capturing all our cutaways. This blog post is more or less an organisational tool that I can use tomorrow to make sure that we cover all the areas that we’ve missed.
Today I went through some of our footage and started to insert markers for some of our longer takes to make editing easier and found some great things that really correlate to our new structure being from desperate Maggie to a Maggie that is able to face the world full on. She says these great things that metaphorically translate into the rythym of our entire documentary such as the ability to walk downstairs and the simple gesture of someone asking her to come down the stairs changed her world, but as she says later on “only one step at a time.” Tomorrow, in my interview I want to focus on different areas of Maggie’s life where there are gaps. Meenal and Sarah pointed out an issue with our story being that in order to know that she has improved we need to know what happened before. These are the holes that Maggie has left in her story. To fill these in I will ask questions that refer to things that she’s already told us to get a better sense of coherence, questions:
- Last week you told us that you had a big medical appointment this week, how did that go yesterday?
- Could you please run us through your life and the different places you’ve lived over the course of your life?
- Questions that run from this: last week you told us that you lived and worked at the Abbottsford Convent what type of work did you do there?
- How long were you there for and from what age?
- Last week you told us that you had made yourself a better person and that you had made some mistakes. What mistakes did you make that you have now gotten over?
- You told us that “everyone makes mistakes” and that some of the people in your past have made mistakes directed towards you? What mistakes have they made?
- You told us that when living in Fitzroy you were too scared to leave the house and go out into the world. Have there been other instances of this in your life?
I think this approach will bring Maggie to focus on certain areas and help us to visualise a timeline of her life. Even though we don’t necessarily want our film to go in chronological order we want to have a sense of where everything she told us last week fits into her life so we can depict her as accurately as possible.
Visual things we need to capture:
- Maggie’s hats: We will also ask her the significance of some of her hats and get her to show them to us and go through them. Meenal, however will focus on capture the hats more than Maggie to use as overlay.
- Maggie’s photos: We may be able to scope out a few things through her photos and therefore will get us to talk about her photos while Meenal focuses on the photos on her photoboard to get a glimpse visually of Maggie’s past life.
- Exterior shots: Maggie talks about venturing into the outside world, however we need to be able to visualise this. We will ask Maggie to perhaps walk outside or take some exterior shots of Maggie experiencing a world that she shares with other people.
- Door numbers: One of the problems that we had was that it wasn’t clear where Maggie was now. We can express this visually through showing the different door numbers in her house or by showing an exterior shot of her room that contextualises it as a room to herself rather than a house. This could be further emphasised by other shots of the place in which Maggie lives such as shots of the outside sharing area.
- Maggie doing something: This could be something simple like her filling up her water bottle or making a cup of tea, we just need to show how Maggie can look after herself and live more independantly in the world.
I think this will really fill the gaps in our film and make it more visual where we can use the visuals to contrast with what Maggie is saying or match what Maggie is saying and therefore bring these things into the editing room to suss out. I think it’s so important to really analyse what Maggie is saying not just her words but her body language and to really see what she’s saying on both a literal and metaphoric level. How do the things in her life now reflect her wider life story?
I also think that if we have time we do some reflexive stuff such as ask Maggie what she would like to have in the documentary and why she wanted to be in our documentary? This might just add a bigger textual level to our doco.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, editing, group, interview, structure
Today Gina and I spent three hours logging and capturing all our footage from Maggie’s interview and to be completely honest thank god I did this after the lecture on Monday because it allowed Gina and I to log and capture in a really efficient way. Due to the fact that I got there earlier I finished logging the clips, leaving the name as the clip as the question and within the logging notes, put what stood out to me in what Maggie said so I would find written references within the Final Cut project. When Gina arrived we began capturing the footage, where Gina was able to transcribe the whole of our interview so we got super organised straight away and discussed some key points in the interview and what other footage we needed to get on our next shoot on Thursday to fill some gaps.
What Gina and I talked about were moments in her story that correlated beyond her story but into the wider context of her life. For instance, Maggie talks about having to go through medical appointments and explains how she is always waiting for answers as they take more blood and do more test in this kind of repetitous manner I thought that this really correlated to her overall story of moving from place to place and having to wait inside and never get this form of conclusion from staying still.
Once, Meenal and Sarah arrived for the tutorial we discussed some major issues that we needed to resolve in terms of where do we go next? Meenal wrote some excellent notes to convey our change of structure that came from a realisation that the hats that she collects and holds so dearly convey more than this. They convey Maggie’s movement from place to place that contradicts the very interior life Maggie has lived. Overall, there is a large contradiction in Maggie’s story being that as much as she has moved from this place to the next there is this sense right through of her being imprisoned to a certain extent and scared to face the realities of the real world. Her hats convey her movement that she has found recently going to Apollo Bay and other places that she talks about in her story. We discussed this with Liam and came up with a solid structural idea that avoids this sense of conclusion that Maggie herself doesn’t give us. Meenal explains this quite well:
As Maggie talks alot about being locked up/scared to face the
world , we thought we could use that as our starting place to portray that sense
of fear she has from moving anywhere . As sound and image goes hand in hand we
thought we could have a overlay of her collection of hats that she loves and are
from different places ( denotes movement again) to play while there is a voice
over of Maggie as she contradicts this movement. “I was stuck in the house for a
month . Some one always did my shopping”.
This lies as a contradiction between what Maggie is saying and what is being revealed and also foreshadows the ending of the film, which will reveal how Maggie has managed to get over this and walk down the stairs, go outside pay her bills, where at one point she claims that “this opened the door for her.” The ending will be the conclusion of the foreshadowing that the hats implied and we hope to capture some overlays of Maggie outside and experiencing the world in a way that she never felt possible. I feel as this is a very literary way to structure our film and reminds me of studying literature in year twelve where you look for different things within a text, labelled by the abreviation MILCSCON- mood, images, links, context, structure and narration. I can’t remember what the ‘O’ standed for. As I looked back through our interview footage I was trying to pick up on certain things especially metaphorical, pithy moments that correlate to a wider sense of Maggie’s life and the links that bring these moments together. In a sense it’s like sitting back and objectifying your work, analysing and searching for moments that are not only good but create a rythym of that person’s life.
I feel that looking at our footage and now stepping forward to do some more filming has really made us grasp what we’re looking for in our next interview and what images we need to capture. Obviously, we need to capture Maggie’s hats in detail as she looks through them and capture hats what show different places that correlate to her life. We also what to get some overlays of Maggie moving to get a sense of the things that she can achieve now as little as they might be, where at one point Maggie does say herself, “it’s step by step.” As Liam said we need to see our subject succeeding or not succeeding but the fact is that we need to see them doing rather than just saying. In conjunction, we want to get a further feel that this is not Maggie’s home in the normal sense of the word “home” and that we thought we could convey this visually by showing room numbers and exterior shots of the way the house is set up to visually show that Maggie is sharing with other people. She still hasn’t gotten to the point where she can live independently. This is how we’ve decided to end our film, by highlighting what Maggie still has to overcome and the ambiguity of what’s around the corner, especially with her health issues.
