Creative Media
Practice project
End of Semester
Self-Evaluation
by Joshua Prentice
Group: Joshua Prentice
and Victor Mihaylov
The concept of our sense of place, that me and victor came
up with, was an insane persons mind. Obviously an insane person will hear
noises and that’s what helps to drive them crazy, and taking inspiration from
things like Lord of the Rings (specifically the rings effect on Frodo), we
based the sound on the screeching noises the man might be hearing in his head.
We tried to crate the effect with a bit of dialogue, between the insane guy and
the therapist, but after feedback, we dropped the whole dialogue concept, and
any dialogue that now appears in our sense of place audio is now: distorted,
reverbed, and sometimes reversed. In doing this we created a sense that he
wasn't focusing on what was happening around him and that’s what we wanted to
bring across. As for the visual side of things all we were wanting was to show
that the character is lost in the world,
and to keep the experimental film as a 'Pure Abstraction' style, and
have the audio do all of the talking for what you see on screen so it lacks
importance of what is seen by the audience.
Our audience is obviously students, and looking at the idea,
I think it's something that they will be able to see on screen and hear. This
is a relatable subject, because although they are not insane to the extent of
what we are trying to portray, the stress meeting deadlines makes it so there
is a lot of strain on their minds, and every little noise annoys them due to
stress, and I think that is how they can relate to the sound track. So we hope
they receive it in that sense and like the effects we put onto the project.
Looking at the finished work from an audience perspective,
the audio works really well. It gives a lot of weird sounds that might drive
the viewer crazy if they had to listen to it over and over again. The distorted
sounds back up the fact that it's an insane persons mind, and the eerie effect
it creates sends some weird emotions in motion. As for the video itself, there
is a kind of randomness about it, constantly jumping from one location to the
other, and the pacing could be a lot better as there were several moments where
quick cut's suddenly went to long clips, then shot back into quick cuts. There
is no real structure to the piece, it seems a little all over the place and if
it stood alone without the audio, it would look tacky, careless and to some
extent lazy as half way through the same clips are just played backwards and
sped up. This looks like there was a lack of care in the project and it seems
highly rushed, which it was, deadlines meant that me and Victor had to rush the
video, which ended up giving it a highly amateur look. I will never claim to be
proud of the image system in this project, and I will go into more information
on why later on.
Looking at the piece as the video and audio put together,
the decent audio track mixed with the basic video, somehow works. The moment in
the audio when you hear 'so, what was your problem again' seems to act as a
single for the visual aspects to work backwards. The bit where you hear an
echoing rant about cars comes in just as this blurry and shaky, sky shot in the
woods comes in and it creates a decent effect that directly affects the
audience; for that brief moment the viewer is shot straight into the persons
mind. So the effect makes the actual visuals look less random and a bit more
organised. With the audio, the visuals playing backwards works as the sounds
get more of a screeching effect, almost like rewinding on old tape recorders,
so the replaying of footage in reverse can be forgiven, and the audio at the
end flows smoothly into the credits.
Obviously this doesn't make up for everything wrong with the
visuals. Some still look random and the sudden changes of pace don't fit so
well, but what the audio has done to the finished piece has made what you're
watching change to something that sort of makes sense. So, though this is
hardly the best experimental ever seen, the audio has stopped it from being one
of the worst.
If I had to change things, I would go for a different visual
concept, and I would get a different person to work with. I know that it seems
a bit rash, but from our discussions beforehand and the ideas we shared that we
agreed we would mix up when it came to filming, and the storyboard we drew up together,
all of it went out the window on filming, with Victor choosing the shots, and
not collaborating with me, and any shot I wanted he would agree to and then
change so it fitted his vision, so what is seen on screen is not an equal representation
of what we both wanted. with the audio it is equal as after the crit I did
stuff with the audio and then let victor come in to add his bits, so the
creative aspect for the audio is 50:50,
the creative aspect for the visual elements is more 80:20. I would personally
have tried to depict the character being lost in a different way than what is
seen on screen.
The making of the project started with a lot of confusion, my
original idea was a common one about student life, and Victor rightly shot that
down. The idea of student life is a quite common idea, and would not be original,
nor practical in terms of experimental film. We juggled around a few ideas of narrating
different locations in Sheffield, and improvise celebrity voices saying funny
stuff. It got to the point that we had a
day just going out and filming sounds from a variety of locations all in
stereo, to see what we could make from it, and that’s where some of the sounds
in our final piece have come from (such as the traffic noise, and birds
tweeting). So, we had some of the sounds in our project before we even knew
what we were going for in a sense.
Two days before the crit session we decided to get together
and do some recording at Victors at which point we decided there and then to
create a therapist situation. I voiced the insane guy and Victor voiced the
therapist. We tried to make a comedy aspect but it ended up not coming across
in the crit session, so I told victor to give me a week to tweak with the sound.
I dropped the whole comedic aspect of the work, as it would look and sound more
surreal if it was more serious and sinister. I got some recording equipment,
and a shotgun microphone for better picking up of the audio. The things I used
to create this echoing, empty, eerie sound were objects like knives, pans, my
radiator, a box of safety pins, my voice etc. I put objects and scraped them together
at different speeds and paces to get different sound effects. In 4 or 5
recordings I recorded about 45 minutes of sound that I could play around with
in the edit suite.
When I got there I added each sound and faded them as well
as upped the volumes in each speaker for certain sections. I tried to create a
kind of audio story of noise that could be heard in an insane persons head.
Straight away I remover any dialogue that sounded stupid of did not fit the
piece and concept we were looking for. In the end I came up with approximately
85% of the sound you hear in the final piece. Victor came in and included about
10% of his own stuff but he added some effects to the different sections of
audio, such as the reverbs on dialogue, and the echo's as well as a couple of
fades which came to our final piece that was a dramatic improvement of what we
had done beforehand.
The video side of things, was a lot less organised, with the
Edale projects taking so much of our time, it was hard to meet up and talk
about the video. We finally had our meeting a couple of weeks before the deadline
and though we agreed on the concept of a guy lost in the world and the woods
being the protagonists mind, that was as far as organising went outside of the
meeting; any storyboards or shots and locations discussed went 'out the
window'. Victor used his own DSLR to record the footage, but finding places to
film, though we discussed them at the meeting, was challenging. Anywhere I had
put forward as a location, was cut down on the day of shooting even though we
agreed to some extent to film at these locations. Still problems arise in the
film industry and we just had to deal with them, because of difficulties with
the woodland location we had to finish with half a film and the plan was to
film the following day. However, our actor did not wear the same cloths the
next day so for continuity purposes, we had to push back filming.
So, I had to edit half a film which contained about a
minutes worth of black screen. Obviously a lot of work had to be done but
Victor left immediately after the crit before we could talk about it. He then
springs it on me that he was finishing the filming tomorrow the night before he
wanted to shoot, and I had already committed that time for Edale editing. My
role in the making off this project sort of stopped until near the end of post
when Victor was half way through a new edit. This was annoying as it's supposed
to be a team effort and there was just no communication or evening out, it
became Victor taking charge of it. Obviously, I take some responsibility as my
involvement could have been better, though I did try my hardest when I got
fully involved and was allowed to express my ideas. Now the edit is complete I
just have to wait and see.
Skills I improved in this project, I am afraid though my
desired career is in camera operating and directing, I did not get much
practice of this and instead threw myself into the audio side of things. It
allowed me to improve my sound recorder skills as I found myself thinking about
different sounds I could create and what they could sound like in the project.
The approach of just finding what sounds I could make worked well, and was an
interesting experience to experiment with. Obviously editing with half a film,
helped prepare my editing skills for problems, but I don't believe I made any
great improvements on that front.
When it comes to teamwork, I would say I did slightly more
with the audio, whereas Victor did more on the visual side of things. My
strengths would be that I listened to ideas and tried to communicate my own,
but I will admit to being impatient at times and I could be way more outspoken
as I don't think Victor realised that I was getting frustrated with how he was
taking things, and I need to be more verbal if I ever wish to be taking a
directors route. I need to be louder, and more clear, rather than just saying
'give me this, I'll do it myself' which I found myself doing on the editing
process meaning communication needs improving on my part.
