Evaluation

An evaluation of my work throughout tasks 1&2

Holly McNish was as massive inspiration for our second documentary, we were introduced to the poetic piece, Embarrassed (McNish 2016), in a seminar and the style and pace stuck with the group. When we had finally decided on the poetic style of the 10-minute documentary we looked back at the way McNish had presented her ideas. We loved the simple shots of plants against bright backgrounds along with the striking fast cutting back and forth.

During filming, we tried to re-create a similar style but tweak it to fit our themes, we had the broken glass filmed against a black background as well as our actress filmed against a white wall. I think that although the scenes of the actress worked well the scenes of the plain black wall often took away from the style that we were going for and can sometimes feel forced.

Another thing we planned on that didn’t make it to the final film was slow motion shots, like mentioned above we had shots of broken glass. Originally, we wanted to see the glass being broken in high quality slow-motion. However, due to time and issues getting permission to use the camera needed we had to work around that decision.

One thing I believe we did use effectively was the lip syncing. Throughout embarrassed Holly McNish’s voice can be heard coming out of another actress’ mouth to illustrate the point of someone else telling her something. We used this effect when our subject was talking about a conversation she could remember with her neighbour. Having our actress voice both herself and the person speaking to her added an extra layer that felt like we were seeing the internal battle being fought by our contributor.

I can split the process of each project up into 4 main areas; Planning, filming, editing and presenting. As each area brought different challengers I could learn new skills and improve and old ones throughout. Planning taught me a lot about team work, being forced to work so closely together often with people I didn’t know meant you were forced to focus on making your ideas matter and being able to justify them. When it came to filming we very quickly realised that not everything goes to plan, contributors can be late, equipment can be unavailable or the weather could be too bad to film outside. Things like this really helped us to think on our feet and allowed us to make decisions quickly to move forward effectively.

Editing both films was a challenge as we didn’t give ourselves much time to really work through all the footage we had. When I was editing the film for task one I learnt to spend a lot of time focusing on making sure there was a strong story running throughout the entire piece as losing this would have made the film feel week. Finally presenting our projects really taught us a lot about ourselves in terms of having to stop focusing on why things didn’t work out and look at what did and how we made it work. Once we’d accepted we weren’t going to produce the films we had originally wanted that allowed us to all clear our heads and move forward. Thankfully, throughout the tasks I could improve my technical skills effectively especially when it came to camera work. The time needed to be spend in the edit suit and out shooting meant I was forced to quickly improve my skills on the job.

For both projects, I officially shared the role of cinematographer with Joel Young. This was something I was egger to do as I’d not spent a lot of time focusing on my camera skills. For task one we set up the interviews and filmed the cutaway scenes. This was something I enjoyed doing as it constantly forced you to think of new ways to capture different scenes. I also, along with Molly, edited the poetic documentary. Although I didn’t plan on doing this I found that after filming the footage cutting it together became an easier job as I already knew what was going through my head when I film the scenes and where I imagined them fitting in the edit. I always tried to approach the work confidently even when I wasn’t feeling sure about what was in front of me, I found that after a while things began to fit into place.

As I’ve mentioned before I was unable to attend most of the shoot and edit for the second task due to a family issue but I was there for planning and the team work that involved.

It terms of working in a team I knew that like everyone I would have some good ideas and some bad ideas and it was important to listen to everyone’s point of view to get the best answer that would help us all achieve our goal of creating a high-quality piece of work.

One thing I’m thankful this project did was push me to improve on skills that I know will be important in everyday work and even life. Meeting new people for the first time is always slightly scary but pitching ideas for this module helped me confidently get my point across while also accepting criticism and ideas of improvement. As well as this it also helped me look at the right was to present yourself to other people. Meeting contributors for the first time I discovered how important it is to know what you want, where you want to take things but also how to get what you want from those people. For example, when talking with Saskia she had suggested that to get a more personal feel and topics from an interview, have the contributor sitting down, get them chatting and make them feel like they’re at home.

I’m grateful that I’ve learn so many transferable skills throughout the tasks and I know for certain that I will be taking them with university and further.

Link to film: https://vimeo.com/246991073

Link to presentation: 
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W1nQFFR9gTIoIG5vlgGhir6DS16INNBwkU2w1PDguwI/edit?usp=sharing

Reference:

YouTube. (2017). Jake Dypka x Hollie McNish - Embarrassed. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6nHrqIFTj8