I am quite proud of what I have done for this project as the overall
film feels very natural, I highly doubt a viewer unaware that sound was added
in recorded separately from the actual camera recording would notice. One thing
I am particularly proud of is how at the end all the sounds slowly and easily move
from one scene to another so the audience can follow the documentary without
feeling disorientated by the sudden loud noises of the musical or its
rehearsals, I think the way it has been edited allows the audience to believe
that these scenes shown are important and it will have a major effect on the
performance later shown in the film.
I would also like to quickly take this time to discuss my decision to
not add any sound track, though I considered putting in happy music and tense
music when necessary at the end to help the audience think this performance
went well was important and perhaps some light playful music in the beginning
to help show actors mood but I decided not too as I felt it was too distracting
and not necessary when looking at the final edit.
Over all I am happy with the product I
created for the narrative documentary class. I feel the work is of decent
standard as it has a multitude of different sounds that I feel work well together
as they are all of a similar type and therefore compliment each other well and
flow together nicely. I’m glad that I chose to use the drama society
performance that we did as it was able to show my ability at recording good
dialogue to sound like it is of good quality and not distracting to the
audiences enjoyment. I think the pacing of the sound works well because even
with the small running time of the piece I was still able to a documentary that
starts off slow in order to show the audience what the musical is and who is in
it, followed by a much ramped up pace to get the audience excited for the final
performance.
One thing I dislike about the piece is how
basic the sounds are, this is an issue, as it does not show off my work to be
the best it could possibly be. The reason my piece feels basic is because the
documentary we chose to make is fairly simple in nature and though there we
some challenges such as the sound of the actors moving around and the sounds
fluctuating rapidly throughout production, it is still fairly uninteresting and
unchallenging sounds unlike other films made in my class such as the poetry
film which can have really interesting sounds like the poet speaking fast and
the music used and still have the challenges of making the poetry outside sound
good and clear, or the very abstract soundtrack that can has a variety of
interesting thoughtful sounds, I admit that one reason we as a group chose to
make this documentary was because we felt it was one of the easier
documentaries to tell through film, in retrospect it may have been more
interesting to choose a documentary with more of a challenge to it which would
have also given me more interesting sounds to record.
I feel I worked well in this module as I
was able to successfully come up with potential sounds, discover ways of making
those sounds, record them and edit them properly to make a decent sounding
project.
During this project I learnt about editing
sound clips precisely to get the exact sound wanted from the piece whilst not
looking visually jarring or looking out of sync. I feel sound editing went well
and was done to a decent standard this can be seen through the lack of
production errors in our piece that were caused by editing.
The second part of the documentary project:
making a much longer film, in our case a film about a group of Sheffield Hallam
drama society members making a musical performance of Seussical, allowed me to
learn the importance of sound to tell a narrative (even in documentary) for
example though the film with music gave off a feeling of fun and excitement for
the whole documentary as the narrative banked up to the final performance, it
was not until the soundtrack of the happy and exciting times was toned down
that the film felt more natural and less forced, This showed me that a large
amount of soundtrack in a documentary is not necessarily better than a film
with a smaller soundtrack. I also learnt that focus must be placed on syncing
new sound with the intended image, though no previous documentary project
allowed me to learn this to an extent with it’s huge importance on the sound of
the piece, I found the recording of the final performance itself to be far more
difficult, As did syncing the dialogue to what the actors were saying. I also
learnt about finding the take to fit the actor as the 2 minute clip the dialogue was added over giving me
full creative control on what was said which could be performed by anyone, this
project had plenty of on screen dialogue to sync but a lot of shots did not fully
show the actors mouths or cut to something else allowing me to add or change
the take completely so the film would sound and feel better.
Overall I feel I learnt a lot from this
project, working with raw, uncontrollable sound was extremely challenging in
its own way especially the only thing I got to record with any sense of control
was the interviews with the cast and crew, and even then I was not able to know
exactly what they were going to say, but this in itself was a learning
experience all of its own.
In terms of contribution to this project, I
feel I contributed largely as I was the one who conceived the original idea for
this project. After pitching it to my group I also took a large role in
pitching it to the class, explaining as much as I can and trying to convince
everyone that this was a good idea. I also helped with talking and proposing
the documentary to the Sheffield hallam drama society and helping work out a
deal that we would also film all of the final performance for a DVD for their group
in exchange for being allowed to film and interview them during rehearsals. I
also of course was totally in charge of sound during this production and had to
record everything that I could as with no script it was difficult to know what
was going to happen next that could be used in the final documentary. I also
recorded the sound for the final performance by asking the sound crew if I
could hook up my marantz microphone to their stage recorders thus giving me a
much better quality sound, I also made sure to record with a sennhieser just
incase the sound from the stage recordings went wrong. On top of being in
charge of sound I was in charge of the whole interview process, on top of
having to set up the Marantz and microphone and make sure its sounding right, I
had to come up with questions to ask the cast and crew as well as then ask them
said questions and ask follow up questions when possible, the questions could
also not be the same throughout as the cast and crew had different
responsibilities that were not always relevant to questions that may have been
asked if they were all the same. I was also in charge of the sound editing for
the post production of the documentary, this included syncing up the Marantz
sound with the camera footage, changing the audio levels so they all sound
right and appealing to the audience, I also was in charge of any soundtrack for
the documentary and had to work out whether the piece overall needed a
soundtrack and if so, how much was needed without the sound becoming weird or
out of place. Though my primary job was sound, during the final performance I
was also in charge of a Z1 camera that was in the center of the theatre and
remained static but had to be monitored to make sure everything looked ok with
the lighting and other things that could ruin the shots, I also had to change
the tape and make sure the battery didn’t die.
During production we were handed a
set of rules known as Victor Kossakovksy's 10 Rules of filmmaking. We decided
to take these rules into consideration whilst doing our documentary, however we
felt that these rules limited a filmmakers ability to make what they want to
make. For example rule 3 is “Don't film, if you already knew
your message before filming - just become a teacher. Don't try to save the
world. Don't try to change the world. Better if your film will change you.
Discover both the world and yourself whilst filming.” Is a rule we disagree with,
we feel from a practical point of view it is much more difficult to put a
coherent documentary together if you don’t know what you want to tell your
audience, our lecturer Chrissie also seemed to think that it was good to have a
plan for what you want a documentary to tell your audience as she was
enthusiastic about any plan for what we wanted to do in the future in our
documentary. Another example would be rule 6 “Try to not force people to repeat an action or words. Life is
unrepeatable and unpredictable. Wait, look, feel and be ready to film using
your own way of filming. Remember that the very best films are unrepeatable.
Remember that the very best films were based on unrepeatable shots. Remember
that the very best shots capture unrepeatable moments of life with an
unrepeatable way of filming.” We also felt that this rule does not allow us
to make a documentary to as high standard as possible as crucial interviews
would not have been useable due to people interrupting them or the interviewee
looking at the camera or just not answering the question well, Our lecturer
Chrissie also encouraged us to not be afraid of asking an interviewee to answer
again if we felt they had not answered well, implying she did not agree with
this rule either. We also disagreed with
rule 4 “Don't film something you just
hate. Don't film something you just love. Film when you aren't sure if you hate
it or love it. Doubts are crucial for making art. Film when you hate and love
at the same time.” We felt this rule as
well as constricting a filmmakers freedom of choice to film what they want to
film, also if this rule was to followed it would mean that many people would
not film something they were enthusiastic about, Personally I feel that having
a love or enthusiasm for a topic will allow you to want to actually film and
possibly get better footage for it, rather than just filming because you have
to. However some rules we did feel were good rules to follow such as rule 10 “Don't follow my rules. Find your own rules.
There is always something that only you can film and nobody else.” We felt
that this was an excellent rule to follow due to the freedom it allows a
filmmaker.
