Appreciating silent cinema

I never feel that I appreciate the importance of sound in film, it becomes apparent to me in the final stages of my editing that sound really is 50% of film. However, as the amount of sound decreases the importance of everything else increases, making films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis all the more incredible to watch knowing the dificulty of directing a silent film that is 3 minutes long let alone a feature.

I sorely underestimated the importance of sound in a project and in the future pledge to pay far more attention to everything surrounding mise-en-scene as well as sound, diegetic or not.

I also will actively seek out silent films new and old of all genres, in order to gain a more holistic approach to film and (attempt to) watch them with an analytical eye.

Rough Edit and Feedback

After assembling our rushes and forming a very rough edit based upon the storyboards I remained confident that the ideas we had in mind were clearly stated within the film, however; as Debbie stated in our initial edit feedback, it doesn't.

See for yourself (EDIT, there was a video clip of our rough edit here, but blogger didn't like it.)

It doesn't gel well together at all and frankly tires me out just watching it.

We also found that some of the shots needed to exude the bleak feeling less subtlely, perhaps changes to colour in our fine edit will remedy this.

Edale Production stills

Due to our busy student schedules we could reluctantly find no time to go location scouting before the shoot and so were relying on the landscapes during the day and were quite pleased to find some really quite pleasent views of Edale.

'Wistful' look location

The inexpensive water shield

Location of the litter trail

This photo is the adjusted establishing shot, initially we had planned to do the establishing shot as one long take leading in from the first but proved troublesome.

There were some sceduling issues involving us walking up and down a hill a few more times than was needed, also a location scout visit might have proved fruitful, but apart from that; a very productive day.
I have found it does seem to be a very particular skill, trying to hard-wire a set of emotions into a piece of film. Creating and manipulating images and colour in order to connote a certain feeling of wistfulness or calmness without overflowing into boredom is no easy feat.

As a result of this we will alter our fine cut to have longer cuts, the staggered shots although was a good concept didn't work in practice and just looks awful; we changed the location of the establishing shot to just outside the pub instead ( for ease, the pub was full of students ) and the time of day of the ending shot had to be changed as we had hoped for a beautiful sunset but were (rightfully?) rewarded with none.

2 Experimental and Drama short film reactions

Joe King/Rosie Pedlow - Strange Lights - 2010 - I felt very split regarding this short, one part agrees that the time-lapse footage shot portrayed a highly serene and beautiful night sky that provokes within the viewer an element of mystery in a relatively effective manner (through its use of parallel sound also, beeps and noises occurring in place of quick glimpses of car lights). The second part of me has seen far too many time-lapse footage and found this to be yet another variation upon a gimmick typically used for the exact same reasons, to evoke a sense of peacefulness in similar fashion, for a nondescript reason. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ.

Conor McCormack - Christmas with dad - 2008 - This short follows the life of a very working-class family over Christmas and focused mainly on the father figure within this unit. Because it was set at Christmas, I felt, this let the viewer identify with the problems presented as they were very generalisable(not buying enough presents, here quite ironically); but more importantly (and this goes for most documentary/drama shorts) I still retain the fact that the hand-held camera should not be a symbol of realism, especially whilst it also tries to create an empathy for the characters; creating what I feel is a highly contradictory feeling, presenting information about the characters from a realist point of view but then positioning us to feel for them. However, I highly enjoyed how it led us into believing our pre-conceived notions about such a family, with establishing shots showing a downtrodden council estate and then later showing us how much of a 'nice-guy' the father was, raising children not his own whilst battling possible blindness; I enjoyed it because it made us question something we thought sure about, without explicitly posing a question to us. Something I believe cinema should always do, no exceptions.

Edale initial planning

Our initial idea for the shoot was to follow the everyday life of a binman in Edale as he picks up rubbish. Initially he enjoys his day but the increasing flow of rubbish makes him angry so he goes to quit for the day but finds a long trail of rubbish which leads him up to a beautiful picnic on top of a hill.

However, what I found whilst storyboarding was that it lacked a complication of some sort as well as this we found that there was no reason for the audience to connect with the viewer other than pity; so we re-wrote the piece in order to give the character some humanity, adding a lunch break and the idea of hidden beauty. We liked the idea of the binman seeing what is widely regarded as a beautiful place, as solely a place of work, encouraging us to look for a relatively picturesque ending shot to fade out to.

what follows are some early storyboards for the project following the re-write.

The storyboards proved useful on the day for making minor changes, e.g. to shot length, as we then knew how long the subsequent takes were and got a sense for the pace of editing. Due to the awkward weather some of the storyboards did get a bit wet and incomprehensible so much so that they aren't really worth uploading.

We did encounter some scheduling errors on the day, having to walk back up into a wooded hill to re-shoot a scene wherein the rain cover (carrier bag) had crept into shot, but apart from that and the accompanying illness, the filming was rather successful. I will admit, in retrospective view we didn't remember to White Balance everyshot, some shots with the sky in-frame seem relatively over-exposed; however, these shots seem to work inadvertantly work in our favor to form a rather bleak outlook through the film.

Michel Gondry trickery

Mind-bending perspective manipulation, incredibly simple ideas followed through masterfully.
Perspective manipulation in particular is an effect I have particular interest in, it's mastery over the viewer is a power I hope to control; particularly in positioning the audience.

Woody Allen will die soon

and it will be a sad day