Diary Entry - Filming & Editing No.2 #17 Bristol

Today, Shani and I went to Bristol for the recording of one of the first scenes, and some exterior shots for the cross-cut virtual and reality scenes. The weather was perfect, there weren't many people so there was only one thing left to do, record.

 Filming

   The first plan was to set off for Park Street and the College Green; we knew there was a lot of architecturally beautiful buildings, and the colour of the buildings along with the weather would really go well with mood that the video is trying to present at this point (optimism). We chose the City Hall to record next to, as it would show the typical 'worklife' very well.

    This scene would only go on for ten seconds or so, so although we knew there was little video that needed to be recorded, we still captured ten times as much as we needed too. The reason for this was because at the start I wanted the video to show the beginning of an adventure for the main character and I believe a montage of shots represents this height of emotion and dream to set off into the unknown, as well as engaging the audience thoroughly. Taking all of this into consideration many shots were taken at different angles, different movements and different distances in order to throw the excitement in as much as possible.

    As far as recording went, there wasn't much fuss or nuisances at all. There were a few times where we had to wait for people to walk by etc. but this was general minor hindrances that were to always be expected when filming in uncontrolled exterior situations.

    As the genre for the music video is supposedly/hopefully going to be seen as 'indie' we wanted to try and get some creative shots in there, and this was the reason for the lens flare in a couple of the shots. This was to generally make the whole scene look a bit more art-y.

     The close up shots for this scene worked out really well because we managed to create the perfect amount of blur in the background of the shot using the DSLR and there was enough light for all of the shots together to look of very high quality. The light also helped us with the colouring of the clips afterwards. The amount of light that we were given with the exterior shots meant that we could customise each shot's look to a very detailed standard and it made the whole job a lot more accessible and a lot easier. 

   The shots towards the end turned out beautifully as they displayed a very lovely looking, architecturally magnificent archway that was framed perfectly symmetrical for the shot. Although this wasn't sought out before hand, I learnt that it is always key to acknowledge and understand the surroundings of the filming location as they may be a bit of a filmic hidden gem in the midst of the mise-en-scène. The light had worked out really well too (shown in the picture on the left) as when I exited the archway pass-through the light shined on me to a luminosity that almost looked unreal, and visually familiarised itself with that of movie moments of characters ascending to heaven. Although this may be quite far fetched, the shot and the way it was filmed still shows the same kind of message as it does in the movies; Going to a better place.

   The filming itself was left to my partner, but to be both involved with it, discussions were made previously on the bus ride. I had brought a long with me the DSLR but instead of a tripod, a camera stabiliser or steadicam. This I thought would look a lot more realistic than a shot from a tripod, as you still get the stability, but with a little bit of movement and dynamic motion. Previous to this project I had studied many critically acclaimed indie movies and TV shows to see what makes a shot look so professional. Apart from the beautiful scenes and the glamorous actors, the main two things were blurred backgrounds and a minute amount of motion within the shot. This was especially apparent within the scenes of the TV show Breaking Bad. The steadicam proved useful for these 'staying-still' shots, and of course it worked a treat for the shots where Shani had to walk a long side or infront of me.

    After Park Street there was only two more places left to go - the Waterfront and Cabot Circus. 

    Both of these locations were going to be pretty easy to record, even when taking all of the factors into consideration. There weren't many people about and the conditions were still perfect. The reason that we didn't think much about framing or mise-en-scène etc. was because these shots were used purely for messages and they would be collaborating alongside green screen shots as a graphic match. There was no point in heavily thinking out what t do with the shot as long as it ticked everything that was expected of it, and also they weren't going to be on for that long anyway.

     This shot on the left is one of my favourites thus far because of the meaning it will give at the end when it is tied in with everything else. I also think it looks very good, and in the clip itself the transition of ascending skywards is very subtle, which helps the audience focus on the message and the emotion a lot more than what else is supposed to or not supposed to occur. 

In a busy city centre, at the heart of a thriving shopping centre, this had to be one of the most embarrassing shots I have ever had to endure. Clearly we knew that Cabot was going to be busy as it was the run up to christmas, so this was the main thing that made this shot so difficult to record. The point of it is to work with a similar shot with the green screen where by I am potentially flying, and this shot is to truly show the reality of what's occurring. However it did take just one take, with the help of carful consideration of distances and positioning of cameraman and actor as well as timings also.

Editing

   For this part of the task fortunately enough the editing wasn't that difficult or time consuming. However,it had only got to this point of simplicity because I had researched, practiced and learned the best ways to edit this kind of footage before hand, which inevitably made the whole process a lot easier in the end. 

    First of all I gathered all of my clips together and extracted the best parts of them using the tool 'Favourite'. We already knew which shots would kind of go in order together so it wasn't that difficult in the end. 

   The most important tool used in this process of editing and will be used for all the other processes would be the sound clip and the present waves that were shown on it. This made life a whole lot easier as it meant that I was able to detect where I should edit each cut too, and this way it was a lot more precise and quicker. This was going to prove to be extremely helpful in the latter stages of editing also because there will be so many shots of the band etc. to collaborate and to coordinate with the music that something as little as this could deduct the time consumption by half and allow myself to spend more time fine tuning each clip to look more professional.

   

    One neat editing trick that I found really beneficial was having a long-length and low-dynamic shot being cut up into parts and being edited to the time of the music. Although theoretically most of these shots were part of the same overall clip the effect still looked pretty good on the screen, because the fact that it's the character that changes not the surroundings. Not only does this show a sped-up effect that conforms to the time scale in which we have to meet but it also presents the recurring theme once more of the character moving forward in a world that's going no where. 

   Last of all to edit was the colouring of the clips. Because most of the clips were all filmed at the same light and with similar surroundings, each clip wasn't going to be that different visually and this meant that I could edit one clip and then copy the preset to all the others. To edit the colour I went onto 'correction 1' on one of the first clips in the inspector tool and manually changed the colours. I have many presets that I like, but the one I like the most is 'Spring Sun'. I used this preset for this choice and then lessened the green a little bit as shown in the picture  to the side. Finally to make it look that much more indie, I decided that I would change the brightness and contrast a little bit to make the midtones more prominent and the highlights less so. 

    The hardest part of the editing here was with the character jumping or de-scaling into the pathway at the end of the scene. To do this we originally wanted o use green screen as we thought this would be a lot easier, but we tried a lot of attempts and it just didn't work out as we wanted it. So in order to make it look good I took a screen grab of the archway entrance with me in it and without me in it. I then edited these in fireworks so that there was a transparent background behind me. I then imported these into FCP X and the archway was below and the character was on top (in terms of timeline placement). Then to make the character descend into the pathway I used the ken burns tool (as shown above) to make my character disappear and appear to grow smaller as doing so. The final thing was to just make the archway picture and the character picture flow with the one before as because they had been screen grabbed and edited multiple times they lost some of the colour and brightness to them. For this I tried 'Match Colour' but this didn't turn out perfect, so instead I decided to manually change the colour and this was done by using the 'colour correction tool'. Mostly it was just changing the brightness/contrast with the mid tones but I also had to make the whites and blacks look a bit more red-y to go with the previous shot and not to show any visual colour jump.

     The very last thing that I did to all the clips was adding black bars at the bottom and the top of the screen. There are two main things I said that made a shot look professional and that was blur and stabilised motion, but when it comes to editing I use black bars within the narrative to give the cinematic feel of a widescreen 16:9 or 2.39:1.