This Tuesday (18/10) my group and I met up to discuss and finalise exactly what we were going to put in our presentation. Answering the key questions 'Who, What, Where, Why, & How?', we designated one question to each member of the group and we all contributed ideas in order to help eachother finalise what we were to present. We spent around 2 hours in the campus library making note of our points and later proceeded to create a powerpoint on google docs in which we could all edit our specific slides at the same time and help eachother make final decisions both aesthetically and literally.
In class the following day (19/10) my group and I presented our powerpoint presentation to the other groups, each group member discussing our designated slides and talking through each point 'Who, What, Where, Why, & How?'. I
feel that the presentation went considerably well and I was able to
talk through my slides effectively and with little difficulty! The
feedback that we all received was mainly positive with only a few points of constructive criticism which stated that we should have related our project back to our chosen documentary filmmaker a little more strongly and made visual reference to her work throughout the powerpoint. Apart from this, the rest of our feedback pointed out the successful parts of our presentation and we were all very happy with how it turned out!
Our presentation can be found here.
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| My presentation notes |
In this weeks lesson we discussed the composition and aesthetic elements that relate to documentary video making as well as the theory of editing. First off we started by discussing the rule of thirds, which says that "if you were to divide a TV screen into thirds using lines, you'd find that where those lines crossed the eye is naturally attracted to". We were shown examples of this and instances where filmmakers had carried it out well and also not so well. It was interesting to see how this theory worked by looking at previous student work as it gave me an idea of how to frame shots throughout the progression of the project. We then moved on to discussing the 180 degree rule, which explains that "the 180° rule is a guideline that says two characters in a scene should maintain
the same spatial relationship to eachother. When the camera passes
over the invisible axis connecting the two subjects, it crosses the line and the shot becomes a reverse angle".
It was really enlightening to learn about this rule as I had heard it
mentioned briefly in previous Media courses I have taken but I never
fully understood what it meant or how to put it into practice, so it was
really useful to have it explained in depth.
Connecting from this weeks set reading by Rabiger, Ch.16, we discussed the 'dramatic curve' and
the three act structure, (more typically known as beginning middle and
end). Deriving from Greek theatre the dramatic curve explains the
progression of events throughout a plot/narrative; starting at the exposition, through the rising action to the climax, leading to the falling action and finally the resolution. I find the dramatic curve
really exciting to learn about, I studied it briefly when I took A
Level English Literature at college previously so I had a brief
understanding, but learning about it more thoroughly was really
interesting to me.
Our
groups were then asked to screen our 1 minute short documentary videos
to the other groups and then discuss them afterwards. My group had some
problems editing the footage that we had collected. I was unable to
attend the editing session for personal reasons, and by the time I was
available it was too late, so the rest of the group took over the
editing for this little project. None of my other group members had ever
used Adobe Premier Pro before so it was completely new to them and from
what I heard they didn't get on with it too well! Nonetheless, I still
think they did a good job considering they had never used the software
before! The feedback that we got was constructive and we were able to
learn from the editing mistakes that we had made like the obvious use of
jump cuts, and the fact that we lost the save location of our cutaway
footage so it appeared as "offline" on our editing timeline. This
exercise was really useful as it gave us a chance to explore the new
cameras, sound equipment, and editing software and get to grips with it a
bit more before we go out and shoot our final creative project.
In this weeks lesson we were introduced to all the different types of microphones and recording equipment that we will be using throughout the first year of the Creative Production Video module. I have very little experience working with sound so being shown the different types of mic that we could be using and what situations they would be used in was really helpful and gave me an insight into what sort of equipment I will be using in the future progression of the module. We also discussed interviewing techniques and were shown examples of what to and what not to do when carrying out an interview in preparation for the short interviews our groups would be doing this week for the short 1 minute videos (The Pitfalls of Independent Living). I have carried out a lot of interviews during my time studying Media in the past, so I am quite familiar with the techniques used but there were a few things mentioned that I had not come across before which was interesting to find out!
This week we also had to individually present our ideas for our 4 minute final Creative Project at the end of the first year module. My idea was to create a portrait of 'The Keep' in Brighton. (The Keep is an archive
and historical resource centre which gives the
public access to over 900 years of records relating to the county of East Sussex and the Special Collections held by the University of Sussex). I found that not a lot of people were familiar with The Keep so I thought that it would be interesting to create a visual representation of the building itself and to explore the records that it holds as they are extremely important to the historical significance of Brighton, and Sussex especially. The other members of my group came up with some really interesting ideas also, but we finally decided to go ahead with Laura's idea of creating a video on the Brighton Police Cells and the 'haunted stories' behind them.
As a group we met up (07/10) and headed to Northfield accomodation with the camera equipment to film our interview for the 1 minute video. It went really well and luckily the weather held out for us and we were able to carry out the interview smoothly and effectively. We got some nice angles of our interviewee and the answers she gave to our questions were really great and informative, I think that this will be great material to use in the edit of this short video.
