Week 8 (07/11) : Old Police Cells Museum Shoot & Editing Our Rushes

This week my group and I had our Old Police Cells Museum project shoot (08/11). We arrived on location at 8:30am in order to allow ourselves enough time to set up the equipment and get any extra exterior shots that we wanted to get before the staff at the Museum unlocked the museum for us to shoot in. The shoot went extremely well as we had almost no problems with the equipment (apart from a slight bit of confusion in the beginning when it came to white balancing the camera, but we quickly overcame that). It was great because we all took it in turns to act as each role, so one of us would start on the camera, going through each room and getting nice cutaways for us to use over the top of our interviews, whilst the others would record certain sounds of the museum (e.g. doors shutting, whilstling vents, keys jangling, etc.) which we want to add into our project in post production to really capture the atmosphere of the place. The best part for me when it came to shooting was using the camera and working with the fig rig, it was really nice to use the camera handheld rather than being restricted to a tripod, and it allowed me to get some very effective and stable shots. 

We initially thought that we would be interviewing one former police officer, and then we would have another person from the museum who we would be giving us a tour of the whole place which we would then add in to our project. On the contrary, we were actually given three old police officers! This actually worked quite well as it meant that we were able to get a lot of content and we had lots of different personal stories that were really interesting that we thought would intertwine nicely throughout our narrative. The only problem that we encountered with this was that sometimes it became a little hard to keep the interview strictly about the Old Police Cells Museum as our interviewees tended to stick more to talking about themselves as old police officers rather than their experiences with the museum itself, so the interview became more like a portrait of a person rather than a place. We tried to ask as many questions about the museum as we could without overloading our interviewees so hopefully we will be able to edit our interviews in post production and cut together all the relevant questions/answers in order to keep strictly to our brief of a portrait of a place. Over all it was a really great experience and it was lovely to be able to work as part of a group again and work on something really exciting!

 

For this weeks class (09/11) we were supposed to be having group tutorials, but out of the whole class only my group came to the lesson so instead we were able to have 1-1 tutoring with our teacher which was really useful as it meant that we could receive more detailed feedback in relation to our footage which that we shot. The group got to look through all of our footage and we went through and labelled all of our shots and made a note of which were the usuable ones and which were not. After organising all of our footage and labelling it we started a very brief edit, we created the opening sequence and played around with a few effects to create a smooth transition between shots. Organising our footage took up most of our time so we didn't get to edit too much in class but we were definitely able to get a better feel of the footage that we were working with and better prepared us for the next opportunity that would have to edit further.

On Friday (11/11) my group and I booked out one of the editing booths and met up to edit more of our project. We spent around 3 hours in the booth editing our footage and after the 3 hours we had managed to edit about 45 seconds of our project. After creating this initial sequence we noticed that the tour part of our video didn't have a clear and consistent enough narrative to use as it was so we decided on using only certain parts of the tour which were clear and then adding in a voice over of our own in order to tie all the parts together and make the narrative more precise. We planned to record this voiceover in the next week or so.