A Most Difficult Predicament

This was a very exciting project that took approximately four days with a lot of surprise challenges and bumps a long the way. The first step to making this film possible was capturing the footage. Steps 2 to the end was editing. Editing took up the majority of the time in making this film.

Day 1
Samantha Putri was able to get her friend to be our actor, and he is very good at his job. We would pass the camera around the three of us to each have a chance in shooting some footage. Because Samantha had a large part in creating the script, I pretty much gave her the job of director everytime I had the camera in my hand. This meant that I looked at her script at what she wanted to do, she had instructions for what kind of shot she thought was good for that situattion, and then asked for her confirmation before filming. She was calling 'action' and 'cut' too; it was quite amusing. Several times we had to make practice shots to make things flow more smoothly or know that we were capturing the right thing. This mostly had to be done for action shots where people were moving into the frame and leaving it. Now, I'm not criticizing Samantha's work, but unfortunately, we recorded very little footage because she did not take the editing process into account and we (me and Gisselle) did not realize this either until it was too late. Our video was very linear to the point that if I played all our raw footage, we had our story.

Capturing the footage presented had some initial difficulties. First of all was the crowd! They were constantly getting in the way! It was very annoying to say the least. We also had to buy out the Snickers, so everytime someone would go up to the machine we had to ask them to not purchase it for the sake of our project. I'm glad we had no grumpy people that had to have it no matter what!

After finishing, we had our second challenge of the day: recording the sound. Remember when I said our video was recorded in a fashion where we didn't have to edit to get the story accross? Well, this came back to bite us on the back the day of editing through Final Cut Pro. We had the actor watch his footage and as he was watching it, he would read the script to match the duration of the footage. There were a few problems to this: the footage was too long being one case; but once again we didn't realize that this would be a problem for editing. Because the footage was so long, the actor had to do a lot of improvising. Going further, due to the duration of the footage, we actually recorded each sound file with the same length. Each footage was about half a minute long if not longer causing us to capture the noise of the slamming door of a moderately quite staircase. We really couldn't find any quiet place due to our time limitations.

Day 2
Editing would have been a nightmare had Martyna not been there to guide us a long the way. Me and the rest agreed to do our own editing. This meant creating three different films with the same footage. My first goal that day was to finish the assembly edditing and make some rough cuts. Which entailed making and taking clips from the raw footage and putting them into their general order. This took longer than it should have due to my inexperience with Mac computers and with the program overall. It took the entire class for me to do so with unfavorable results at the end: it was absolutely unexciting. Finally, we all discovered we had a problem with sound that day. Our sound files wouldn't work with what we edited. The sound files were too long and would've sounded chopped up had we made them shorter.

Day 3
More rough cuts were due today to be followed by final cuts and then rendering it all together. Editing started to become fun now that I got the hang of the program. I was able to execute what I wanted with few difficulties. Though...after speaking to Martyna about it, it turned out I had a few editing problems such as needing to extend or create an establishing shot (which we didn't have much footage of) and needing to create a rhythm for the film to make it flow more smoothly. This rhythm entailed increasing the length of a lot of my shots. It did not produce favorable results so I had to cut the long shots shorter and move more footage (about 3/4 of it) around to their new timeslot. Martyna also didn't want us using any effects to make artificial flow and to try to imitate the editting method of the films we saw in the lecture. This too also required a lot of cutting and rearrangements.
Day 4
It was presentation day! I was sad to see that my other partners were not present; without them I couldn't see how they managed with the editing. I also sadly had not solved the problem of sound and the film had to be in silence. I was even thinking of some catchy tunes to go along but, alas, I didn't have the class time to add it in. I didn't even know how to edit it in so...shame on me for not doing research on my own time.

Museum of the Moving Image

I remember going to the Museum of the Moving Image when I was a child in elementary school. It was quite very boring because, if my memory is correct, it looked very drabby inside and honestly, I didn't care about the moving image or flip books of myself saying "hello" to the camera (which we got to make at the end). All I wanted to do was go home and watch some cartoons. Now, over a decade later, this place is amazing. This renovated building is so cool with its modern, space age design with eyecatching LED lights placed throughout. Furthermore, it has some very interesting exibitions.

One memorable exhibition for me was the "Behind the Screen" exhibition. This exhibition featured some of the most fascinating equipment ever used to creat films, it also has interactive exhibits to explain the process of film making. One of the demonstrations that I really enjoyed was the demonstration on sound design for the movie Titanic. We learned of the many layers required into creating a soundtrack which included the dialogue, music and sound effects. It was especially interesting when he started presenting the dialogue or rather...people screaming. Not much emotion was present when all you can hear are panting screamers. But if you add in more layers of sound effects and music (all recorded independently from one another)you will have something completely believable.

Here's the kicker. These sounds were recorded independently from one another. You would think that they actually broke a ship, or threw people around to get the sounds they needed, right? Wrong. The methods these sound engineers employed are ingenious and definitely not something someone would think of immediately as a means to achieve their desired sound. For example, when Rose fell, she did not make any of the sound that you hear; it was made seperately by throwing a chair to the floor. It was absolutely mind blowing when I learned this and it really made me wonder what other 'shortcuts and techniques' the crew of a movie would employ to achieve their goal.

Beyond the demonstrations, what I really loved was being able to get so close to the props and costumes used in famous movies. I couldn't peel my eyes off of them. The level of skill, time and dedication it must have taken someone to complete these works of art is truly admirable and laudable.