The creation of this video was the most tumultuous project I've ever had to do! I've never realized the amount of work it takes to create a video; it all looks so simple on television and in the theaters. Splice some images and clips together, add some sound effects and boom! Done. Oh how wrong I was...
In hindsight, I've realized that planning is the most important part of this project and probably any project in Film and production. John Canemaker had spoken how he'd done things on a whim to create his masterpiece "The Moon and the Son" but I strongly believe he's mincing his words. The storyboard is everything when creating the video project. You simply cannot film with vague and general ideas of what you want to do. I found myself needing to revise my storyboard and create a transcript of Jenny's narration of her family, beliefs and aspirations in order to get a feel of what I needed to do and ultimately collect. The amount of things she speaks of and mentions is monumental to say the least. Adding to the sheer enormity of the wide range of topics she discussed is the difficulty in capturing the footage she spoke of. A great deal of the things she said had to be pulled from videos in YouTube. I simply couldn't take the video camera and go film some 'Asian nymphs' or 'dragon ladies'. I even found myself at an impasse when she spoke about community health and how she wants to use it to better the lives of her people. The best thing I could think of was to shoot something abstractly related: her studying to get to that point as an example.
I had a lot of difficulty when shooting footage of Jenny. People aren't so considerate; they just love walking through your shot. It was extremely frustrating and resulted in several do overs. Another problem I ran into was what to shoot...? I found myself watching television more carefully than ever in observing the types of shots they did. For one segment, I was inspired by the movie "Tony Takatani" where the entire film was shot with the camera moving from left to right. I also found inspiration from commercials! Commercials utilized short, and quick shots that get to the point of the message. When it came time to put my knowledge to the test, I found it to be much more difficult than planned or anticipated. In the end, I took establishing shots and closeups and everything else in between while being careful to keep the continuity of the shot with the 180 rule. I did mess up once though when I filmed the logo of "Hunter College East" and panned to the hallway. Jenny should have been standing there! But I forgot to ask her to and didn't realize until it was too late. If I could, I would do that over again. I would've also taken much more shots in different angles in the future. I found myself sorely wishing for variety when editing it all together.
As I edited the items I collected, I constantly found myself short of material. I was never pleased and was constantly filled with new ideas of what to add and what to subtract. One of the editing techniques that I had much fun in doing was matching the change in footage to the beat of the music at the end of the video. As I edited, I also ran into several problems. The problems stemmed from my lack of knowledge of Final Cut. I deleted some of the raw audio to make space on the hard disc! Like, what could go wrong? The Final Cut file was so large, surely it doesn't need the raw audio! I was completely wrong. The original files to create the audio was lost and the .fcp version of the audio was useless. In keeping with the constraints of time, I made a quick fix by downloading the mp3 version of the audio from YouTube to save the day. (I hope that's okay!)
Now, whenever I watch a movie no matter how horrible it may be, I will definitely respect the amount of work the developers and film crew had placed into it. It takes experience (probably months of trial and error), skill and expertise to make anything motion picture worthy. I find myself seeing the different shots they used to capture the mood of the scene and ultimately I am more aware of what is going on.
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