A grave matter

Having had a discussion with Ross following the group meeting on tuesday we have now begun to form the structure of our documentary and intend to make Anna and her life style the main topic of our focus.

1st minute
Beginning with a short introduction regarding attitudes towards food in the U.K we will highlight the fact that obesity is on the increase in the uk and that the government has set out initiatives on the importance of eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. with the use of voxpops we will reflect 2 - 3 opinions from the general public.
2nd minute.

Introduction to Holistic nutritionist and raw food specialist Anna who will talk about her lifestyle, nutrition and describe what it is she does and how raw food can be beneficial to our health and well being.
5th minute
Anna will go on to demonstrate in public how to make a healthy dish and we will see if she can convince the public that healthy food can be tasty.
7th minute
interviews and vox pops of the publics reaction and a round up from Anna.
Below is a slide show of some of the research Ive done and other bits and bobs...

19/3/10

We have begun filming some of the content for our documentary, last week saw us record one of Annas workshops. We used the Z1camera for the close ups and my own camera for the wide angle shots, the sound was recorded using the seniser rifle microphone connected to the Z1 camera , the microphone was set up above Annas head where we managed to get a decent sound quality. I am pleased we made the decision to take the microphone rather than use the mic on the camera, as we had to set up at the back of the room so we did not block the veiw of the people attending the workshop, I was stood next to the window and the noise from the street outside was quiet loud given the distance I was stood away from Anna I think we would have struggled to get a decent sound quality.
After the workshop had ended I interviewed some of the guests and asked them some questions regarding the workshop, I was alone at this point and found it quiet difficult to concentrate on all the tasks such as interviewing sound and the camera, the result of which was that the some of the interviewees moved around in the shot and as I wasn't behind the camera some of the framing is out, I am hoping we can resolve some of the problems in post production.

Thursday 16th March

We began filming the second of three scheduled days of filming , The aim of the day was to Interview Anna, capture some cut away shots and interview the restaurant manager and shop owner where Anna supplies her cakes. Ross was in charge of the Z1 camera whilst I took care of the sound and interviewing. Annie was unable to make all of the days filming and although we managed it with two of us, I found it difficult to deal with both the technical aspects of recording and doing the interviewing at the same time. We had a few issues with the framing of the subjects but once again I think we might be able to sort them out in post production. We managed to acomplish everything we set out to and think we have some good interveiws to work with.

DAY THREE

The filming for the third day had us out on the streets of Bath Filming Anna Putting some of her raw delights to the test , are aim was to record the reactions of the general public . Annie took the role of interveiwer, Ross was on sound and I was on the camera we found that most people were happy to record a vox pop interveiw and answer a few simple questions.
Annas food created a lot of positive attention every person who tasted it seemed to realy like it which was very good feed back for Anna and easy filming for us, the only problems that occurred on this particular shoot was the weather. We only managed to get around an hour of filming before the heavens openend and down came the rain , we managed to get all the equipment packed away before it truly lashed it down, That finished off the filming for that day but due to the postive amount of responses we had managed to film, we now had enough footage to move onto the editing process.

Myself, Ross and Annie got together in the gate house and began sellecting what to put in the edit, We started with the interveiw with Anna, that been the main spine of the peice on which everthing else would hang.It seemed that once we had narrowed down the the interveiw the rest of video began to fall into place. The main problems we had with this peice was with the dvd authoring. The file exported from final cut would not be read as 16/9 we tried several times using different formats but the same problems occured over again. Mike finally excepted the disc as it were as there seemed to be no solution that any of us could find.
After many Problems with uploading the file to the net we have finnally managed it. Here is the finished version of food for thought.

Between the group I feel we managed this project pretty well. The comunication and reliabillity was good and everyone turned up on time or gave plenty of notice if they were unable make it. We stuck to all of our filming dates and I feel we planned the schedule well. All of our filming was done by easter and I began logging and capturing over the holidays and we met as a team and began editing, when we returned to university after the holidays we only had to polish up the edits and do some colour correction.
During the shoots myself and Ross took turns on the camera and audio giving us both a chance to practice are skills, Annie was unable to help out on the technical side of things (fustrating for her) but made up by doing other things such as the interveiwing, photographs and paperwork. The main problems we encountered with this project was the format problems in the last few days of production. Other than that I would say that we reached our objectives worked well as ateam and used the time we had sencsibly.
This project gave us a taste of what it would be like to be working on a peice in the real world, given that the end product was going to go on Annas website. The whole process ran very smoothly and I am personally happy with the end product.

A Grave Matter

The filming on day three turned out to be the best day weather wise. I had learned from my early mistakes and brought along a Rhode video mic, which I attached to my camera in the hope of capturing better audio.

I managed to capture more cutaways, record an interview with Ray and catch a few unintentional 'magic moments'. The day seemed to be going well until I realised that I had been shooting in 4/3 from the previous day, all the other footage taken over the previous two days were shot in 16/9, nightmare!! Done it again! We had the same problem shooting the group project, on that occasion two cameras were shooting in the two different pixel aspect ratios. Lesson Learned this time I hope. Despite the problems I managed to capture most of footage I had set out to get, I was on target with my schedule and it was time to begin the logging and capturing process.

THE JOYS OF PRODUTION

I wanted to log and capture all the video and begin the edit before the end of April as I was going on holiday for four days giving me just under two weeks to finish the project, I had initial problems in logging certain parts of one of my tapes, I kept getting logging errors I tried different capturing devices but the same problem occurred each time, I resolved not to use the piece in the end.

Once all the footage had been loaded into final cut, the process of choosing what will go in the film and in what order began, until this point I had not had any clear idea of how the narrative of the piece would go, I knew which elements of Rays story I wanted to portray, but the next step of the process is how to tell it.
I began trawling through the footage marking the peices I wanted to use and sorting clips into bins.

I soon realised that a lot of the footage I had taken had technical errors in one way or another, some footage was over exposed or under exposed the audio had wind rumbling over it in places. Unlike the group project where we had a controlled environment where it is so much easier to set up and make judgements. I found that filming and recording alone is a difficult task as there are so many different aspects to think about, filming outside has so many changing circumstances i found it difficult to .
Once I had narrowed the footage down I decided to hinge the piece around the interview and pick out the audio were Ray had given clear answers or had told a story in full. I wanted to show Ray in a balanced light with both his happy go lucky attitude towards life but also his serious and spiritual side.

I began the project, by setting it to 16/9. Initially I had forgotten the 4/3 footage and began working on the piece. When I did come to offending footage I decided to increase it in size so that it would fit to the widescreen. It was not until later when I saw the quality of the picture that I wished I hadn’t and instead had tried clipping wide screen footage down, I realise either way can be problematic.

Once I had the bones of the edit together I chose the music, A friend of mine gave me some C.Ds of sound tracks that he had composed and produced, the music does not have any vocals and varies in mood and tempo, so it was perfect for my piece The one used in the film is called Whispers By the Sea by Lee Harris. I am fortunate to have the use of professionally produced music, without it I would of been unable to create the same atmosphere and experience that music provides.


Colour correction and trying to sort the audio were the final processes, Having Talked with Richard Wood I tried putting the audio sample into sound track pro and appliying a high pass E Q it helped a little but it also raised the levels of the clip, I over looked the issue and handed the peice in with the audio levels jumping high.


A Grave Matter

The authoring of the dvd looked like it might pose problems, I had the same issue as with the group project, for some reason when I export the file from final cut into I dvd it sees the file as a 4/3 not 16/9 (pixel aspect ratio again) I decided to use dvd pro as it exported the file as widescreen, one other problem I encountered was that I had left some media in the time line which made the file lenth some thing like eleven minutes instead of seven. I had used all my DVDs so Mike accepted it as it were, given that I had already identified the problem I will not loose any marks.

I realy enjoyed making my personal project from working with Ray to the editing process the whole journey has been a learning cerb, I think that most things that can go wrong did go wrong especially in the filming department. It gave me plenty of work to do in the editing process
From the lessons learned during this project I will now move on and spend some time on improving my camera skills. I need to think more about camera shots and angles and start to think of the camera as more of a creative tool rather that just a window from which to veiw through. I also need to practice with exposure, white balance and generally operations of the camera in order to produce more professional material .