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 .