Final Cut

 

Creative Critical Response

 

Experiences Used to Reflect as a Director and Cinematographer for the CRR (Planning)

What learning experiences I can use to get ideas.

I was the leading director of recording on a Saturday at cypress park. Therefore, I can use the before of this event to say what I planned and how I did as a director. I planned a production proposal to record this swede. I had no idea what a director had to do yet for the whole swede. I worked on getting actors and meeting them at the location. I discovered what it was to be a director while recording the swede. Below is what lead me to realize the importance of leadership.

It all started being a director by looking at the scene first then designing a shot list that was used as a rough draft of every shot.

Next, I had to organize a meetup at the park, which somewhat stressed me of the situation.

This told me how hard being a director is, I needed to develop first to actually start the recording. Because I had just had one member in my group, I didn't have to worry too much on getting multiple people to do work, it was just my actors that caused me the most problems. During recording the swede, it was difficult to manage recording time, breaks, and total mishaps. Over time I managed to get 87 clips that I had to review and fix because I was also the cinematographer. This taught me over time what it means to be the leader of the project and just knowing that I only done the minimum of what real directors do. 

The question I need to answer 

First, I need to pre respond to the question before I start recording. At the start of the video, I will begin with the background context of the project and how that further develops me. Then, I will start the video giving a brief pause with each part giving things I did and how over time I progressed as a director and a cinematographer, I will continue until at the end of the video where I will give a statement of how I communicated with my teammate of how I worked with him editing it.

Planning My CCR Question (Planning)

Introduction to the CCR

The Creative Critical Response is next on the list to complete of the after production of the swede. The point of a CCR is to reflect on a question based on the entire project. The question that I feel the better as taking the role of a director and cinematographer is question 3: "How did your production skills develop throughout this project?". Now, what would I do for the CCR?

My Vision of the CCR

I decided that my CCR will be based around a director's talk track over the film. I feel like this is the best option because I am a director myself, this would also make me reflect on every moment that went on throughout the swede. This video of me talking over the film should include light music to not make it too boring of a narration, and maybe to include a facecam on the side. 

The closest represented format I want to achieve.

How Am I Going to Do this?

Now the question rose, how would I manage to do this?  The best option of use is to use a screen recorder with a facecam recorder to capture my face and record my screen at the same time. While having both on my screen. Below shows a picture of what I'm going to look like.

Yes, this is me and what my facecam is going to be like.

(Relection) on recording our swede.

My Thoughts

It was crazy that we managed to finish in one day. Looking back at the recording part, we were all way better than we had to be at acting. Maybe some mistakes, but for the first time I've even done this, it went well. Doing this as a director and cinematographer made me realize that there is actually difficulty to these roles than just doing them. It was fun learning all these strategies and demanding what you need for the shot.

What Went Wrong

Recording almost came as perfect, but not nothing can be perfect. We had some mistakes too, I thought about how noisy the place is. In the start, we did have a rough start to acting it out, camera placement, forgetting the script, not enough action, or just bad timing. As a director, I look back into these moments where we are just aren't doing much. Another thing that went wrong in my opinion is the lighting of the place. Yes, the sun did act as a natural light too, but I think it just wasn't enough. When it got dark, there was a streetlight right above us which did guide us with some light. But in the end, I wasn't so satisfied. The audio capturing of the actors was one of the main things I was worried about, I did have a microphone in my kit, but unfortunately my teacher did not bring the extension to connect the microphone to my phone, in which we stood to the phone itself.

One of the mistakes that I made (listen for the background sound)

Improvements That Need to Happen

Was the original location a mistake? YES, I should have chosen a quieter location than the one I choose. As I gain the knowledge of knowing where to record for a quiet environment becomes clearer, I have known some locations where it is quiet and a simple environment, I had this location in mind in the picture down below due to me being in a separate film that was recording in that area. Next, I would need to lock in more regarding my role as a director. My leadership skills will need to get stricter, and I will need to use real gear this time. Overall, not bad of a first-time performance, but I surely wasn't too happy about the result.

                                                

Above was a location I originally had in mind but didn't go it for. 

The day of recording our swede (implementation) FINAL part

As the day started to end, we tried to finish before it was over. My goal was to efficiently get this done. It started as we needed to do one more scene until we would have to go put the tripod far away from the actors.

This is how the scene needed to be. We would finish the cut that leads into this cut, I planned to not go too far on the parking lot but enough space for them to all fit in the frame.

This certain cut made some problems that I had. Would the audio be low from here? We committed anyway and did the cut in 4 attempts. I looked back and I was surprised for the audio not to be too low as expected. We were on the final cut of the swede, it looked a little bit dark in the picture above but we just stood to it as it didn't really make much of a difference. I made it where the actors that in front would leave the frame leaving the one in the back to stay.

As we finished that last cut, I was shocked that we didn't need a second day. Luckly the park provided some artificial light to help the cut stay well lit and not complete darkness. We were all tired in the end of the day as we reviewed all the clips and played some soccer. I went home with all the clips, choose the ones that were the successful ones and gave it over to Justin who would be the editor and sound designer of the swede. My goal was complete as we finished recording and now it was our job to polish it.

The day of recording the swede (implementation) part 3

 My goal has changed as it was to get as far as possible before it got too late. We were officially halfway through the scene and it looked to be possible to finish the whole thing in one day. I wasn't here to rush my production, so it would still be challenging to maybe finish on time. We kept on going recording and reviewing our shots until we all agreed that it fits for the scene. I kept on looking back at the real scene and comparing them side to side. 

Looking at these both clips, I was looking back and forward to just inspect the details, I did this for every cut that we recorded. We would continue doing cuts, it was getting somewhat dark but still well to record. It keep going as one of my actors had a long script to say. This at least took sometime for him to practice but eventually I got the cut.

After that, we took a break again. Finishing in one day was in sight, something that I would have never expected due to the fact that we were going to finish on the next day. We were in the final cuts of the scene and maybe we can stretch to finish.

The day of recording the swede (implementation) part 2

The recording continues as my goal was to at least have a little more than half of the shots done for the day. We started to talk about the next shot which was second cut which made it very time consuming to do. We would need to switch camera positions every few words said by the actors which came with a couple of mistakes. I tried to make the actors the best possible copy of the character in the scene. We would record just to look back on the clip to notice a detail that just didn't click. 

We were not halfway through yet and we were struggling to keep our composure when acting. We took a small break and revised the script, we later went back to recording as we started to hit perfect scenes just how I wanted to see. Not every cut was a first try but it was a time saver in terms of how much time passed by. It was still sunny as we reached one minute of the scene, looking at the time and how long we took, surely would we finish in one day? 

                                           These are the scenes that were done at the moment.

We took another break in order to plan out what to do next. I stated the positions they would need to be. We came back to recording once again, as our next problem was to get my phone camera very close to the id. We tried to do that but it would just have it very blurry which was not a good thing. We pulled back the phone camera in order to make it focus but still have only the id in frame. 

Doing this was harder than expected, but we made it work in another way. Furthermore, we kept on going until we reached half of the scene we needed to do. I thought to myself if we were going to finish all of it in one day?