Film Class DW Entry

* Today is my bro's bday XD

Monday, February 16, 2009

Before today's lesson, I finished editing our previous dialogue footage and submitted it onto the shared drive on Friday. The editing took place after school on a Friday, along with my mates Elliot, Jing-Ting and Joyce. With completed footage from last week, Elliot and I started the basic cropping of the footage, removing bits and pieces that will not be in the actual film scene. After that, we started piecing them together, placing transitions at appropriate places. Firstly, it started from a zoom-out to the stairs where Jing-Ting walked down and sat, and started reading a sheet of paper. Following that, Justin Tay our "intimidating" and "rowdy" character steps in with a worms-eye-view slow motion. I then performed a multiple cut on the awkward scene of Jing-Ting and Justin Tay sitting side-by-side. This is to let the audience know that some time has passed through the constant cuts, and obviously to transend some sort of humour. The finale was crafted by fast-forwarding Justin Tay's running down the stairs scene by 250%, also to emit humour in a Charlie Chaplin sense of way. Overall, I turned the dull dialogue scene into a somewhat funny short clip.

After making the edits, I have once again enhanced my editing skills, and mastered the basics like clipping the footage, speeding up/slowing down the footage, tuning colours as well as making sounds pitch louder or softer. Referring to the IB learner profile, I have learnt to be more knowledgeable, since I am learning how to edit from Elliot, as well as exploring myself after Elliot left. I also became a better communicator by confidently and creatively present my ideas, through speech as well as actions. We were also being open-minded and risk-takers, as we constantly explored fields of editing that we rarely breeched, and made use of our newly learnt skills effectively.

We started a new unit today - "Film Noir", which means 'black film' in French. It is basically a popular style of film with special characteristics like narration, seduction, identity-changing, interrogation, attacking and is played by a protagonist and antagonist. There is normally narration to show the deepest thoughts of the character. It is basically a much duller film, with lighting tuned down, dutch angled high focus shots and consists of many night scenes.

We warmed up by starting with two clips: one from "Memento". In this excercise, we were given a task to count the number of cut. Eventually, I came up with the same actual numbers of cut Miss Wong noticed (21). This excercise was not to train how witty or how quick our reactions are, but to allow us to appreciate how continuity filming works and how it can blend so smoothly into a scene. The second excercise was to identify the continuity editing techniques used. We came up with eyeline match, point of view cutting, rhythm and much more. This allowed us to be better IB thinkers as well as more knowledgeable, due to the fact that we are applying our knowledge into slightly less familiar situations.

We soon got into groups after receiving our rubrics and I formed a group with my pal - Elliot, along with Louise and Ashley. Ashley was the only amateur member in the group, hence she took the role "writer" since there is not a lot of technical tools involved in this role except for scriptwriting an official standard script. We are being "caring" members of the group according to the IB learner profile, by supporting weaker members in our group. Louise took the camera person role as she is quite experienced, Elliot took the editing role leaving me with the sound director role. Sound directing is extremely new to me, as I am expected to tamper with the noise pitch and levels within Final Cut Pro, plan the sounds during filming as well as use FreePlayMusic along with Garageband to generate tunes. This requires lots of risk-taking factors, as well as inquirer in the IB learner profile.

We will be expecting our first script from Ashley - so we can discuss, make changes and perhaps plan the storyboard during next lesson.