common ground

/kəˈmjuːnɪti/

I absolutely love editing. Using Premiere Pro and After Effects is my favourite past time. After all of the footage was together, Emily went through it and selected the best shots to create the first draft. It went from twenty three minutes to seven, and from then on it fluctuated between five to eight minutes.

I used After Effects to animate some of the questions used for the interviews, as well as some other bits and pieces. 

At the same time I also used my Zoom mic to record two short speeches and colour-graded the clips one by one on Premiere Pro. It involved a slight increase in contrast and playing around with the temperature through intertwining other colours.

On Thursday evening I swapped with Emily and took her hard drive to spend the night editing. It actually took longer than expected for me to look through the footage again. The main problem we had was that the documentary was very visual at the start but then faded away into a more interview based ending. To attempt to fix this I cut it up slightly more, mixing it up with some of the shots we had filmed around town and within Farnham Park, although that won't make the final cut because we've decided to change it for more News footage.

The main editing I did was in the middle part where it focuses on what community means to different people. The storyboard started off as family, then going into religion, university etc. I changed this to be family and then go into music, fading away the sound afterwards to go into the speech about how community is more of a feeling. After the music shots, it was followed by the visuals I filmed (the seaside town being my newest community) and then changing into the next community, all connected through the audio track.

I enjoyed the short period of editing more than being the director of photography, and I do wish I could've animated a shot or two, as it was something I had been wishing to do since the very first idea I had back in October, but I'm glad I got to do some things on After Effects. I also enjoyed having the chance to put my opinion in the film as well through the audio.

The draft:

I think community's more of a feeling than anything else. You can't really describe it. Someone anonymous told us for them it's religion and their church. For other peers it's our creative university and the people they meet along the way. And who's to say it has to be physical? Poets are connected through poetry, perhaps they're not acquainted yet they're aware through words. And back when we were young, just children, weren't we all a part of a community as well? The playground was all ours. So.. that's what a community is.

initial ideas & a wordy reflection on week one

At the start everyone in our production group had a drastically different idea for the topic they wanted to document. These included poetic (mine being about questioning the idea of a community and whether it had to be a physical one for it to matter; I wanted to explore the relationship between different poets and their connections) and musical documentaries, a documentary on Farnham Rants and another one on student finance.

In the end we sort of came up with a topic that managed to more or less intertwine all of them. The idea was to create a poetic documentary collaboration by using opinions supplied by others, written work, animations (both visual and text) and explore the meaning of community instead of focusing on a specific one.

We thought it would be interesting to see what people thought community really was and if they feel like they're a part of any, and whether the word community is associated with only positivity It was originally inspired by Ai Weiwei's amazing Sunflower Seeds because of the idea of people coming together to create (in this case, create a visual representation of community), and for my original idea the inspiration was this documentary on spoken word by Kate Church.

Initially the plan was to film in Lion & Lamb, however after I got in contact with Farnham Council and they informed me it was privately owned, it soon became obvious it would be very hard to actually get in contact with the agency that owned it. Instead, we moved our interview shooting location to Farnham Park.

On the day before the interviews, I wrote down the questions we were going to ask (just a reason for me to add some behind the scenes photos, really):

Looking back at it now, I wish we had put more thought into this. The questions were alright but they were... closed (thankfully the people we interviewed chose to follow up with what they meant). At the same time, they were also way too long and wordy, so in the end we got very different answers to the same question that barely linked together which proved to be difficult when we got to editing.

We had planned to shoot interviews on the 27th, however the morning was rainy and dark, so we moved the date to 28th and instead spent time filming the storyboarded intro which would be the opening shot with a cup of tea, following the poetry lines of 'What is a community? Is it a cup of tea shared with a friend?'

I said the lines out loud and it was quite nice, although later in post-production we realised that it was slightly too underexposed and dim for an opening shot. I later re-shot it in my own apartment in the morning to get more light. Personally I feel like it's quite a nice and colourful shot. The same happened with our projector shot that Emily later swapped for a recorded screen.

My role for the production was cinematographer. I was excited and couldn't wait to shoot. Reflecting on it, I'm not very happy with how some of the shots ended up looking. The interviews were very quick and there was a lack of directing so the people didn't stand in the framing I had previously set up, thereby we ended up with ever-changing shots as I had to adjust them for every single person. Perhaps this is only a small issue, but as the cinematographer I wanted to push myself to the highest of my ability and I don't feel like I did.

On top of that, midway through storyboarding the documentary, I realised there wasn't much work for me to do at all as there were so many individual animations such as stop motion, adobe animate and adobe after effects that there was almost nothing for me to shoot specifically as everyone ended up being a cinematographer anyway. That's probably the main reason I got so upset during the production - I felt lost in what I had to do.

Despite all this, I still had a quite fun filming week and it was a nice experience.

I learnt that:

• I would work much better in a team where all roles were specific to
  a single person rather than blurred
• communication is very important to relieve stress
• more time needs to go into planning out small details such as questions
• ...apparently cold weather can also affect productivity

layers of dream