After viewing the rough cut for my final project in class, I was a bit surprised by the criticism it received. For one, I was extremely concerned about the technical part of my project. For one, I accidentally recorded the date and time on to the tape of the entire piece. Because of this, I was forced to put black bars at the bottom and top of the video to cut that portion out. This made the image look extremely small, especially on the large projector in class. Surprisingly, no one mentioned the weird aspect ratio. I’m still trying to find a way around this problem without re-shooting the entire piece (So far, there doesn’t seem to be another solution).The criticism that I did receive was extremely helpful. The first issue, and second issue I was most concerned over, was the audio for the video. Having only shot and edited the video the day before, I didn’t have a lot of time to work on sound. I knew that I wanted to have a sound design that was as natural to the actions in the scenes as possible. The critique’s from class helped me to see that this was a good idea. However, I’m still considering whether or not I want to add some type of non-diegetic sound (like music or maybe a poem). Perhaps I’ll save something like this for the end credits so that it doesn’t take away from the story. The other issue that was brought up concerned the pace of the editing. I was and still am undecided about how I want to edit the piece. I really like the natural, slow, almost documentary style that a film like Rachel Getting Married has. Yet, I also think that embarking on this new challenge of creating a narrative, I should remain consistent with narrative editing. One other thing that I was unsure about was the performance of the girls. I thought that it may be too amateurish and a little unnatural. But, kudos to them, there performances actually came out good. I do however think that I had to work to find those natural scenes, and wish that I had more of them. I’m going to look over the footage I have and try to, as Naima suggested, find those moments of interaction between the girls that will make the story more natural and in her words, allow them to breathe. Technical errors aside, I’m happy with my story and hope to work it into something that I can be proud of. Now, for the Sound Design!
Filed under: Portfolio Posts, Video Projects
