Documentary and Drama Evaluation

     For my Creative Media Practice, this semester I have worked on firstly a short documentary and secondly a drama piece we have been asked to create. For my short documentary I was sound recordist and my role for drama was sound editor so I have spent the majority of the semester working purely on sound. I have recorded a lot of sound for similar projects such as documentaries, drama pieces and experimental films in the past so I felt very confident for my first project but I had never done much sound editing so I was quite concerned for my second project.

     My group for my short documentary consisted of Heather Kelland as Director, Isabel Wells as Producer, Beth Elston as Camera Operator, myself as Sound Operator, Jamie Wiffen as Editor and Bronte Schoonen as Sound Editor. I was happy with my group as everyone seemed very confident with their role. We were told that our short documentary was to be filmed in Liverpool between three days which meant we had to research a topic based in Liverpool that would make an interesting subject matter to investigate within our short documentary. After group research we had come up with two ideas for a documentary we felt we could accomplish with the time we had there. 

     Our first idea was to make a short documentary on a dead man called William Mackenzie who lived in Liverpool and by myth was buried only 5 minutes away from our hostel in a tomb above ground. We were fascinated by this idea as there is a myth that William Mackenzie was a drinker but a successful gambler by playing poker but one day he met his match with a mysterious character. He lost all of his money to this man but the strange man asks him to play one last hand even thou he has nothing to gamble with. The strange character suggests betting his soul and therefore loses his soul to what appears to be the devil. We felt this would be an interesting documentary that we could make into the length of 5 minutes with a couple of interviewees who are aware of the myth and have anything to say on the topic. With shots of his tomb with the interviews and shows of perhaps graves and churches nearby we felt this could be done.

     Our second idea was to make a short documentary on the Jacobs Biscuit Factory based and created in Liverpool. We had two approaches to this idea as we felt we could make a easy straight forward short documentary on the history, present and perhaps the future this Liverpool local factory and has given huge amounts of jobs for locals of the city. We also in our research found that recently there had been conflict between works and the bosses at the factory over new rules that had been tried to be made such as workers had to have permission to go to the toilet. As interesting as we felt this situation was we felt that we would be making things harder for us trying to get interviews on the matter especially off any mangers or bosses. Either way we felt that it would be an interesting documentary to make that locals of Liverpool may be intrigued to watch as it is a place they may see in close to everyday life.

     We were interested in both ideas but the William Mackenzie idea was a lot more fascinating and when we pitched our ideas to our seminar group, they agreed that our first idea would be more eye catching. Personally I wanted to do the William Mackenzie idea because I knew it would be more fun and more of a challenge since the main character in our documentary is already dead. It appears this was the same way the whole group felt and therefore we decided to go along with our first idea.

     I prepared for my role by writing down a list of sounds I would record for our documentary and I wrote down a list of equipment I would need to get the best of the sound I desired. For this I booked out a zoom, headphones, boom mic, boom pole, XLR cables and a dead cat (wind protector).

     Once we arrived at Liverpool, the first thing we shot took place at an old book shop owned by our interviewee who was called Bryan. In this interview my director and editor asked Bryan questions on dark tales of Liverpool and then gradually began to focus the interview on William Mackenzie. Bryan gave us a good 20 minutes of great material of him discussing William Mackenzie and other strange myths from Liverpool's past. Overall I felt the interview went very well but I felt the sound on my part could have been improved as he spoke very quietly but I didn't want to ask him to speak up.

     Afterwards, we then moved on to gather different footage of Liverpool that could fit well with our short documentary. Firstly we went to the harbour to get indicative shots of Liverpool so it’s obvious it’s a documentary based in Liverpool and to also set the scene as well. I therefore recorded atmospheric sounds of the city and also of the Mersey River as we had some shots of the water to go with it.

     We were a little windswept at this point near the river and after a short break for fish and chips  we then moved on to record shots of William Mackenzie's tomb and a graveyard nearby to get some chilling shots to represent the ghost story we were investigating within our documentary. We later got the same shots at night time as well to have a contrast of the two that we could play with in edit to see which day time to what shot suits the most. We also shot in the cathedral next to the graveyard which was very interesting, especially when we went to the roof which allowed us to see across the whole of Liverpool and more. I took some more atmospheric at the cathedral and graveyard just encase in edit we felt that we needed some.

     I was worried that even with all my recorded sound that the ghostly them and feel to the film might not be achieved and therefore I came up with an idea of someone doing a voiceover. I decided that parts of the book Jamie had purchased, from the book shop we shot in, would be interesting as it was a book of old tales and myths of Liverpool. Jamie had a granddad called Carl that lived nearby Sheffield and had a great spooky voice which led to us recording him reading small parts from the book at his home. It sounded really good and not only made more of a range of voices within the documentary it also build up our theme In post-production I watched Jamie and Bronte mix together Beth's recorded footage and my recorded sound. Everything came together very smoothly but we knew that we should had collected more interviews in Liverpool, to mix together in edit, other than Bryan. The style of cutting the clips together and the effects added to it were very interesting for us and our fellow peers we showed it to. Effects such as contrasting the footage together and fading it together to give it that kind of surreal element we found fascinating. The major part of our documentary we decided to edit was the sound clip of Carl as we noticed as a group the Bryan and Carl sounded quite similar and could make confusion. Bronte therefore added slight echo effects to not only change the feel of his voice but to make it not as recognisable to Bryan's.

     Overall I was satisfied with our final outcome as I felt everything came together to make quite a grim, interesting short documentary about not just Liverpool but about that every city has its dark little secrets.

     For my second project I had to re-join a different group and choose a different role to make a 5 minute drama piece that was based on the theme of “journey”. I found a new group and we choose the roles to be myself as sound editor, Oliver Guy as director, Louise Bailey as Producer, Rose Ryke as cinematographer, Hannah Grencis as sound operator and Sarah Cooper as editor.  

     After the roles were discussed and agreed on we jumped straight into planning and idea developing. Oliver and Hannah shared with the group a very interesting story that Oliver in particular seemed very passionate about. We therefore agreed on this idea and that’s why it was decided Oliver would be the best director as he had a clear idea what he was after and was most confident with the job. Everyone else except for Rose was quite new to their given roles so therefore it would be challenging but also very educational. I felt confident though as Oliver had worked with sound editing a lot before and said he would help me if I needed it.

     Our drama piece is to be called “A View”. It will be a 5 minute drama piece featuring one character and would consist of no dialogue, which follows the journey of their personal progression in a single space whilst suffering from agoraphobia which is the fear of being outside. We hope to create a true and realistic account of the fear from the sufferers perspective and therefore to show this we will film the entirely in the space of the room in which the character feels trapped in. As the film runs through, we hope by using the image and sound to create a feeling for the viewer to have claustrophobia to really sympathise with the character.

 

     The idea “journey” will be shown in a simplistic way as the film will focus on the inner progression the character has to overcome a part of his fear. The character will be a male adult (early twenties) who will visit the location more than once before the shoot to get a good idea of the space and a feel for the character.

     Since there was to be no dialogue and how serious the character was, I knew that sound was going to be extremely important within the film. With discussing sound plans and lists with Oliver and Hannah we decided to add a lot of outside sounds into the room so that the sense of the character being obsessed with the outside world is more powerful for the viewer.

 

     Our inspiration for this is the film Apocalypse Now as the opening to the film has a man in a hotel room who is mentally scarred by the Vietnam War and all he can hear is sounds from the jungle and sounds such as helicopters. Once we were confident with our idea we pitched our idea and received feedback. It seemed they really liked it and could understand our intensions within the film. We had a tutorial and discussed in further detail our plans and ideas. We received great feedback but for my role my most important feedback was the discussion of there being any score throughout the film or to just let the sounds, themselves, me the music for the film.  

     We found an actor who fit the part called Johnathan who was happy to act for and we found our location which was an old people’s home that had a whole floor of rooms empty for us to use but we only required one. We decorated the room with plants, books, framed pictures of Johnathan and such as, to create his little world.

 

     I felt that the shoot went great all together and to see Johnathan actor was quite overwhelming as I couldn’t believe we managed to work with him. He was very patient with us as well which was good as we are only students. I helped as much as I could with the shoot by doing a lot of lighting work. This led to the sunlight through the window becoming my enemy of course but some shots I felt look interesting with the exposure. I have recorded a lot of sound in the past and therefore offered by help to Hannah whenever she wanted it but she knew what she was doing and did a good job on her own. The only problem she faced was that the zoom kept going through batteries after every couple of takes which was strange. I though Oliver did an amazing job as a director since it was his first time directing like that and I thought Rose came out with some amazing and quite inventive shots I instantly looked forward to editing sound with in post-production.

     I faced some problems in post-production as Sound Pro editing software was not working the way it should as the wavelengths on the clips of sounds were not appearing and therefore the editing process was to be twice as difficult. This was eventually solved as a technician installed an earlier version of Sound Pro, to my MAC, that did show the wavelengths. Also it was hard to match the sound files to the footage as Oliver would repeat the same scene and shot numerous of times.  

     Overall even with the struggles at the beginning of my role I found it quite enjoyable and understood more than before on how important sound is to film as noticing that even a couple seconds of a sound can change the film massively.

 

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Drama Project – Edit Development

     For the sound editing process it was a mixture of difficult and very fun. Firstly I saw the edit, Sarah had done with the footage, after the holidays and I straight away felt pleased as I could follow the story and understand the characters motives instantly. I was pleased with this because we worried if we could manage to edit to footage together and make sense out of it for the audience. I was amazed that it was cut down from 8 minutes to the required 5 because there was a lot of vital footage to be added if the film was to make sense but we managed. I felt confident that with this I could begin the sound edit but this was just the beginning of a couple of problems that set us back a couple of days.

 

     Firstly for the first two days of my editing, Sound Pro editing software was not working probably as the wavelengths on the clips of sound were not appearing so therefore it made my task of sound editing a lot harder than it should have been. For someone like me who is quite new to Sound Pro I was instantly struggling because of this. I told the technician’s office and they tried their best to sort out the problem but then the next day with a different MAC it did it again. Eventually a technician installed an earlier version of sound Pro to my MAC that slightly showed the wavelength better.

 

     Secondly I became aware something no one noticed on the shoot which was Oliver got mixed up with scenes and therefore repeated the same scene and shots numerous of times. This led to me having to reconnect all the sound from scratch to the scenes they were recorded for. Also on some sound clips, it was not identified what the sound actually was so I had to guess what shot it was for. I eventually re-matched everything together my re-naming all the sound files.

 

     Once this was done I really enjoyed sound editing and felt I fully understood how Sound Pro works quite quickly. I began putting done an atmos to set the scene and then began syncing all of the sound together with the movements within the footage. For instance I added in footsteps, doors shutting, sound of bed sheets as he gets out of bed and etc. After we felt satisfied with it so far I then began to add the outside sounds we wanted to put in to create the aspect that the character has a huge connection with the outside.

 

     My biggest influence of this was the shot of his hand over the door handle while he contemplates opening the door. We build up the outside sounds such as bird sounds, cars and wind to reach a climax to then complete silence as the hand appears in the film. With this the viewer only really gets a kind of white noise like sound with the characters deep breathing and crying to give an impact on the audience. This was my most proud part of the film that I had contributed to.

 

     Overall even with the struggles at the beginning of my role I found it quite enjoyable and understood more than before on how important sound is to film as noticing that even a couple seconds of a sound can change the film massively.      

Drama Project – Filming

     Our location was an old people’s home that had a whole floor of empty rooms. Once we saw the room, we knew using one of the rooms would instantly create the world we want the character in. It was very important we got a good room to shoot in as the room is a character in itself. The only problem was that we needed a desk for a scene but luckily Louise had a hold up one she lent us to use.

 

     We finally put up posters and added little decretive items like plants, bedside table light, books, and framed pictures of Jonathan, all to give the impression that the room looked homely and lived in but we also wanted the remained feel that this room was a mess just as he is so therefore we messed it up by bringing lots of rubbish in from our own flats.




     On the first day of shooting, the morning was spent with me, Sarah and Louise preparing the room and setting up all the equipment as Oliver, Rose, Hannah and Johnathan shot the scenes of Johnathan outside, in a woodland area, close by.

     We then continued to shoot the second half of the script as Johnathan had a beard that was for the second half but not the first. Therefore the next day of shooting he was clean shaven. Johnathan was very understanding and basically just went with the flow by going along with full help on what Oliver and Rose asked of him. He was very cooperative and I could see that Oliver had made a connection with him, from the shoot at the woods, which was good to see as oliver was the director.

     Since I was sound editor and Sarah was editor, this meant we would help a lot on the technical side of the shoot as for example we basically did all the lighting work for the whole shoot by place the main lamp around the room and holding the reflector to get the best of our shots, sound wise. With these constant lights in such a small room it meant we would have regular short breaks so that we did not get too tired from the heat. It came to our advantage as this meant we had time to quickly move the equipment around with Johnathan out of the room and for Oliver to keep communicating with the actor to get the footage we desired. This made the entire shoot run more smoothly through the two days.

     I felt that the shoot went great all together and to see Johnathan actor was quite overwhelming as I couldn’t believe we managed to work with him. He was very patient with us as well which was good as we are only students. I helped as much as I could with the shoot by doing a lot of lighting work. This led to the sunlight through the window becoming my enemy of course but some shots I felt look interesting with the exposure. I have recorded a lot of sound in the past and therefore offered by help to Hannah whenever she wanted it but she knew what she was doing and did a good job on her own. The only problem she faced was that the zoom kept going through batteries after every couple of takes which was strange. I though Oliver did an amazing job as a director since it was his first time directing like that and I thought Rose came out with some amazing and quite inventive shots I instantly looked forward to editing sound with in port-production.  

                                                                                   

Drama Project – Actor

     We firstly had tried to find an actor through facebook and emailing different drama societies but we didn’t receive much luck. Our luck was low as we had many actors interested in our sent scripts but none of them on our behalf really met up to what we were looking for. We wanted a more of an older actor but we were only getting feedback off actors around 18 to 21. Thankfully, we were recommended a website called star now, were we created a casting call, this was great as we then were able to find a more specific actor to meet our characters looks. We asked for males between the ages of 35 to 50.  

     An actor got in touch with us called Jonathan who seemed to have had lots of acting experience and luckily also once used to suffer with panic attacks. He had a knowledge of agoraphobia and therefore were happy he could relate to the character personally which was quite a stroke of luck on our part. He seemed very passionate about our idea and was looking forward to our first meeting to discuss the idea into further depth. I could not attend our group meeting because of other university work but from what I was told, Jonathan seemed very interested with our script and told the group a lot about his experiences with panic attacks. Overall he had not many questions for the group and was quite up for anything.

 

Drama Project – Pitch and Feedback

      We were happy to pitch our idea to fellow other students working on their own drama projects as we were interested in their feedback. We gave our fellow peers a brief synopsis of the drama, although still a little bit under developed I feel we achieved the task of getting our idea across and that it was understood. It was quite hard to explain the character as we were not 100% finished on developing the character. We felt we found be able to finish the character once we had found an actor and discussed things with him.

     Once we had received our feedback, it seemed they really liked it and could understand our intensions within the film. We had a tutorial and discussed in further detail our plans and ideas. We received great feedback but for my role my most important feedback was the discussion of there being any score throughout the film or to just let the sounds, themselves, me the music for the film.   

Drama Project – Idea and Inspiration

     Our drama piece is to be called “A View”. It will be a 5 minute drama piece featuring one character and would consist of no dialogue, which follows the journey of their personal progression in a single space whilst suffering from agoraphobia which is the fear of being outside. We hope to create a true and realistic account of the fear from the sufferers perspective and therefore to show this we will film the entirely in the space of the room in which the character feels trapped in. As the film runs through, we hope by using the image and sound to create a feeling for the viewer to have claustrophobia to really sympathise with the character.

     The “journey” will be shown in a simplistic way as the film will focus on the inner progression the character has to overcome a part of his fear. The character will be a male adult (early twenties) who will visit the location more than once before the shoot to get a good idea of the space and a feel for the character.

     Since there is no dialogue and we will be dealing with quite a serious character, we will have to carefully plan out how we will design the sound and edit it within post-production to set the scene. With this and our set design, this will narrate our film and form its structure.   

     With discussing this with Oliver and Hannah we have decided to add a lot of outside sounds into the room so that the sense of the character being obsessed with the outside world is more powerful for the viewer.

     Our inspiration for this is the film Apocalypse Now as the opening to the film has a man in a hotel room who is mentally scarred by the Vietnam War and all he can hear is sounds from the jungle and sounds such as helicopters.   

Drama Project – Brief, Group and Roles

     For this semester, our brief is to create a 5-minute drama project around the theme of “journey”. The project has to meet certain requirements, such as:

·         Maximum of 3 characters

·         Maximum of 3 locations

·         Shot on location outside university

·         Shot with synch sound

·         Demonstrate mise-en-scene

·         Strong elements of sound design

·         Edited at aspect ratio of 16:9

·         No longer or shorter than 5 minutes

 

     No one was allowed to work with anyone they had already worked with so I eventually got a group with people from a different class. As a group of six, my group members were:

·         Myself

·         Sarah Cooper

·         Hannah Grencis

·         Oliver Guy

·         Rose Ryke

·         Louise Bailey

     At our first meeting we discussed ideas and most importantly job roles. Oliver and Hannah shared with the group a very interesting story that Oliver in particular seemed felt very passionate about. We therefore agreed on this idea and decided Oliver would be the best director as he had a clear idea what he was after and was most confident with the job. Rose took the role as cinematographer and Louise was given the role as producer. Hannah had been producer in her last recent project so therefore decided on giving sound operator a go. Sarah was given editor and I was given the role as sound editor. The roles were then officially:

·         Oliver Guy – Director

·         Louise Bailey – Producer

·         Rose Ryke – Cinematographer

·         Hannah Grencis – Sound Operator

·         Sarah Cooper – Editor

·         Myself – Sound Editor

     I was quite happy with my role as I have a lot of experience sound recording but I have very little experience editing sound so I was up for the change of role and confident our final piece would be good on my behalf as Oliver said he would help me with any problems I would come to face as he is very familiar with sound editing.

Documentary Project - Post-Production and Final Edit

     In post-production I watched Jamie and Bronte mix together Beth's recorded footage and my recorded sound. Everything came together very smoothly but we knew that we should had collected more interviews in Liverpool, to mix together in edit, other than Bryan. The style of cutting the clips together and the effects added to it were very interesting for us and our fellow peers we showed it to. Effects such as contrasting the footage together and fading it together to give it that kind of surreal element we found fascinating. The major part of our documentary we decided to edit was the sound clip of Carl as we noticed as a group the Bryan and Carl sounded quite similar and could make confusion. Bronte therefore added slight echo effects to not only change the feel of his voice but to make it not as recognisable to Bryan's.  

 

     Overall I was satisfied with our final outcome as I felt everything came together to make quite a grim, interesting short documentary about not just Liverpool but about that every city has its dark little secrets.

Documentary Project - Shooting in Liverpool

     The photo above is myself doing a microphone test at the beginning of our interview in Liverpool. It was the first thing we shot and it took place at a old book shop owned by our interviewee who was called Bryan. In this interview my director and editor asked Bryan questions on dark tales of Liverpool and then gradually began to focus the interview on William Mackenzie. Bryan gave us a good 20 minutes of great material of him discussing William Mackenzie and other strange myths from Liverpool's past. Overall I felt the interview went very well but I felt the sound on my part could have been improved as he spoke very quietly but I didn't want to ask him to speak up.

     We then moved on to gather different footage of Liverpool that could fit well with our short documentary. Firstly we went to the harbour to get indicative shots of Liverpool so its obvious its a documentary based in Liverpool and to also set the scene as well. I therefore recorded atmos sounds of the city and also of the Mersey River as we had some shots of the water to go with it.

     After we felt satisfied we then moved on to recorded shots of William Mackenzie's tomb and a graveyard near by to get some chilling shots to represent the ghost story we were investigating within our documentary. We later got the same shots at night time as well to have a contrast of the two that we could play with in edit to see which day time to what shot suits the most. We also shot in the cathedral next to the graveyard which was very interesting, especially when we went to the roof which allowed us to see across the whole of Liverpool and more. I took some more atmos at the cathedral and graveyard just encase in edit we felt that we needed some.

 

     At the book shop Jamie purchased a book on old tales and myths of Liverpool. We felt that a voice over of a reading of the book could fit into the documentary to bring more of a contrast of speakers as without a voice over it would have been just Bryan talking. Jamie's granddad called Carl, who lives in Sheffield, said he could be delighted to help and therefore me and Jamie recorded him reading a few passages of the book in a quiet part of his house. It sounded really good and made more of a range of voice to the documentary.    

 

 

 

  




  

Documentary Project - Sound Preparations

I wrote down a sound list and equipment list in pre-production.



Documentary Project - Group and Idea Development

My group with the chosen group roles consisted of:

Heather Kelland as Director
Isabel Wells as Producer
Beth Elston as Camera Operator
Myself as Sound Operator
Jamie Wiffen as Editor
Bronte Schoonen as Sound Editor

     We were told that our documentary was to be filmed in Liverpool between three days which meant we had to research on a topic within Liverpool we could make a interesting short documentary about that would be in our reach of achieving. After research our group came up with two ideas for a documentary we felt we could accomplish with the time we had there.

     Our first idea was to make a short documentary on a dead man called William Mackenzie who lived in Liverpool and by myth was buried only 5 minutes away from our hostel in a tomb above ground. We were fascinated by this idea as there is a myth that William Mackenzie was a drinker but a successful gambler by playing poker but one day he met his match with a mysterious character. He lost all of his money to this man but the strange man asks him to play one last hand even thou he has nothing to gamble with. The strange character suggests betting his soul and therefore loses his soul to what appears to be the devil. we felt this would be an interesting documentary that we could make into the length of 5 minutes with a couple of interviewees who are aware of the myth and have any thing to say on the topic. With shots of his tomb with the interviews and shows of perhaps graves and churches near by we felt this could be done.

     Our second idea was to make a short documentary on the Jacobs Biscuit Factory based and created in Liverpool. We had two approaches to this idea as we felt we could make a easy straight forward short documentary on the history, present and perhaps the future this Liverpool local factory and has given huge amounts of jobs for locals of the city. We also in our research found that recently there had been conflict between works and the bosses at the factory over new rules that had been tried to be made such as workers had to have permission to go to the toilet. As interesting as we felt this situation was we felt that we would be making things harder for us trying to get interviews on the matter especially off any mangers or bosses. Either way we felt that it would be an interesting documentary to make that locals of Liverpool may be intrigued to watch as it is a place they may see in close to everyday life.

     

     We pitched both our ideas to our seminar tutor and the rest of our peers. We received positive feedback on behalf of both ideas so it was up to us to decide which idea we would do. As a group we all agreed on the William Mackenzie idea as it is what fascinated us the most.

Documentary Project - Research and Influence

     For the beginning of this project I have research on a lot of interesting documentaries such as The Act Of Killing (2012), The Imposter (2012) and Marley (2012) but the film that I felt influenced myself the most was Dark Days (2000).

 

     Dark Days is a documentary made my Marc Singer on the homeless population who live permanently in New York in the underground tunnels. I felt this documentary gave me influence as firstly I was intrigued by his approach to the topic of discussion in interviews with the homeless in his film because you never hear him speak as he just lets them do all the talking. He lets them feel comfortable and be themselves throughout their interviews and there is a sense that Marc has not pressed them to discuss only on a certain topic but has just let them talk on their own accord. I liked this sense of freedom the interviewee has in this documentary. I also am fascinated with his choice of shots as these certain parts of the underground tunnels he has captured say just as much as the interviewees. An example of this is the shots of the shacks the squatters have made out of nothing but left over scarp from across New York.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Documentary Project - Reflection On My Own Practice

     For of our next semester we have been asked to make a short Documentary. I feel quite lucky as its a genre of film I have worked on in the past and felt it was necessary to publish my old work on my blog to show my understanding towards documentary film-making.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL5wjhnK6YU

     I was sound recordist for a short documentary made about a man called Tony Kennedy from Blyth, Northumberland who was a kit man for Blyth Spartans football club for over 1000 games and from that he earned a well known cult status amongst the people of Blyth. To my surprise my friend and director of the documentary went on to win a the Chris Anderson award for Best Young Filmmaker at the Berwick Film Festival.

     I felt throughout my time working on the making of this short documentary I learnt some skills with approaching people with interviews and the look a documentary should have. I enjoyed recording sound and seeing it on film made me confident I could take on that role again.

Experimental Project Evaluation

By Adam Young (Group C)

     For my experimental project we were put into groups of two to create an experimental sound clip and also an experimental film.

      My group consisted of myself and Andrew Espley which was to our advantage as we both shared similar influences and inspirations for both experimental sound and film such as, firstly for sound, we were both fascinated on work from Delia Derbyshire. A great example of her work we were inspired by was her experimental sound called Blue Veils and Golden Sounds. We found this piece very interesting with its strange and haunting sounds but with its quite beautiful flow throughout it. We aimed to achieve this within our sound and therefore began discussing ideas and started planning.

     Myself and Andrew decided to base our experimental sound on everyday city sounds everyone would hear within a city. We felt this would have more of a disturbing effect towards our target audience, which was teenagers to above, because it would be taking something that they are familiar with and adapting it to something so surreal. We discussed how we would do this and planned to distort many of our collected sounds within post-production.

     Therefore on the day of production we booked out a zoom recorder from Sheffield Hallam Universities Film and Media department to spend the day collecting city sounds. This day consisted of walking through Sheffield city centre and recording such sounds as traffic, trains, walking and water fountains. We found this very interesting to do as listening back to our recorded sounds we noticed lots of other city sounds we did not even notice such as talking. Overall I felt recording went very well as we managed to collect a lot of sound to work with for the editing process.  

     We had problems in post-production as we firstly started to use Pro Tools sound editing software but we suffered technical issues so therefore we could unfortunately begin our edit. We then decided to use another sound editing software for our work. We approached editing our sound with different techniques to create this disturbing and unusual sound such as reversing sounds, changing the tempos and dropping pitches. We found slowing the speed of the sound clips or speeding them up very effective as well. Also to add a sense of different layers to the sound we used echo effects, faded some clips in and out and repeated some of them to achieve this feel for the listener. After this we later added “phaser, “wah wah” effects and inverted the majority of them which gave the sound this huge sense of irritation and disturbance. We noticed a lot of wind within a lot of our sound but decided to fade it in and out because it also let off a strange effect. We brought in the sound close to the beginning and then brought it out close to the end to make a sense of our experimental sound having a beginning and an end. From listening to our final edit we found it near impossible to recognise these everyday sounds we had recorded and therefore felt satisfied because this was our intention.

     We were unsure on our final outcome of our experimental sound and therefore let other fellow students, working on their own experimental sound, listen and give feedback. We noticed, using the certain speakers in our classroom, that some sounds would occasionally cut out as the speakers could not manage the rising sound. This did not affect our feedback as we were very pleased to hear they all thought it was very good and had an interesting flow to it that created a disturbing scene in their imaginations. I felt we worked very well as a pair to create the sound we did.

     We then moved on to planning our approach to our experimental film by researching on interesting techniques and styles from other experimental films. We both found very interesting a short experimental film by D.A Pennebaker called Daybreak Express from 1953. The reason for this was from the way he shot lots of different parts of New York, from a train, and mixed it together with jazz music to give the footage its upbeat mood. With the added jazz music the experimental film felt it adapted to more of a faster pace and became more exciting. At the beginning of the film it has no music and therefore has quite a calm feel to it before the upbeat. This inspired myself and Andrew as we wanted to do this with our own film to create a short climax before the main flow of the film truly gets going. After watching this we began to discuss the possibilities of using our experimental sound for the beginning of the film.

     We also gained inspiration from another experimental film/music video which was made by Duvet Brothers, in 1984, for the band New Orders song Blue Monday. The reason for our like towards it was that throughout the film there is a clear divide within the different footage that has been used. It’s obvious the inner message is to raise the fact that there is a huge divide between rich and poor people in Britain because there is footage of run down council houses with footage of Buckingham palace. There is even a point where a sign appears saying “the poor get poorer”. Myself and Andrew were fascinated by this as it is edited to have the complete same flow but the inner layer of the film shows its true message that the film is split into two.

     We then began on idea development for our experimental film by starting to discuss parts of Sheffield to shoot as we already agreed we wanted to base the location of the film around Sheffield. We wanted to use our experimental sound at the beginning but to have the film break into another, more upbeat, sound. Our inspirational sound was a song called “Touch Me” by The Doors. We knew we would not be allowed to use the song over copyright reasons but we wanted to either find or invent an alternative close to this. Eventually we found a song from a website you were able to purchase music from for less than a pound but we were still unsure on if we were allowed to use it. We also slightly mimicked the Blue Monday film we were influenced from by planning a divide within our footage such as the art within expensive prestige looking builds to old rundown buildings.   

     On the day of production we shot lots of locations using a Canon D600 around Sheffield such as churches, the town hall and other old prestige looking buildings which were mostly in the city centre. This was very interesting as there was art work such as stone status near these buildings. We then went on to collect lots of shots of abandon and half destroyed buildings which was very interesting as they were only a 5 minute walk from the city centre. We were intrigued with these buildings as they were much more colourful than any other buildings we had spotted because they consisted of great looking graffiti all over them. It was quite a safety hazard shooting there since we had an expensive looking camera with us but we had no bother what so ever. We also gathered footage of traffic, trains and big groups of the public walking around Sheffield.

     In post-production, to edit our experimental film we used Final Cut Pro on the Macs provided for us two by Sheffield Hallam University. After we transferred our footage onto Final Cut Pro, we went on to organise its content so that we could begin our editing process to complete our first draft. For our first draft we focused onto creating our original idea and use the song we found and brought. We wanted to be given feedback off a mentor after this so that we could have a clear answer if we were allowed to use it or not. We added effects to the footage towards the beginning with our experimental sound to make it look old and with the slow motion effect added, it made it look very strange. These couple of shots were of crowds of people walking and trains pulling into the station. When the song began to play the mood and flow of the film became very upbeat which was what we wanted. We highlighted this by editing the footage so it cut with the beat of the song. Unfortunately we were told from feedback that we would not be allowed to use the song but we got positive feedback towards the beginning of the film. We then decided to take out the song and use our experimental sound throughout the entire film. This meant we would have to just keep the experimental film completely with the mood, we would have at the beginning, throughout.    

     Andrew had an idea of using photographs we had taken and mix it together with our moving image footage we had shot as we felt this would highlight the darker and creepier part of Sheffield in our film. We made sure we created the clear contrast between both parts of Sheffield we wanted. To do this we edited the film so that it jumps from one type of building to another. We edited in the sound of the shutter on the camera every time a photograph was to appear as we thought it was an interesting touch to the film. We kept the same first 30 seconds of our original experimental film as we felt it was a good intro and we had already received positive feedback towards it. When it came to approaching editing our photos together we decided we wanted to create the sense of movement by using stop motion animation. With every next photo it would get closer and closer towards the certain object or building. To create this we put the length of every photograph to 0.15 seconds. We were very pleased with our final edit outcome.

     Personally I think our experimental sound and film went very well together considering we originally shot for another mood that was not disturbing like our sound. Although furthermore, I feel if myself and Andrew were to re-do this project again we would get different approaches. Firstly I feel, especially with our experimental sound, we would make a clearer motive to follow for our film as within pre-production and even in shooting we were still unsure on one mood to create in our film. Secondly we would have made sure from our planning stage if it was expectable to use the song we wanted or not as this lead to extra time re-editing. Even after mentioning these signs of improvement I still feel very positive with our final outcome.

     As a group I felt we worked very well and both shared our own input to successfully create the experimental sound and film we have made. On the day of production I told Andrew of the buildings with graffiti on them because I had walked past them only days before so knew of their whereabouts. We both equally recorded sound and footage for our edit and both were in the edit suites editing the film together. Andrew edited the experimental sound on his own as the software we decided to use was not available to us from the Macs in the edit suites. Overall I felt we shared the work load except in post-production when I felt Andrew had done more because of the experimental sound.

     Throughout this project I have learnt technically a lot more about effects within editing as it was very interesting to discuss and test out different effects to create the disturbing mood I feel we achieved with our experimental project. This made me appreciate the approach to editing more in a different way. I also feel I have learnt skills creatively more towards idea development because I feel the way me and Andrew discussed and built our ideas was really productive towards our experimental project.

  

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