I got in on Thursday with my costume - large cape and a wig. I was to play Elvira. Talking to friends in the class in other groups, it sounded like some of them are getting actors in while the actual teams worked on production. It made me feel like they were working on a whole different level with this project.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I came in, but one member of the group had managed to edit Wednesday's footage together, so I looked at it and I was actually very surprised. Despite the shots looking terrible to me the night before and there being a complete lack of continuity near the end, he'd somehow managed to put it together in a fairly coherent manner.  The biggest problem was, as he'd pointed out himself, the construction worker shots which he'd used, one shot he isn't there, another shot he is, another shot he isn't. This didn't seem to bother my team member so I thought well perhaps we could go and re-shoot that shot at least... maybe...

I've sort of decided to suppress my thoughts and wishes and visions for this project somewhat, I really just didn't think there was much point and I'm feeling too tired and drained from the last project and sort of the whole semester really. What's the point of causing conflict when the group seem happy with what they are producing. So I'm just enabling where I can. But I've been saving my critiques for the blog, it's how I can communicate that I may have some understanding, whatever result we were likely to produce.  My group had nice people in it but they had their own ideas and I feel sort of out numbered - two members have worked together in every previous project (by fluke in this one too) and all members are all younger than me. There have been no conflicts, I've just made my mind up based on my my observations of the members, who are all rather passive and perhaps slightly defensive to ride this one out. While my last group were always open to suggestions, I don't  get that feeling here, though I could be wrong. I have tested it a couple of times and not really been received with the enthusiasm I'd want to continue developing and I don't currently have the energy to pursue things further. As I said, I'm at a point where I just cannot be bothered pushing differing ideas. Not this semester any more.

So we went to our team member's apartment to shoot the rest of the story, and decided to just enjoy the time for what it's worth and not feel stressed about the way we were going about this. Starting from the end of the day before we seemed to drift away from the storyboard, but rather than kick up a fuss, I went with the flow. Well Thursday's shooting was even more off storyboard. So what was the point in making one? Due to the last scene on Wednesday being changed, it made the next scene on Thursday's shooting which follows completely redundant. I privately felt a sense of loss, because it was my part of the storyboard that was that was  effectively binned. Not one bit of it was shot the way it was originally planned.

Perhaps for the sake of clarity I should give a basic overview of the... er... "plot"... Dorothy is in her apartment and decides to walk the dog in the local park despite being grounded or something (I still don't have a copy of the script), next follows a few minutes of her walking around the park, then she comes back, runs into Elvira who wants her red shoes back (she gets them) and walks into the apartment to find a gun fight between her aunt and uncle because the uncle apparently cheated with Elvira. Over the gunshots Dorothy's aunt sends her to bed without dinner for going out.

On Wednesday we shot park scenes, at the end she is supposed to just walk home (and cut to my establishing shot of the apartment) but it was changed to her tapping her feet and disappearing in a cloud of smoke and reappearing in the apartment hallway. Thursday we shot the opening scenes then the scene where she meets Elvira (which I originally storyboarded) and the gunfight. It turned out that the plan was not to follow the gunfight storyboard either but just capture lots of shots from different angles and see what can be put together. I agreed and went along with it but I'm not sure how I was supposed to direct anything. I didn't really direct at all anyway though, - it was clear this is not how we were going to operate. I am mildly concerned that it's my marks that get affected too. I'd like to shoot for A+ for everything in this course, I'm pretty sure that I have the understanding required for this particular subject and I think I could do A+ execution given a team with similar ideas. I've taken part in a number of movie-making & TV production courses at various institutions in my school years (and beyond actually, one course taught with actual film), read a lot of theory (from actual books) and from quite a young age just observed movies from a production perspective. I've also shot footage, edited on multiple platforms (pre-computer) and authored DVDs, learning as I went. I'm not however really prepared to go boasting about previous experiences as a method of getting my way.

I was the camera operator for the gunfight. It was suggested by a member (one who also seemed to be taking a backseat in my observation) that we do handheld camera footage for the gunfight to convey a more personal or immediate feeling, perhaps more of a sense of danger, and I didn't think it was a such bad idea really so that's what we did.

It was nice to be able to have some control over framing of shots by virtue of holding the camera, I wasn't so sure how to control the lighting on it, but the auto settings seemed to work okay.

I also had my 20 seconds of fame playing Elvira, with some terrible wooden acting and a croaky voice, discovering that I can not imitate even a humorous female voice. We had planned to do some ADR and Foley later on, but I'm not sure how you're supposed to do that when your day finishes at 1 or 2pm. I have audio equipment at home (SM52 XLR microphone and a decent audio interface, a boom stand etc) and I planned to bring it in but the hassle of carrying all of that on a bus (I really miss living in the city) along with the quality of the footage and the likely hood of us actually using it meant that I wasn't really prepared to lug it around with me.

After shooting we went back to class, reviewed the footage and I transcoded it using a free program called MPEG Streamer. I did this for 2 reasons. One is because Final Cut could not read the soundtrack embedded in the movie files that came from the camera. This is because the sound is multiplexed which basically means (I think) that it's tangled up with the video for compression purposes. We could have just as easily imported the files into iMovie as that apparently demux's as it imports, we'd been told that but I had filed it away in my mind as irrelevant because I never intended to use a harddrive-based camera, so sort of forgot.  The other reason is that all of the footage was interlaced to hell. MPEG Streamer de-interlaced the footage.

I didn't really feel all that in touch with the project personally by this time - I sort of felt like some unnecessary appendage to the group - so when the inevitable going home early idea was floated I agreed and said I'd clone out the construction worker. It's a time-consuming task that could have been avoided by a quick re-shooting but, it gave me something small to do and a reason to explore the world of Photoshop's video layers which is something I've never really touched before.

Friday came and the group was busy putting the final footage together, I continued with cloning in the computer lab, and it didn't look like the film would be finished. Despite that, it seemed that there was little for me to do and by this point I felt like I'd be polishing something that's not meant to be polished. To my surprise the movie got finished and put to DVD with a menu. I'd kept out of it's final production which I think probably suited everyone and instead helped with making popcorn for the movie presentations to be held at 4pm. I really had no hand in getting that movie made or authored to DVD, and I was quietly bothered that I would be in the credits for directing and who-knows what else when it was not really my work or something I'd feel comfortable being credited with. The first 2 films were really impressive. I suspected that they would be due to their groups members containing people experienced with film production (and better people management skills/more potentially outspoken I guess). Ours was the third to play. It was surprisingly well edited. This is not an endorsement of the film though, we could have done so much better; We could have made a decent story, made a storyboard and followed it and followed a production schedule as called for in the brief. We could have paid more attention to what a western actually is, we could have spread the load like a proper group and last of all we could have stayed in class longer and discussed things like a group and with more class time we could have polished it properly and replaced the awful sound.

I think our team really missed the point of what a western is and instead followed really superficial cues. It had been tinted to sepia, and the dog-walking scene was backed with generic to country music, and there was a gunfight. But this stuff doesn't make the film a western. Not in any academic sense to me anyway. Westerns feature conflicts between people and about the times that they are in. It's about how they react to those conflicts. It's about morality and sometimes the lack of. This tangibly translates to lots of extreme close ups of people's faces showing exactly how they feel and what they are thinking.  I'm not sure we had any real closeups, certainly no extreme closeups and there was no thought put into the nature of any of our characters. Westerns also can have a lot of very wide shots indicating the isolation and the expanse of land, setting the scene. The movie perhaps should have started with some establishing shots of the city, but it started with Dorothy looking out a window in an apartment.

We watched the other movies, all interesting, quite a few with some nice ideas and then the class finished up. Part of the material we have to submit (individually) is analysis of 5 key shots from the final video and the way they function to communicate a key aspect of the video. I was originally looking forward to writing that,  but it's not when the material that you are using doesn't have enough thought put into the shots in the first place, when nothing was deliberate, when the movie was just cobbled together like a school project, it's more difficult.

I liked our group members on a personal level and see some talent and some industriousness but I felt passively shut out from the creative/production/decision-making process from the very beginning. I would test this occasionally with suggestions but the reactions served only to confirm my opinion. I suspect the tactic was to go home and assume control over the project and just let the group tag along. I'm not really content with tagging along. This difficult position will cost me some marks which is annoying but at least I'm familiar with the subject matter so I don't feel like I've missed much on the learning side. I have just completely missed the satisfaction of a project well done and possibly some kudos.

Anyway, below is the final movie, make up your own mind.

Edit: I notice the construction worker clone out wasn't used anyway.