Production 5: Disposable Media

We were given 45 minutes to film, on our phones, and two class periods to edit. This is what I came up with.

Well, actually, there was no idea at the beginning. I was jokingly talking with Henry about what to create while I was walking around the cinema room and the hallway outside filming the objects there. At the same time, Henry filmed me doing it, and after seeing the first footage we decided to work together on that plan. This worked out well, because my phone only had enough storage left on it to film for three minutes. We spent the rest of class going around campus, with me holding my phone pretending to film, and Henry filming me doing it. Later on, we switched roles and I filmed him, although there were less shots of this. The look I was originally imagining was something artsy, like 'photography is cool', 'capture that moment!', something similar to that example video we watched near the beginning of the year featuring that girl talking about her love for her camera and for photography.

Inspired by the lesson of Wes Anderson telling his crew to reassemble the dolly track to make sure a lighthouse was dead center in his shot, Henry and I tried to do some "Moonrise Kingdom"-style symmetry shots, with the subject centered rather than on the third line, but these did not come out as well as we wanted. Henry's phone, the phone we filmed with, an iPhone 6, unlike the iPhone 6+, iPhone 7, or my Samsung S6, does not have optical image stabilization (OIS), so the video is more shaky and not of the best quality. The best shots, in both of our opinions, were those incorporating panning or a revolving movement, where the shaky video issue was mitigated. Overall, we recorded over 2GB of 1080p 30fps video, well more than we could use. Henry uploaded the footage to the cloud for our review and use in editing.

While I was reviewing the extensive amount of video we recorded, I watched one clip of me holding my phone in front of my eyes (the fifth shot in the package) and got a different idea on how to spin this story. Instead of having a positive message, I set to (trying to) make something with a bleak futuristic theme, criticizing people who record or take pictures of everything, like concerts, instead of living their lives 'through their own eyes'. Another reason why I wanted to do this was because Henry, editing the same footage next to me, was making his video into an adventure story, and I wanted to do something as different as possible.

Because this idea was not even considered when I started this project, the footage I had to work with just wasn't the best for this purpose, but I tried a few tricks. To get a serious, dreary feel, I originally tried making it black and white, but that wasn't what I was looking for. Instead, I modified the saturation and temperature of the colors to create a washed-out, gray image. I used three shots each of Henry and I holding the phone, but compared to the shots Henry used in his video, these are longer and more boring, although we did use some of the same ones when they had the best quality. Later on, I added a track from Incompetech called "Reign Supreme", which was described as feeling "dark, eerie, mysterious, [and] somber", as well as door opening and closing sounds (I went through at least 20 door opening sound effects before I chose this one) and wind for the final scene. As for that final scene, don't be confused; there is really no purpose or hidden meaning, although even I may sometimes be mistaken in thinking there might be. Rather than making that scene have washed-out colors and scary music, I only included wind sounds and oversaturated the colors, to contrast this shot with the rest of the video. This concluded my work.

Day 1 /// Monday, November 27:

• Filmed
• Uploaded footage to Google Drive

Day 2 /// Tuesday, November 28:

• Began editing
• Organized clips

Day 3 /// Wednesday, November 29:

• Finished editing visuals
• Color correction
• Color saturation - shadows, mid tones, highlights
• Flag scene - mid tones - reds, highlights - sky

Day 4 /// Thursday, November 30:

• Added audio - music and sound effects
• Music from Incompetech.com
• Door and wind sounds from YouTube