National Anthem - Lana Del Rey
Towards the end of the video (5:40) Lana is reading a famous letter. It’s a voice over layered on top of the ending of her song with reenactments of the Kennedy assassination.
I was already working on my film when I saw this but I wanted to somehow incorporate that look and feel on to my own film as well..
Apricot - Ben Briand
Although I didn’t have this short film in mind when I came up with the idea for my own film, as I was going through production and post-production, this kept coming back to me. I think I wanted to capture some of the same feeling that this short film gave me when I first watched it. It’s now one of my favourite short films ever and I think this definitely influenced how I executed my own film.
Two Truths and a Lie - Short Film
‘face the truth’
a song i wrote as soundtrack to my film
i’m on vocals and my friend is on gat
thoughts 04
about a week before our assignment was due, Bevin asked everyone to present a rough cut to be critiqued by the class. it was a good time to wrap our heads around constructively critiquing our classmates’ work and of course it was great seeing what the rest of the class were up to - we pretty much updated each other on our progress during lectures.
anyway, at that point I only had the one I posted before this and though it wasn’t quite what i had envisioned I would be at that point in time I was still happy with it. i think an important lesson i learned after having bevin as advisor for one of my other papers and him leading this paper, of course, is that it’s okay to start with something really rough and slowly refine your work as you go.
when i presented my work to the class i was really happy with the reactions and the comments. one of the common comment was ‘what happened?’ and ‘who killed who’. i thought, when i was putting the film together, that it would already be obvious and it could be a disadvantage but after their comments i saw it as a chance to push it more into the direction i really wanted to go.
it was quite funny because one of my classmates asked about the fact that there’s only 2 stories going on in my film - the one you see and the one you hear. he said that he started to wonder where the third one was. jordan explained it better than i ever could but was he said was what i was aiming for even though people still suggested more visual (more obvious?) alternatives. jordan said that just by having the 2 narratives on the screen the viewer would question where the third one was, which inadvertently makes the viewer a part of the search for the truth and making the film ‘transcend’ the screen.. my classmates suggested two similar visual narratives but shot differently.
one of the comments i found really helpful, because i was stumped with my opening sequence, was to make it seem like in the beginning, what the girl was saying matched the visuals, but when we repeat the shots they actually didn’t match. if you look at my rough cut, it starts with the ‘rose-tinted’ effect and everything seems happy but when she says piano, he’s playing on the Playstation.. and later on in the film it happens again. so they offered variations to make that more effective, i applied it and i think it starts off vague enough that you don’t even notice until you see the second time she talks about him playing.
another thing: in the rough cut i used a recently released song by an actor/singer even though we were required to make our own soundtrack. but it matched so well that i just decided to try and recreate that mood in a song that i would write myself.
those were the things that shaped the way i worked on putting together my final cut.
This is the cut with the new audio. I definitely think it sounds better than the previous one. This one is still just the basic structure of my film and now I’m going to mess it up by adding multiple frames and of course doing lots of layers on the audio as well.
Obviously this is really, really rough but I already like where it’s going. Definitely a lot more playing around is needed.
Will contact my actors again to film more of the same from different perspectives plus a little bit more to just give the impression that there are different versions of the same story going on at the same time.
I got a suggestion to show the girl being interviewed - in the ‘present’ just to explain some more but I feel like just having her talk is enough. There may be a lot of things in the video that already suggests that she actually committed the act but I still want to leave that sense of.. ‘what if it’s all in her head’ and to actually show her talking to a person of authority will erase all that.
Been busy trying to put a rough cut together and this is just a part of what I have. I got friends to do the voice-acting for me. They were actually really good so I was really excited to the audio with the footage.
I also asked a friend from church to act for me and he was more than happy to do so. When he came to my house I realised that I would actually need another person (either camera man or actor) to get all the footage I needed. Long story short, he went to pick up his girlfriend and they were both such total sports.
So i quickly tried to put it together and I started hitting some walls in my brain. I realized that I was going to be able to put it together as a quite linear story pretty easily and that the challenge would really be in implementing the parameters of the assignment, which was pretty much the whole point I guess.
Some stuff I had to deal with: bad sound. It wasn’t that the people weren’t good, I just didn’t record it properly. This is just a little bit and I’ll have a better, longer version to show in class I just thought I’d put this up here as a test and a very rough version of the film.
003
no updates on the video front but i did find a gem in the book i just finished today.
“there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other”
i love that. i think that will resonate with the whole two truths and a lie idea i have buzzing in my brain.
now to script that and take the scribbles into my head and put it to paper and try to make sense of it.
assignment2 thoughts // 02
i just saw the meanest video today. it had great play on multiple frames, layers and time. it was awesome. it was in the CD that came free with a popular design magazine. i’m gonna try and get my hands on it then get a closer look at it.
assignment2 thoughts // 01
VP3 lecture only went on for an hour today, which was good because I got a bit of time before my next appointment to stop and absorb everything Bevin talked about.
He was showing everyone clips that got him thinking differently about filmmaking and encouraging everyone to find our own clips, our own triggers kind of. It was interesting and i could definitely feel my brain pushing itself outside the box.
So after class I went to momento for a cup of coffee and start churning out ideas for the short film. I figure if I started thinking about ideas now, I’ll give myself the chance to come up with something different - basically get the crap out of the way and hopefully some gems will emerge. It’ll also give me time to refine it and do stuff on aftereffects.
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So far I’ve thought about doing some sort of documentary in church. In wont be about my church exactly, but just to somehow capture the positive culture there. I thought it would be good to do that what with conference coming up. It’ll be a great place to get footage as well.
Another idea is to do a sort of fictional vlogger type of deal, with a bit of kinetic type and other motion graphics but I’m not so sure about that.
Right now I feel that maybe I’m still a bit inside the box and that I’m just thinking of ways to mess up typical ideas. I’m hoping that the more i think about the assignment, the more I write down my ideas when they come, the closer I will get to an idea that will be something.
