Group Project: Trevor Daley Musicworks

For our group project I was assigned into a group with Aaron, Johanna and Racheal. We were tasked with making a short documentary piece about a local business (that wasn't a branch of a national organisation). After a brief walk around town brainstorming, we came up with a short list of companies we'd like to do and began approaching them to arrange times to interview. We agreed to let Johanna and Aaron operate the camera for this project.

After some companies (such as the Tuatara Cafe) declined the project, we approached the Trevor Daley music shop who were more than happy to work with us. I took charge of directing this project, and confirmed the availability of Trevor Daley and Hayden Budd. I came up with the list of questions for the interview, arranged the time of the interview, and produced the set-up for the interview set up.

We later dedicated an afternoon to the production of more B-Roll footage and I contributed an extensive amount of potential shots related to a variety of sub-topics within music, and 3 hours later, we were done with getting our footage.

Note to self

625 pixels in a frame

Using 4:3 aspect ratio:
PAL Standard Def = 768 x 576 Pixels
720 x 576 =

25 frames per second
50 fields

Using 16:9 aspect ratio:
Full HD = 1920 x 1080
1280 x 720

"1080p25 -> Progressive scan
Vertical dimension = 1080
Frame rate = 25fps

"1080i50"
"576i15"
"576p50"

Frame Size = 4k >
Able to scale down in aspect ratio, rather than having to magnify

RGB Curves

Three-Way Colour Corrector

Note to self: When colour correcting, regularly take breaks and come back with 'fresh' eyes.

Video Editing 28/4

Tuesday April 28th:
Some members of the class presented our Microsoft Powerpoint presentations that day. This was our first assessment of the class.

My topic was 24p vs 23.98fps, which was relatively straight forward and people followed what I was saying. I offered chocolate as a reward to anyone who answered the questions as an incentive to ensure that they kept paying attention. Sure enough, they answered my questions correctly and remembered the educational facts I told them.

Most of the class gave their presentations that day, but we had to wrap the class up near 2:50 so the rest of the presentations were due to present on the following Friday (May 1st).

Friday May 1st:
Powerpoint presentations continued, amendments and additional notes to some of the presentations that happened on the tuesday. Marks would be next week.

Tuesday May 5th:
Today we started working in Premiere Pro to create a Pre-Roll. The rationale was to help us deal with demands from broadcasters.

The main aspects that were necessary to include were:

• Bars + Tone -> Calibration
• Black Screen
• Slate -> ID (Identifying format specs, who/what/when etc, I.E. - clapper board)
• Leader -> Countdown (Leading into the footage)

We also briefly talked about colour correction , colour grading, and broadcast safety.

Video Editing 24/4

Friday April 24th:

This class was again allocated to working on our cuts of Admit One. We were expected to finish editing our final cuts of the film that day.

Having already finished the short film, it was a fairly uneventful class for me. What made it productive for me though, was that we began watching each other's final cuts and critiquing them. Some of them were cut down unbelievably short, some of them replaced the soundtrack songs for comical value etc etc. At the end of the class we were given some advice briefly on the presentations, which was nice, considering it was worth at least 20% of the paper.

Video-Editing 21/4

Tuesday April 21st:
The majority of this class was allocating to working on our Admit One cuts.

I had already finished my final cut of the short film at this point, so I spent most of the class (against the advice of Patrick) researching about my PowerPoint presentation topic and occasionally experimenting with the effects Premiere Pro.

Patrick also went around teaching people individually how to automate the audio levels in Premiere Pro. Having already automated, I just helped out people with it (Iris, Josh, Adam, Aaron) with it. My automation in Admit One adjusted the audio levels to have the soundtrack music get slightly louder when the couple were shown on-screen, and reducing the volume levels of the soundtrack when David put the Minties wrappers into his ears to block out the sound of the couple having sex.

Video Craft: Lighting Exercise

Yesterday we done an exercise in lighting, for more preparation

For differing types of lights, the size of the light is a major factor for the differences.

We were shown the types of lights available to us in the SIT equipment kits:

There were:

• Lamp

These lamps have light diffusers attached that could be used for providing directionality to the light) Runs on approximately 100 watts

• Red-heads:

Relatively small light. Runs on approximately 650 – 800 watts

Give off a considerable amount of heat

Therefore, you don't want them too close to the lighting

Or, you might use them on the environment rather than on the person themselves

• Blonde lights (Bigger than red-heads, presumably a 'medium' size)

Main types of light:

1. Key Light
2. Fill Light
3. Backlight

Reflectors can be used to provide backlight or fill light. We were shown effective ways to angle the reflectors off the key light to provide the fill light (as we were doing in the exercise), and after setting up lights at Upstage with gels to make the light softer and the shadows less intense.

Preparations for Mini-Documentary Interview

This morning we learned a few key-points to take into consideration when preparing our documentary.

A lot of emphasis was put onto what kind of key points we want covered during the interview.
This was summarised into 4 main categories:

1. People
2. Places
3. Plot
4. Purpose

This strongly resembles the emphasis placed onto the Who, Where, What, When, Why and How basis for common questioning in journalism. We watched two videos in this class to get us thinking about how we can go about preparing our assignment.

Three main considerations when deciding on a setting for the interview were:

Is the setting relevant to the topic being discussed?

Is the setting comfortable for the interview subject to be in?

Is the setting 'Production-Friendly'?

Production friendly in this case could refer to places with a good natural lighting source, minimal outside sound that could get into the recordings and no administrative objections to the interview taking place there. The absence of any of these values would make the setting that much less ideal to use for the main interview.

An equipment list was mentioned in one of the video lists, to which I added a few extras that I think would be ideal to have during the production process.

The list is as follows:

• Camera
• Tripod
• SD Cards
• Memory Cards
• Laptop (to transfer memory to so that you can format the cards if they get full during the day)
• Microphone
• XLR Cable
• Headphones
• Lights

A summarised checklist approach was made during this class for some of the key bullet-points: 

1. Research / gather info on project
2. Have a task sheet / shot list and questions ready
3. Keep in mind crew members are potential interview subjects
4. Prepare plenty of Video Cutaways (Make use the environment)
5. Use a tripod as much as you can