My Multi-Track Continuity Story

My short film was called "Hey! That's My Hat!"  It is made in the style of old silent move era films.  It involves one character chasing after another character in order to retrieve his hat.  The idea for the film was pretty easy to get to.  We decided that we would work on a film in which there was a chase, and a point in which the two characters meet with one another.  The production of the film went extremely smoothly due to our pre-production planning.  We knew exactly what we wanted to do and we decided how we were going to do it.  

We had mainly only successes with our shooting.  It seemed like we knew exactly what we wanted to do and there were only one or two scenes we had to re-take.  Since our film was modeled after a silent movie, we did not record any dialogue, and our audio was mostly music, white noise, and one sound effect.  It took some work trying to line everything up perfectly.  As for editing, it was mostly a matter of cutting out any excessive material and lining up the video with the audio.  Our shots were already taken in order so there was not too much of an issue with continuity.  

I really enjoyed editing the piece.  It was fun picking the proper sound track.  We found some great old-time music that went with our theme perfectly.  We found some recordings of a record spinning that filled the blank spots with audio that also fit the film well.  There was a point when we showed the character who took the hat, and we wanted to play a dun-dun-dunnnnnn sound effect.  It took some work to time the sound effect with the video properly, but it ended up working out. 

I think the things that we learned in class that helped me the most were lessons in camera-work and also lessons in artistic expression.  I think that we brought the story along pretty well with the use of our camera angles and different shots.  we kept it by the book.  We used long shots, medium long shots, medium close ups.  We also used our zoom and panning shots.  In addition to that, all that we learned about artistic expression, and using what we want to tell our story best helped me feel pretty free in the production of the film.  I didn't feel confined, and I feel like Buck and I got to make exactly what it was that we planned on making. 

Final Project

Hey! That's My Hat!

MOMI Trip

My favorite part about our trip to The Museum Of The Modern Image was the demonstration where our guide played the scene from "Titanic" for the class.  The idea behind the demonstration was to take apart the audio of the scene, piece by piece, so that we could see the importance of dialogue, sound effects, and music.  The whole demonstration left a pretty big impression on me and it taught me a lot about experimenting with different methods of artistic expression.

Without the sound being played during the scene, it was hard to focus on the action in the film.  The movement of the characters on the set alone was not enough to capture our attention.  Then, with just the dialogue being played, it just seemed silly.  The sounds of the characters panting, screaming, and yelling, seemed comical when there were no sound effects or music to back it up.  Next, the scene was just played with sound effects.

 I found sound effects to be the most interesting part because, without dialogue or music, it was easy to make out what the sounds used for the sound effects actually were.  The cables snapping on the smokestack were gun shots.  The smokestack collapsing was a tin can being crumpled. The sound of Rose falling on the deck of the ship was actually a sack of potatoes falling off a chair.  This idea of using different objects to create different sounds that leave a certain impression on an audience opened up a new world to me.  I feel that using sound to represent something as opposed to recreating it is a beautiful method for artistic expression.