Tuesday
7am start for the rowers:) I got up and got to the river
early in order to make sure I caught them, turns out I was a little over eager
as they didn’t appear for a good 15 minutes. When they did appear I managed to
get 45 minutes of footage although it was mostly from the same spot across from
Menlo castle, I didn’t want to risk moving and then not catching them again. I
will endeavor to get out to film them regularly and to do it from a different
spot each time. I am under the impression that the editing for this film will
be easier than for the sports documentary as it is one club, the river flows in
one direction. How I edit the footage together will depend upon the interview,
I will attempt to create a narrative arc depending on the quality of the
interview and the corresponding footage. The footage could follow the arc of a
training session, in the sense that the order of the footage would be from pre
training (getting the boats out) to upriver to downriver to end training
(putting the boats away). A little simple maybe but once the narrative arc is
in place I could experiment with the timing of events, scenes and shots. I am
also thinking to use no soundtrack for this documentary; to just record some
wild tracks and put them in place around the natural sound. That would mean I use
a prerecorded song for the sports film, make a recording for the boat film and
then just use natural sounds for the rowing film. Each one will be a different
learning experience. After filming the rowing club I collected the laptop and
spent the day editing in the sports office. This once again proved fruitful as
I managed to set up some more meetings to film and also collected footage from
off campus clubs (eg snowsports)
Friday 15th March
Today I had arranged to meet with the golf club at the
Galway Golf Club, we were to meet as they were passing the clubhouse during a
round. When I rang the vice captain he informed me they were not out but he
could swing by to do a bit of filming. When he arrived I quickly realized he
(Damien) had the run of the place. We tried to take a shot or two down near the
water but there was too much glare from the sea and the way the tee was
pointing meant that I would have to film into the sun. We then tried from the
top of the golf course and this worked because there was not so much glare but
there was still a nice backdrop to frame. This is where Damiens knowledge of
the club and its workings came in handy, he was able to borrow a golf buggy for
free to take us to the top of the hill. Bumpy ride but still better than walking.
Damien proved to be very willing to participate in the filming process, taking
as many shots as was required and allowing me time to ensure that I had the
camera focus properly tuned. Having taken the footage home and viewed it since
it still appears that there is some blurring but this could be to do with the
iso. The footage collected will add to the films visual diversity as the
landscape is completely different from anything else in the film. Having said
this it is still the case that I need to check the settings on the camera and
see what they do in relation to the footage that I have captured thus far.
Friday 15th March
I tried to film the rowing club for a while in order to
check the focus, I have been having trouble with getting the camera to focus.
It looks focused on the screen but when I get it off the camera onto the
computer its hazy at best. I took some footage and brought it back to the
laptop only to find that it was once again blurry. I will take Aimee’s advice
and henceforth use the automatic focus before switching to manual focus, just
to be sure.
Saturday 16th March
Today was the rowing event named the Head of the River. It
is a large rowing event that rowers from all over the country come to compete
in. I started filming on the riverside and just as I was leaving I ran into the
club captain who said he could get me a ride upriver in a launch for the second
race, of course I accepted. On the way up I wanted to film everything but I had
to balance it with the need to conserve the battery life, I had only two
batteries with me. Having so many rowers on the river gave me lots to film and
moving alongside them allowed me to illustrate the flow of the boats. Once
parked on a rock island I was let off and began filming immediately, the framing
was nice but I was worried that the shots would all look the same as I could
not move from the rock island I was filming from. Once the last boat of this race
(there was three races) had passed we followed them downstream, in fact all the
launch boats (ten or more) followed them downstream. I was actually filming it
on my mobile phone, it has good footage and I had no battery worries but it films
everything in widescreen. For the last part of the race (I had not intended to
stay this long) I set up on the Quincentennial Bridge to get a different angle
of the rowers. I have footage from the start, near the end and the end of the
race. I captured it in different order but I am intending to edit as if I captured
them in sequence of how they occur in real time. Having edited to footage into
a short film that needs an interview to describe what is occurring and perhaps some music although I am beginning to like the pared down version. When looking
in the camera viewfinder everything looked in focus and today everything just
about was. I had followed the advice of using the automatic focus and then
switching to the manual focus and this seemed to work.
Early edit;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sIocoCIdRk&feature=youtu.be
No comments:
Post a Comment