Re-Edit

Well I got some feedback from the class and it seems like they got the gist from the most part. I decided upon seeing it on a big screen to remove the tacky rhetorical questions overlaid on the video. It seems as if the video should explain what I’m talking about instead of tacky text. Ugh.

I hate being a perfectionist.

Also, grr to lack of communication and procrastinating because I didn’t realize the formatting of exporting the video would take so long! Hopefully it works out okay ^^;

Mandabala

This doc felt like an old James Bond flick. There were so many different players and victims involved that at times it was hard to keep up. I feel like I would have to watch it again and perhaps learn more bout the socio-economics and history of Brazil in order to appreciate it more.

However, it did a great job of conveying how dangerous Brazil was and how beautiful it was at the same time.

The director was obviously trying to make it more narrative movie or James Bond-esque because one of his interviewees reacted to one of the questions as such. He succeeded with the film stock, sweeping shots of Brazil and interesting conflicts of government officials and the people.

Editing my new Doc

I’m finally editing my new doc and I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s hard parting with some of these shots. I want to make it longer than 10 min but I don’t want it to be an hour long thing. That’s obviously not going to work. I wish I had more people’s advice on how to initially expose my family to the audience. I want everyone to take something different from it and hopefully my vague way of editing it will work.

I wonder if name titles are important?

Spellbound

I loved this documentary! It brought me back to middle school all over again and thought of my own experiences trying to get into the spelling bee and my friends who did win the spelling bee, etc. The way the film was edited together made it so you wouldn’t be able to tell who the winner of the spelling bee was.

In fact, most of the kids had such character I wasn’t sure who I wanted to win, or who would win. I found myself being anxious with the parents and spelling along with the children feeling the same tensions that they did. When I finally thought I knew who would be the winner of the spelling bee, I was wrong, haha. I want to know their process of making this film. For as many children that went to the spelling bee I wondered how they decided which children they were going to film. For some I understood because they had been to the spelling bee multiple times.

I also wondered how long it took for them to gather all the footage they needed and organize it, considering I’m in the organizing process of my doc.

Footage of Family

I decided to put Trey’s doc aside, considering the amount of post processing I’d have to do with his pictures as well as the Skype footage. It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve wanted to do a documentary about my family for the longest time. I’m finally getting around to doing that.

Youtube/Skype Footage

I didn’t really get the specific questions or answers I needed after all—and I forgot to get a basic introduction of him. So I asked him to finally chat with me over Skype. I found a video chat recorder which recorded the audio and video from Skype and got a lot of good footage that way!

Edit: It turns out the footage was a weird format and wasn’t transferring correctly onto FPC. Also the main piece of footage has a weird watermark on it when I was using the demo. The other footage seems okay though. *sigh* This is turning out to be a bigger hassle than I wanted it to be.

Shots at his house

It’s taken a while, but I finally managed to get some time with Trey at his house and I’ll have some of Alex’s help. We finally got equipment (Huge Hassle, btw.) and Alex has a car so he was able to bring me to Trey’s House. I got a lot of good footage from inside the house, even though it was a little badly lit (we managed to find a light since he’s a photographer and had some standing lights.)

I also got some footage of him at work on his computer; which made for good B-roll. I have to figure out how to make his pictures work on After Effects!!