Reflective Journal
Week 12
Monday 07-12-2020 to Sunday 13-12-2020
Promo Video - Amersham Old Town
I asked my Mum if we could go early to College and go first to Old Amersham to see if I could get the shots that I wanted before College. Unfortunately, it was still too misty at this time of morning. I confirmed that where I was hoping for my mum to park would still work, and Ellie and I will try after College to get these shots. It is important not to ignore practicalities like parking. On a real film production, all the practicalities are a big part of the planning, especially if you have a large cast. Getting cast and crew from place to place can be a large logistical exercise. I’m fortunate in that I’m not filming with a cast, and the only crew that I will have for filming after lessons today is Ellie. But I still need to plan where my Mum can park and also where she can wait (since it doesn’t make sense for her to drive all the way home then come back again) and also it needs to be somewhere safe to get out of the car. I have found one parking place near the “Amersham twinned with…” sign, and another close to the Old Amersham high street.
After College, filming in Amersham Old Town – It was a bit darker than I would have liked, but as we were needing to film in our own time, we just had to make the best of it, and see what we got.
First Ellie and I went to get shots of the “Amersham twinned with…” sign, since I felt that this was the most important part, so we should make the most of the light that we had. After this, Ellie and I met up with Matthew, a friend, and we got a nice pan of him standing in a quaint archway in Old Amersham. When we had been discussing our plans for this Promo Video as a whole with Nick, he had mentioned that having people in shots helps the audience to imagine themselves there, and this shot with Matthew in fulfils that well. However, by 4pm it was getting dark, which was making filming tricky, so we had to stop, although there were still a few shots that we hadn’t got.
Promo Video - More Old Amersham shots
Again, I headed to College early to try to get the couple of shots that Ellie and I hadn’t got because it had got too dark on Weds. These were the oval award signs, the church, and the nice pub sign for the Swan Pub. I had seen the weather forecast first thing and it was forecasting rain, but due to us running out of time I had decided it was worth a shot to see if the forecast was wrong. A weather forecast is for quite a wide, general area, and on occasion a small area can have different weather to that forecast.
Unfortunately, that was not the case this day. It was misty and rainy as forecast.
Immediately after College I stopped off in Old Amersham on the way home from College with my mum as crew. I was careful to stick to the Risk Assessment, including telling my mum at which place we should cross the road etc. and asking her to keep an eye out for public wanting to pass when I was blocking the pavement with my tripod. It worked well. I got the shots listed above, I also took a bit of footage of the Elephant and Castle Pub when my mum mentioned that there is an Elephant and Castle area of London. I’m not sure if that can be incorporated, but at least I have the footage if it can. Pros – it would give a subtle nod to moving out of London but still some things being familiar. Cons – it could tie the promo to London whereas we didn’t include the statistics about moving out of London at the start so as to not be negative about London and also it makes the promo multi-purpose by keeping London out of it explicitly.
Promo Video first draft
Harley has done a first draft of Promo and sent it to the rest of us for feedback. It’s a very smooth edit, but it isn’t quite it the spirit of counterintuitive. When I showed it to my parents, my Mum was confused and said “I thought you said the words were going to be opposing the images. Did you change that?” and she is right.
Harley and I had a Director/Editor meeting about this on Discord, and that’s when I found out that some-how we had had a miscommunication issue over the counterintuitive aspect. Harley hadn’t fully realised about the counterintuitive aspect, and that every shot had to be opposing the words. I had thought that I had explained this fully, but, when I think back, I can’t actually remember the conversation. I think, upon reflection, that we (the rest of the group) had discussed the creative approach so much in the first week, which was an “In-College” week, so Harley wasn’t there, that by the time we were back to Zoom lessons the following week we had moved on to planning the practicalities of filming and the risk assessment, the kit list, the shot-list etc. So the reason I couldn’t place the specific time when I explained the counterintuitive part is that I never specifically did! I apologised, and we went through and reviewed each shot with the counterintuitive aspect in mind.
I liked the panning down idea at the start, and so did Harley which is why he put it in. We decided to replace the opening shot with the Amersham sign, and I said I will go and re-film the Amersham sign as a pan down like the one in this initial edit. I will also film the quiet country road with just one car in. That sorted the opening.
A few other shots needed to be re-edited to specifically get in the Counterintuitive tone. Once Harley and I had that concept straight, Harley could pretty much see what he needed to change, so going through confirming it was pretty straightforward. For example, the shot of Charlie sitting on his own on a bench needs to be extended to include Jack coming and sitting with him. This changes the entire tone from Charlie siting being lonely to Amersham being a friendly place where you won’t be on your own. We also changed the clip of Jack rushing up to Adam (for the violent crime part) to include Jack starting to walk away and Adam looking (unscared) at Jack then turning back forwards, to show that it is NOT an example of violent crime.
We also decided that the train section needed adjusting. The sound of the train didn’t oppose the word “noisy”, so we needed to alter that. But we wanted to show good transport links since that is important to Londoners. However, we couldn’t just leave out the train sound. This is because, psychologically, an audience is happy to hear a sound that they can’t see an image for, for example they are happy to hear sirens off screen and assume that a police car is off screen somewhere. However, seeing an image on screen without the corresponding sound has a different effect, especially if it is a very obvious sound that they would expect to hear.
Directors and Sound Designers can often use this expectation to “play” with the audience psychologically, to evoke a certain response. Not hearing something on screen that you would expect to hear, for example a dog barking on screen, can jar the audience and maybe imply that the main character, whose point of view the director is focusing on, is maybe super distracted by a piece of bad news, or may be feeling ill and be about to keel over. Obviously both these examples are of bad things either just happened or about to happen. There is nothing to stop a director from using it to show that the protagonist is distracted by being really happy about something, but from what I have seen in films it is usually connected with something bad. Which is exactly opposite to effect that we want to have, we want our images to be pleasant. Although the images and the words are opposing each other, it is in a humorous way that should be making the audience smile, not worry that something bad is going to happen.
We decided to keep the train sound in and to change what might seem like a problem into an advantage. We decided to add in positive words about the train station with an onscreen title with a positive quote about the train station. I feel that the quote that “The staff are really nice and friendly. If you lose or forget anything, you will get it back” is a very appropriate one and works well. Thus, a problem was solved and even turned into a positive.
The end shot that we had filmed didn’t really seem strong enough a positive image to end on. The last image of Amersham needed to make it really look like an idyllic place to live. Changing it to the shot through the quaint Archway in Amersham Old Town will leave a much better image in the audience’s mind.
These changes should really improve our promotional video, making the message clear rather than confusing, and making the whole thing more glossy, as requested.
Promo Video - Amersham twinned sign
On Saturday afternoon I went with my Mum as crew to refilm the Amersham sign footage as Harley and I had agreed, to get it panning down in order to replace the original opening Amersham High street pan down. I also shot the “empty country road with just one car” to replace the high street footage where the line “terrible traffic problems” is said. It was a beautiful sunny day. I was thinking maybe I should have been filming some Old Amersham footage and maybe I should have arranged to meet Ellie here today but when we drove through the high street it was really busy with lots of stalls in places that Ellie I had originally filmed, so it would not have worked due to too many people and it would have been very difficult to keep to the risk assessment, which we have been careful to do at all other times. I believe it was the right decision under the circumstances of Covid-19.
I’m very pleased with the pan down that I got. I had to re-do it several times when multiple cars suddenly appeared where there had been none at the start of the shot. The final shot that Harley put in was 5 seconds, which was long enough that sometimes a car would come round the corner from behind me and get into the shot, which I didn’t want for that shot. I experimented with the speed of the pan down to try to match the pacing of the rest of the video. I think Harley chose the right clip and the pacing works.