Cookery show - finished! a bit late, I know.

Student Survival Guide to Food - Creating our Succulent Student Stir-Fry

While I realise this is a bit belatedly put up, I thought I'd share our finished group task to create a cookery show that showed how to cook healthy, cheap and student-friendly food. My last post about it was about the filming, which took a disproportionately long time (4 hours for 3 minutes!) and therefore made the editing and post-production process longer as well.

Post-Production:

After filming, we all met up to do the editing process and, after many problems logging and capturing, were finally able to edit it down all the footage to the three-minute limit. After this we had to find up-beat music that we had free access to, which we were able to find from a friend of James Harris named ... We then needed to add a voice over, which Chloe and I did together using a Snowball USB Microphone from Blue Microphones, seen below.







Looking back at it, I think we could have done better on several things:

• not rush through the voice over too much - this was a result of realising after editing that we didn't have enough time to explain how to cook it as we would have liked, so we had to cut out all the non-essentials and speak as quickly as possible to be able to have it go with the visuals. The effect of this is that we didn't have time to make any comments or have fun with it, so it ended up sounding rushed and, to be honest, a bit boring and not as exciting as we would have liked it to be.
• Left more time for the post-production - because of conflicting schedules and having to find a time when we could all be there to edit as well as the problems we had with logging and capturing, we were pushing the deadline and rushing to get it done in time.
  

Overall, we did enjoy doing it and it was good experience in how to create a practical film aimed at a set target audience and with a specific purpose. We learned from it and definitely enjoyed eating the stir fry after we made it! Here is the finished result:

Cookery Show Finished from Esther Ridings on Vimeo.

Rough Sleepers Stop-Motion Editing: the process

For my personal project, I'm creating a stop-motion sequence for the opening, starting from the top of the High Street in Bath and walking down, focusing on the homeless in the city. I hope to create an impression of the viewer feeling as if they are walking down a busy city street, yet spending time to look at the homeless instead of walking by.

The idea is there, but making it a reality is proving challenging. I started out by setting my camera (a Canon EOS 400D/Digital Rebel XTi) on continuous and walking down the high street continuously taking pictures at a rate of about 2-3 photos per second. I tried to stabilise the camera and keep it at around the same height and angle the whole way by keeping it taut around my neck and taking pictures as I walked. After making a spectacle of myself in this way with people staring at me the whole time, I then imported all the 1,540 photos into Final Cut Pro.

At first I tried just banging them all in, setting the
duration (see photo, right) all to a fixed time (.04 seconds) and trying to make it work. My first attempt can be seen below, with no transitions:

esther stop motion intro1 from carlina flood on Vimeo.

I wasn't happy with the result as it seemed too jerky and all over the place to seem natural and served to distract rather than had the effect I was trying to get. So I tried, on Mike's suggestion, importing all the photos again but this time using the Overwrite -> with transition tool, which inserted a cross-dissolve in between each frame. This made it have a softer feel, not as jerky and smoother and I was happier with the overall effect. I also edited many of the photos, cutting out big chunks that weren't needed and weren't the strongest part of it.



I then started to add text, trying to find a way to superimpose statistics without distracting from the visual narrative and added music, the song twentyten by the band Colours which is licensed under Creative Commons, syncing it to the edit. Here is a sample of what I've done so far:

Opening Sequence with Music from Esther Ridings on Vimeo.

Personal Project Progress - Rough Sleepers starts taking shape. Stop motion, statistics, etc.

Rough Sleepers
(working title)

a mini documentary - advocacy of the homeless

Sleeping rough: (definition) 'People sleeping, or bedded down, in the open air (such as on the streets, or in doorways, parks or bus shelters); people in buildings or other places not
designed for habitation.'

For this personal project, I wanted to begin the piece with a stop-motion sequence of going through the main high street of Bath, focusing if possible on the homeless and poor of the city. I am hoping the final product will look a little like the first part of this (minus the strange guy and siren music):

The reason for this is to create the perception of walking through a city on one of its busiest streets, an experience many have on a daily basis - yet no matter how many times we walk down the same street, how often do we pay any attention to those around us that need the most help? The purpose of this would be to challenge the viewers (including myself) to start looking outward, to open their eyes and really begin to see people for who they are and to start taking notice of those that we tend to ignore or pass by every day.

To go along with this, over the stop motion sequence of going down the High Street I would like to superimpose some little-known statistics of people that are homeless. Some examples of the statistics I would want to show would be:

• Over 1 billion (1 in 6) people in the world are forced to live in inadequate housing.

• Approximately 100 million people have no housing whatsoever and are forced to brave the elements and live sleeping on the streets with no shelter or food on a day-to-day basis.

• The UK has one of the highest levels of homelessness in Europe with more than 4 people per 1,000 estimated to be homeless. Source: Homeless Pages, 2004

• In the UK alone there are 10,459 homeless people that sleep rough every night and 98,750 households in temporary accommodation. Source: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2005

• 63% of homeless women in the UK have experienced domestic violence and 40% have been sexually abused. Source: Homeless Link, 2007

• The average life expectancy of a homeless person in the UK is 42 years, compared to the national average of 74 for men and 79 for women. This is lower than the life expectancy of Ethiopia or of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Source: Crisis (1996) Still Dying for a Home

• People who sleep rough are 35 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Source: Crisis (1996) Still Dying for a Home

Other Sources:
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28086
http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statistics

Using these I am hoping to create a powerful and challenging introduction to an issue that is seldom looked at. I want to juxtapose these statistics with, after the title, going into vox pops of how young, wealthy urbanites view the homeless and some of the stereotypes that they might project. I think the contrast between opinion and reality will be another powerful tool to realising how much this issue needs to be looked at in a different way, to see rough sleepers as real people with real lives and real stories.

I've also started making some contacts of people I would like to use in the piece: one is a group of young adults from Bath City Church, the church that I am a part of, who have regularly been going out to buy food, sit and talk and build relationships with rough sleepers. They do this to make a tangible difference in the lives of those who often are the most rejected, scorned and ignored people in urban society, and I think are an example of the difference we can make in people's lives just by showing kindness. I have also made contact and heard some of the stories of several rough sleepers around Bath that have said they would be willing to be interviewed and tell their stories. From these I am hoping to find one that I can go into more depth and tell a story, the story of an unheard, unseen rough sleeper.

'So It Goes' pre-production and filming

We finished the filming!!!

Over the Easter holiday we spent the first week coordinating schedules, emailing to get permission from the Bath Film Office to film, preparing the props and tweaking the plot and storyline - that we finally decided on after changing it completely about 5 times - until we had something we knew we could work with. We then did all the filming in Bath and Bristol in three 8-10 hour days, filming outside through rain, mud and even freak hail storms (twice!) until we were finally able to say the three words that every film crew cannot wait to say: it's a wrap.

Pre-Production

We had to a do a lot of paperwork before we could actually start filming: permission forms, release forms, application forms, risk assessments, storyboards, a schedule, a shot list, the list goes on. We had to write risk assessments for every location, thinking of every possible risk and how we could prevent it - here is an example of one we filled out for filming in a stair well alley in Bath.

We also had to push back the schedule for filming to make more time for creating props needed, etc. One of the main props we needed was a photobook of the photographer Maynard's photos, which we created by taking photos of the locations we would be filming in black and white, then putting it all into a book using at the last resort a shoelace to tie it all together, courtesy of Ant and Seonaid Aitken. Here are the photos we used, all taken by Ant and James at locations around Bath and Bristol.














































We also changed some of the locations of the filming: instead of filming at James' house for the first scene after the title sequence, we were able to use a flat belonging to some friends of mine, Tim and Rachel Chapman, that was located in the center of Bath right next to one of our locations that had a spectacular view of the city which worked perfectly for it.

The Filming

So at long last we were able to begin the filming, starting Day One in Tim and Rachel Chapman's flat and working our way down the high street of Bath filming in the different locations in chronological order. While we had some setbacks mainly due to the weather and having to run to get a photo done for the cover of the photobook at the last minute, the filming overall went well. James was the cameraman, using his own Sony DCR-VX2000 and Ant and I did the acting and making sure it all run smoothly. On the first day we filmed all the Bath locations except for some shots of Maynard in the flashback sequences, which we filmed the third day.

The second day of filming we all went to Bristol, did a two-mile hike to get to a tunnel to do some more filming that unfortunately we were unable to use most of due to it not working in the story. We were able to use the part of Maynard in the flashback sequence of the tunnel, which we used in the beginning in the dream she is having of the photographer. We then went back to James' house and filmed the end of the film, in his garage and his father's darkroom.

The third day we did the rest of the shots needed, which were some of the dream scene when Maynard is taking photographs around the city of Bath. After we finished all the shots needed we then were finally able to call it a wrap, finished with all the filming!

Overall the filming and pre-production went really well, it took a long time to get permission and we had to change the schedule to push it back a bit, but in general things went smoothly. We did well sticking to the time line needed, finishing all the filming with plenty of time for post-production. The only things I can think of that we could have done differently would have been to be more prepared with getting the props ready, perhaps meeting more beforehand to have more of a handle on who was doing what and applying to the Film Office for permission much more in advance then we did. We also probably should have thought through the schematics of the story more, for example we should have made the decision to go to the tunnel only after we figured out a way we could have it fit in the story instead of going without thinking it through first.

Overall though it was a productive, fun and challenging task that we thoroughly enjoyed and got loads of experience in filming, constructing a storyline and plot, acting, producing, directing and doing all the pre-production out of! I personally enjoyed doing the acting as that's something that I love to do and while I've done professional acting jobs before, I hadn't done any acting in a while and I loved getting back into it. I also really enjoyed the writing of the plot and storyline, developing the character and thinking of different ways we could carry out what we wanted to achieve through it, as well as making sure there were no continuity errors on the day of filming and that it all would work to make sense to the viewer.

Here are some production photos: