Rough Sleepers Individual Project is FINISHED! The year is done.

Finished DVD cover>

Rough Sleepers

Blurb:
Brian Jones is a rough sleeper who has been living on the streets for more than twenty years. Passed by and ignored on a daily basis while trying to scrape out a living by selling Big Issue magazines, Brian has become a living testimony of hope in the midst of the hardest of circumstances. This short documentary offers a glimpse, through the life of Brian Jones, into the reality of what it is to live as a rough sleeper.

The individual project, last project of the year, is now finished! After finishing the post production process, I then exported it as a QuickTime .mov file to upload it to my YouTube channel online and to burn it to a DVD using Apple program iDVD. I added and named chapter markers in Final Cut Pro before exporting in order for it to have a DVD menu for scene selection. I also added a slideshow of production stills as another menu selection and added music to the menu options, designing it all using an iDVD template.

I then designed a DVD cover using the photo-editing program PhotoShop and a DVD cover template. I took the .psd file to a print shop to have it printed off correctly, and although there were some formatting issues that I had to quickly fix last-minute in the shop, they printed off a professional looking DVD cover that I was able to hand in the DVD in along with the production folder.

I hugely enjoyed doing this last project, as even though it was frustrating or time-consuming at times because of technical issues, it was a rewarding and fulfilling piece that I am happy with the end product of. It's hard to believe that the first year of being a Creative Media Practice student is now finished, but I can honestly say I enjoyed it, have grown in the technical skills of producing media and have learned much from the process. Below is my finished individual project, Rough Sleepers:

Rough Sleepers Post-Production...almost there

The editing process for this took quite a long time to do, but it's finally finished! I edited the final version of Rough Sleepers using the Apple editing program Final Cut Pro, seen below.


The editorial process took a long time to do because of some technical problems with the filming (result of it being the first time I've ever gone and filmed a project by myself!), such as poor audio quality, shaky camera bits, the boom mic being seen in the shot, etc. However, I was able to work around most of these problems to an extent, which took a long time but was worth it in the end. For the shots where the microphone or 'fringe' of the mic on top of the Panasonic were seen, I was for the most part able to edit these out by cropping the frame and enlarging it to fit the screen. As a result some of the framing isn't ideal, i.e. not enough head room and so on, but definitely better than distracting from the content by seeing what's not meant to be seen!

With the audio quality, the reason why it wasn't the best was because although I looked all over the microphone to try to find a place to set the audio levels before filming, I couldn't find it and assumed there was no way to set the audio levels on that particular microphone. It was only afterward during editing with the help of Rich that I found that there were tiny buttons underneath the battery pack to set the audio levels, but of course by that time it was too late! The result of this was a distinct 'fuzz' or noise during the recording of talking, especially in the interview with Brian which was the most important one.

The way I dealt with this, again with Rich's help, was by sending the project to another Apple program, Soundtrack Pro, one that deals specifically with audio (seen below).


After opening the audio tracks, I then had to find a piece of audio that contained only the noise I wanted to remove, select and double-click on it to open a new tab to work on that specific area, then click Process -> Noise Reduction -> Reduce Noise. This then opened a window (seen below right) that allowed me to change the noise threshold percentage (the amount of noise permitted to be heard in the background) as well as the percentage of noise reduction. These had to be balanced against each other as the quality of the sound of the voices needed can be affected by too much noise reduction or not enough noise threshold.









This took a long time as I then needed to go through the project and repeat the same process to every track that needed an audio quality boost. While I wasn't able to cut out the noise completely or bring up the audio quality to just quite the needed level, it did help and made a big difference in the final product.

I was able to use some music that belongs to friends of James that he had gotten permission from to use under the Creative Commons Copyright License. This was a huge help and the tracks worked well with how I wanted to put the story across. The first track, twentyten by the band Colours, worked particularly well with the stop-motion opening sequence I used in the beginning, as I was able to edit the pictures to the music in order to pause on a picture of a rough sleeper and make it coincide with a break in the music to give it more dramatic effect. I used these two tracks as background music throughout the entire film in order to give it more depth and sound, bringing up the music during B roll footage using the pen tool to do key framing to bring the music levels gradually up or down, seen right. The duration of the tracks worked well, as I was able to line up the ending of the second track to the ending of the film with no problem.

After hours putting the project together and trying to figure out ways to provide transitions from one scene to the next without using a narrative or text but allowing the story to speak for itself, I finished the editing of the project and am happy with the result. I decided to end the film and start the credits with the end shot of Brian walking through the restaurant entrance with the door closing behind him. However, I broke up the credits by putting in footage of Brian inside the restaurant and his reaction to sitting in one of Bath's finest restaurants, ending with a shot of Brian eating and then looking up and smiling at the camera. I slowed down the speed to 50% to give it more of a finality and dramatic effect. I then put in a slug for about 15 seconds and added another extra bit of Brian talking about how he felt being sat in one of Bath's finest restaurants, as well as how much he was looking forward to eating his pudding as it doesn't happen very often! I decided to put this in after the ending to add an extra bit after the viewer thinks that the film has ended, showing a reaction from him that added to the film but wouldn't have fit, in my opinion, with the other shots during the credits as it would have interrupted the music and disrupted the feel of the ending. Since it was filmed inside with low lighting and voices speaking in the background, I felt that it would be better as an unexpected extra bit at the end. This is often done with films after the end credits as an unpredictable addition and one that I felt added to the final project.

Some things I would have done differently in hindsight would have been:

Sound: I would have tried to do everything possible to get a tutorial on the sound equipment before using it and attempting to figure out how it works on my own, e.g. setting sound recording levels and so on. This would have saved me a lot of time in post production trying to get the sound quality better, which I was never full able to achieve because of the loss in quality of the original sound recording.

Visual: I would have filmed more B roll footage to have for cutaways during the interviews, as I only had a limited amount which meant having to use much of the same footage for different times in the film. I also needed more footage of the restaurant itself, as I had to use a section from the actual filming of the scene for a cutaway while Josh was talking about the restaurant.

I also would have made sure that the microphone or sound equipment was never in the shot, as if I had done that in the beginning it would have saved a of time in post production cropping and enlarging the frames and making sure they all were the same size in order to make sure that the mic would be out of frame.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the editing process and was happy with the final result. While there are some technical issues to the film, I feel that the main character and the story speaks for itself and allows a glimpse, through Brian's life, to see what it is live as a rough sleeper.

Rough Sleepers - the filming process.

The filming process for my individual project, a short documentary about the homeless, has proved to be an...interesting experience. The equipment I used was a Panasonic NV-GS250 video camera, pictured left, which is less ideal than a professional video camera such as the Sony Z1 but turned out to have advantages as it was small enough to not be as intimidating, it's not too bulky to carry around and is easily transportable. I will also be using this to film the last scene at a restaurant, which would not have been possible with a large professional camera and tripod as it would have taken up too much room.

I opted for transportability and so decided to use a Manfrotto 679B monopod, seen below, rather than a more conventional tripod that would have been much more bulky and less portable. Earlier in the term we learned about all the different types of ways of holding a camera, comparing the pros and cons of everything ranging from tripods to a contraption known as a fig-rig, invented by film maker Mike Figgis.
The monopod, while can be less stable than a conventional tripod, is much lighter, more portable and can do a variety of creative angles such as high birds-eye shots or, held upside down, low-angle shots while still having a degree of stability. Because I needed to film vox pops on the High Street as well as cutaways which meant I needed to walk up and down streets, I felt the monopod was the best option for my project.

The final piece of equipment I used was a VideoMic Directional Video Condenser Microphone, a professional grade shotgun microphone that can attach to the hot shoe on the top of the video camera so that you can film and record high-quality sound simultaneously. I also used a wind shield since almost all the filming took place outside.



I've definitely learned a lot about the process of filming through encountering first-hand probably every filming-related problem possible at least once during the process of this project, if not two or three times each! Some of the problems I encountered and had to work around were:

- No DV tape included in the equipment as I thought there would be. The first day intended for filming (of course) happened to be a bank holiday and there were no shops open in the whole of Bath that sold tapes. After frantically running over the whole of Bath trying to find a shop that sold tapes, I had to quickly change the schedule around and use the time we met with Brian (a rough sleeper that the piece is centred around, pictured above) that night to get him Chinese and talk to him about his story and his life, prepping him for the interview and finding out the specific things about him that I could use to make the interiew process quicker. We rescheduled to begin filming that Thursday.

- Although I had thought the battery for the video camera had been charged for an entire day after I had made sure that I had new DV tapes and had plugged in the charger to try to make sure everything would be ready to start filming, apparently the charger didn't work that time for some reason so as soon as I set up the camera on Thursday, the battery died. I had to think quickly yet again and since we had been planning on taking Brian to get some food afterward anyways, we decided to quickly go to Burger King and plug the charger in the wall there while we ate. This time I made absolutely sure it was charging and after eating as quickly as possible to make sure we would have enough time to film outside before it started getting dark, we went and found a bench in the empty Abbey courtyard and were able to film the entire interview while there was still enough battery left - crisis averted!

- Accidentally filming over footage. After interviewing Josh, who volunteers with the homeless, I had been looking over the footage to make sure that everything had been filmed and recorded correctly. Unfortunately, when I then started the next filming day, I had forgotten to fast-forward to the end of the footage on the tape, which meant that the entire interview had been taped over. I then had to reschedule the interview to do it again, when I had the next problem...

- The microphone! The second time I interviewed Josh, poor guy, I made sure that I was at the end of the footage on the tape, that the battery was charged and we figured out a way he could hold the microphone underneath the camera shot so it wouldn't be seen, yet still be recorded with high-quality sound. The only thing I didn't think of to do was to turn the flipping microphone ON. The entire second interview was filmed with no sound being recorded, which reduced Josh to a mime and was completely unusable, so I had to reschedule Josh's interview once again. This time, I finally got everything right and was able to use the filming.

- Filming permission. While I was able to get permission to film out on the streets of Bath from the Bath Film Office with no problem, the last scene that we wanted to film in a nice restaurant as a surprise for Brian proved more difficult. My first idea was to try Jamie's Italian, a Jamie Oliver restaurant which is one of the nicest in Bath. The reason this seemed like the perfect choice was because Jamie Oliver has previously done work with the homeless and so we thought the restaurant would be sympathetic to what we wanted to do. However, after days of being passed from one person to another regarding getting permission to film, they finally told us that apparently it would take weeks to get permission because of associating Jamie Oliver's high-profile name with any film. After debating what to do, I was able to contact a friend who is the manager of The Moon and Sixpence restaurant here in Bath who thought it was a great idea and said he would be willing to help in any way possible, giving us the permission to film in the restaurant. However, he said we could only do it when he was working, which wasn't until Friday night - the project was due on Wednesday. I spoke to Mike about it and was able to get an extension to be able to film this last scene, which is all there is left to do!

Now on to the editing...

Rough Sleepers Pre-Production

The time has come to get all the pre-production done for my individual filming project, Rough Sleepers. I had to do all the same paperwork that needed to be done for our group project, such as getting application forms to get permission from the Bath Film Office to be able to film outside on the High Street of Bath, filling out risk assessment forms, making a schedule, the list goes on. I also made contact with the main subject of my documentary, a rough sleeper named Brian Jones (seen below).


A friend of mine from the church that I go to, Joshua Smith, often goes out to talk to the homeless, taking them food and making relationships with them. He's been doing this regularly for quite a long time now and knows all the Big Issue sellers in Bath, and when I mentioned to him that I was doing a project where I would be following the life of one homeless person to break off stereotypes, he said he knew the perfect person for the job. I went to meet Brian with Josh on Monday the 3rd of May and we took him for a meal at a local Chinese restaurant so I could talk to him and hear his story and prepare him for the interview.

The first impression I had of Brian was that he was the most talkative person I had ever met - the first hour I couldn't get one word in edge-wise. The next thing that struck me though was his genuineness - he works as a self-employed Big Issue magazine seller, lives off his own income from doing this and doesn't sign on for benefits from the government since he believes that he should do all he can to earn his own living and stand on his own feet instead of relying on the charity of others. While he does have the occasional drinking set back, he is self-disciplined and works 8 hours a day on his feet selling magazines and hopes to be able to earn enough soon to rent his own flat which could open the door to him getting a good stable job. He's known in Bath for being the Big Issue seller with things to say - his pitch for selling the magazines could almost be a stand-up comedy show, with poignant truths woven in such as 'we're homeless, but not hopeless'.

One of the lines he says often says how he's not expecting anyone to reserve a table in his name at one of the nicest restaurants in Bath, so what we thought we could do would be to actually go in and reserve a table in his name at Jamie's Italian, a Jamie Oliver restaurant that is known to be one of the nicest restaurants in Bath. We got the number of the woman to contact about getting permission to film in there, and we hope to do this as a surprise to Brian, to show him that he's worth enough to sit at the nicest restaurant in Bath.

To try to pre-visualise how the film is going to be structured, I created a non-conventional storyboard using index cards to show the sequence of shots, seen below:

Exposure - The Finished Result!

Exposure
'A photographer with no faith in her own ability
encounters someone who radically changes her future.'

The Finished DVD Cover

For this project we had to create, write, produce, film, direct, edit and even star in a short film which we decided after much deliberation to call Exposure. We had to hand it in on DVD as well as online, for which a friend of Ant's that's a genius with Adobe Photoshop designed a well professional-looking DVD cover (seen above), complete with a bar code, the DVD symbol and even a 5 star rating given by a flatmate!

We used the Apple iDVD program to create a DVD menu and burn it onto a disc. We had some problems getting iDVD to do what we wanted it to do - create a chapter menu, a slideshow of images, etc, but we were able to get a basic menu done and finished it in time to hand it in before deadline. We're all really happy with the final product, which you can finally see here - the waiting is over!

Here is the finished result:

Exposure from James Harris on Vimeo.

Exposure (the new title of our group project) Post-Production

Exposure

Post-Production

We've changed the title 'So It Goes', since this title went with our first idea of having a storyline that ended in despair and resignation, a completely different theme from the storyline we finally decided on. We wanted a title that was more appropriate to go with the themes of photography that is seen throughout the film and also had relevance to the storyline and theme of hope. After many different ideas, we decided to use the title 'Exposure' since it is a photography term used mainly in the darkroom, which part of our film takes place in, and is also a play on words, highlighting the theme of her being exposed for who she really is.

After filming all the footage over a 3-day period, Ant took the footage to log and capture it and create a rough edit for us to work with. James, Ant and I decided to meet up to do the post-production and editing together. We decided to do this instead of each taking separate bits and editing them in our own way because we thought we all would have different styles of editing and it would have been hard to put them together to make a uniform piece. We still all wanted to contribute to the editing process, so we met up at Ant's flat as he has an iMac desktop with Final Cut Pro, which is the program we chose to do the editing on.


We had to make some changes, such as cutting out footage of a scene
which took place in and near a tunnel in Bristol (seen right) since, although the aesthetic quality of the footage and the style of it made it some of the best footage we had, the location didn't make sense as we had no reason in the story for her to suddenly be in a tunnel in the middle of nowhere (it was a 2 mile walk from James' house in the middle of a forest) when she had previously been walking in the city of Bath. Because of this, in the interest of keeping the story realistic, unfortunately we had to cut the scene altogether.

The tunnel in Bristol

After finishing the editing, we then used Soundtrack Pro to create sound effects and to add the music, one of the most important aspects of the film. We learned from doing a sound effect task before about using diagetic and non-diagetic sounds. We used diagetic sounds ('actual' sounds, ones that match with what is seen on screen) such as a city background from Soundtrack since when we filmed the exterior shots of walking down the streets of Bath, there were aspects from the real sound that distracted from the fim, such as cars being too loud, honking and people talking in the background. We decided to do this so that we could have more control over what was heard and when. We also added a non-diagetic (or non-realistic sounds to create dramatic effect) sound that we used throughout the film every time the protoganist had a flashback to make it more dramatic, as well as an underwater sound we found on on soundtrack to create the effect of it being muffled and distorted during the flashback sequences.

Then it was time to add the music. We decided to use songs from the albums The Slip and Ghosts I - IV by the band Nine Inch Nails, both of which are released under Creative Commons copyright license which makes it free to use as long as we credit the band in the final piece. These are instrumental tracks with a subdued and ethereal quality (Lead singer Trent Reznor calls the album 'a soundtrack for daydreams'), which is the exact type of music we were looking for that we thought would fit best with the dream-like aesthetic elements of film.


After we had done all this and had done some final tweaks, we were finished with post-production! I think we did well on the timing and schedule of production, finishing it well ahead of the deadline and having enough time to really focus on editing it to the best of our ability. We are all happy with the final result and can say that overall this was a great experience.

Exposure final result coming soon!