University project - Bromoil

Assessment

Pre-production – Planing and research

It was initially my Co-Producer, Angella Wang, that introduced me to this art and to Derek Ashman (the photographer). Angella and me sat down and started brainstorming on what kind of documentary we wanted and topics we wanted to cover. Because of the short running time (3 to 5 minutes) the finished product needed to have, we were very conscious on the fact that we needed to cover the whole process on a basic level. I sat down with Derek and asked him about his thoughts and how long it normally took him to make a print. When he said he normally uses a month on a set of print, my heart jumped I have to admit, but after he said the whole process would take less I calmed more down. He suggested that we do a dry run up to the bleach point. Meaning that he would prepare the image for inking. To get to this stage, the image have to go through several chemical baths and dry between each, but the inking process itself (which is what you see) only takes about half an hour.

Production – Shoot itself

With the research we had done in advance in mind, we went to Derek’s house and his workshop in the attic. The place itself had sufficient lighting which was a relief to me. Prior to the shoot I had sat down with Derek and explained how I wished to do this. I explained I wanted almost the camera to do the interview, meaning that my voice would not be present and that when I did ask questions, that he could answer in such a manner that included the question. After trying out different angles and framing, I found a total shot I was happy with. He had rehearsed a “speech” which wasn’t ideal, but after the first take, I asked him if he could try to explain it more in his words. And boy does this man talk. I remember standing there dreading the editing process because of his talkative nature. After each stage I would move in and do close ups of the tools he had used. During the whole shoot I made sure I took notes of what he was doing and close ups shots I got get afterwards. I left the audio running regardless of when I stopped the camera.

Post production – Editing

Having over 30 minutes of footage and the same for audio, I was a bit worried about how to compress this down to 5 minutes including credits. To my relief, Truls Telle (classmate), showed me a syncing program to go with Avid Media Composer called PluralEyes. Basically what it does is to sync the in-camera sound with external recorded sound. This couldn’t have been more god given for this project! I put all the clips and external recorded audio into the timeline in Media Composer and exported the timeline as a .aaf file. Then imported that in PluralEyes and volà. It synced up my audio in a matter of seconds. This saved me a lot of time. Then the process of cutting it down started. Sturgeon’s law is an adage commonly cited as “ninety present of everything is crud” or “ninety present of everything is crap”. I’ve learned that it’s better to have too much than too little when it comes to footage.

Because he took a fair while to come to the point on the essence of the process, I chose to re-record a few seconds of sound later. What originally was over 1 minute of talk explaining the process, I got down to a few seconds. With the software Audacity I mixed the re-record sound with the room sound from the first shoot. My goal was to mix to the best of my abilities to create the impression that the audio was the same.

Overall

Does the finished product reflect the original thoughts I had for the film? Yeah more or less. I’m happy with the close ups I got. I wish that the audio I re-recorded could have resembled the original audio more, but I did my best. In a perfect world I would have liked to have gone back to his workshop and recorded the audio, to get the exact same sound, but mine and his schedule clashed.

Also if I were to do this film again I would have got more cut aways and also made sure I kept the tripod still for the total/master shot. So if I had a second chance I wound have brought a second tripod, leaving the first tripod in the same position the whole time.