Evaluation.

During the course of this experimental module, my project took on many different forms, i feel for the first part of the module i didn't engage thoroughly enough in the planning stage, and it was only towards the end that i managed to find my footing in my strengths, which is cinematography, directing and post production editing. For the pairs project everybody in my class decided to work alone, i was initially quite put off by this concept, i felt that i worked better in a group environment, i was reluctant to start properly planning my film, something i think i was influenced by my own film making insecurities, i have always made work in groups that i was fairly proud of, so the idea of making something on my own that would only reflect my own input was quite daunting. For the final project the outcome had its own strengths and parts of which i am extremely proud of, one strength in particular was the camera work, although i initially had some technical problems with being unable to get the lens's i would need from the university's camera stores. I had a style of filming that i was going for which i feel is evident in the final product. 

Below is an image from 'The Selfish Giant' directed by Clio Barnard.  The film has a distinctly northern style, the cooled down image and the bleak background, juxtaposed by the image of a child is very striking.

I didn't at first decide to use a child, but as my project started to shape up, the kind of style i started to develop was influenced by various northern films, i wanted to take advantage of the natural scenery and the juxtaposition between nature and working class people, that getting an actor from university that fit the style just seemed too difficult. This is where i got the idea to do an experimental documentary, i didn't feel like i wanted to force performances out of people without having previous experience with actors. Harry Smalls who stars in my film isn't strictly a child, he is 15 years old, and he works on a steel yard in North Yorkshire. He isn't an actor so all of his performances are natural, apart from things that i told him to do i.e wash his face.

Below is a screen shot of some of the footage from my film.

'The Selfish Giant' is not strictly an experimental film, but i think taking the style from another genre of film, which is drama, and introducing it in an experimental way is not something i have seen before. I wanted to make my film an experimentation of genre rather than an an experimental image, i feel that my strengths lie in the actual shooting of a film, and i do have the capacity to understand dense theory, but overall i like the style and feel of watching real characters on screen over a deconstruction of the image. I watched Doug Aitkens 'Electric Earth' and i really liked the idea of incorporating movement into my piece, this linked in also with the scene from 400 blows with Jean- Pierre Leaud. 

The 1 minute.



Sequence 1 from Jay Burgoyne on Vimeo.

This is a link to my final 1 minute piece, i struggled with this piece, this did not turn out how i had pictured it, i think that it required much more forward planning and a stronger idea, i am quite disappointed with this piece, i had a good initial idea that involved using balloons filled with paint strapped onto a board with a sheet on, and i used sparklers to pop the balloons. I did this because i wanted to get an interesting diversity of sound. I hadn't screen tested this and after a last minute decision of thinking the balloons looked a little bit naff i decided to film lower down the sheet so that you couldn't see them. This was a large mistake because after my tutorial with Martine, it wasn't evident what i had done. if i could do it again i would have waited until it wasn't windy and i would have left the balloons in shot and paid more attention to composition. Another failing of the project is that i didn't really have anything that inspired the piece. I struggled with the brief, all the ideas infringed on the instructions we were given. I didn't really enjoy this project as much as the final piece, i feel i could have engaged with it more at an earlier stage and my work suffered because i did not, it also does not inform the second piece in any way.

The overall final project image changed drastically from my original idea which was to explore how people used television to validate their own identity, but when my final idea came about making an experimental documentary, i feel like the finished project is similar to what i had in mind.  Some of the things that i think worked were, the style and tone of the film, and the image overall i feel worked as a story in its own right, i cut the shots of Harry running into different parts of the film to try give the illusion of a different time and place, to give the audience something to wonder about. Things that i feel i could have done better are the sound. For the sound initially i wanted to create something similar to 'fruit factory', i left a microphone in one of the buildings where there were men working, i didn't tell them until after i had done this and i got permission from them to use it in the film. I listened through it and i had caught some interesting dialogue about their family lives and interests an general work chatting and joking. Unfortunately the file corrupted when i tried to listen to it again, so i lost the audio. This took my final piece in a new direction as i decided that the best thing to do would be to create a music piece in pro-tools. This is something i had some experience with in first year, but i managed to get a fellow student Chris Wood, who had taken the sound module to help me with this, this largely consisted of finding preset sounds and copying them over on different audio tracks to a metronome. This was quite effective and was good quality due to the time limit i had. If i could do this again i would leave myself more time for the edit and sound, a lack of resources over the Easter holidays directly before the deadline contributed largely also.

For the editing i was at first pretty confident as i feel i am an able editor and it was one of my electiv modules for the year. The amount of footage i had captured was well over an hour, and i had at first thought i was going to struggle to fit it all into 5 minutes, but because of the lack of sound design at this point i condensed it into five minutes to keep the audiences attention. I considered what i wanted the audience to take from the piece while i was editing and overall i wanted it to be a character led story, i left out much of the cutaways i had shot in favor of more shots of my main character. I wanted to build an empathy with the character, and an understanding of his life. One of the sections that i built into the edit was something that i had put in last minute which was colourful orbs floating around on a black background, i created a 15 second section in the middle of my piece with this. On reflection i don't really think this worked in terms of the overall style of the film, i feel it was unnecessary and i only added it in as it was part of the more conventional experimental film genre. 

I have actually learnt a lot from my major project, experimental film is something that i am quite interested in in terms of theory, but when it comes down to having something you want to get across in an experimental way, i think that requires more planning for it to be done effectively, as it has to be considered and thought provoking in the same way as other mediums of film making, other wise you just end up with a string of images, which is something i was conscious of. I didn't want to cheat and just try and make an experimental looking film, i wanted the film to actually be an experimental approach to a real idea and a real thing. I feel in terms of the film and not the sound that i achieved what i set out to do, it was interesting to hear the feedback on my piece, how others had interpreted the film, i had intended to show how Harry was using his work at the yard as an escape from school, because i know him i know that he was expelled from school and through working at the yard he has had time to figure out where he wants to go next in his life, which he has done and he wants to be a jockey. But others interpreted it as if he wanted to escape from the yard, which is fine, and i think to a certain extent that is true also as its his middle ground. I wanted to shoot Harry as natural as possible so his true character came through in the film which i think it does. 

In regards to my overall contribution to the film, as i worked alone instead of in a pair, it is fair to say that i did all of the film myself bar some minor help with the sound. Working alone is something i would consider doing again, and it is something i really enjoyed, i only wish i had engaged with the module earlier as i feel i could have really pushed this film and made something to a standard that i would have been happy to submit into film festivals. The sound recieved mixed reviews, i would have liked to have included dialogue, but overall i think the music gave the film an edge and a dimension that made it feel quite experiemental.

In terms of fitting my work into an experimental framework, i read a chapter from 'A history of experimental film and video' that stated that experimental documentary in the early 20th century was used a political medium to explore left wing and Marxist views on social values and class. Acting was also "one of the final barriers barriers between the avant garde and mainstream or arthouse cinema" with some notable film maker's being Sergei Eisenstein with 'Strike' I feel that this is interesting as i read this during the production of my film, but i had innately leaned towards exploring social issues with my experimental film. I have seen some formalist cinema before, and i liked the way that they used images to juxtapose each other and create their own meaning, while i was editing i cut on of the clips where Harry was washing his face and spliced in a clip of a wasp struggling and then flying off that i had shot, i then continued the rest of the shot. This worked really well as the basis of the film was Harry running, and as he looked in the mirror and saw the wasp fly off, it seemed as if he envisioned himself as the wasp flying away, sparking the running scene. 'Strike' used the images of cows being slaughtered as a seemingly unrelated image to represent the working class being overworked and treated like cattle in comparison to the bourgeoisie. 

Overall i enjoyed my experience with making an individual experimental piece, it is something i would now consider pitching for 3rd year. 

Below is the finished film, i uploaded it to vimeo but because i had to compress the video from 2GB to 200MB to fit the video on the quality is not as good as the DVD version.


Finished with sound and colour from Jay Burgoyne on Vimeo.

Final Shoot & Edit.

During the final shoot i was panicking quite a lot, Harry failed to tell me that he was going to be busy until 3 oclock in the afternoon, leaving me roughly 5 hours of daylight to shoot, i was unable to get back down the yard on a different day due to work commitments and travel costs. I had managed to get all the equipment i needed from stores and this time i had brought a film tripod and two spare lenses a 25mm and a 50mm. In hindsight i really wished i had brought an 80mm one also for some of the wider shots, as i was unable to zoom in onto things apart from with the stock lens, I had envisioned getting some extreme CU shots of harry moving around in the style of 'Fruit factory' but because i would need to be too close with the camera and i didn't want to make him uncomfortable as he looked much better on camera when he was being natural. I started off the day by getting there early, i walked down to a nearby field that had some really interesting looking yellow flowers in, i wanted to capture a few shots of them ebbing and bowing in the wind, i think this worked really nicely and i thought it would provide a stark contast to the industrial shots i would be filming later in the day.

During this time i also walked around and tried to capture some shots to contrast this image, at this point i confess i really had no idea what i was going to be doing in terms of editing. I lost my first assembly of the edit, which in a way was a blessing as it allowed me to go back to the piece and restart it but from a different angle, knowing the footage a little better. I had already come up with the structure of under laying the running shots throughout the film, I knew that i wanted the shot with Harry staring into the camera as my final shot. so i laid the base structure at several points in the timeline up to five minutes and began filling in the gaps between. During the shoot i had captured a shot of Harry doing some work on a car, i had purposely left his head out of the shot as it looked as it he were a full grown man, i introduced this before introducing his face, i showed this to somebody in the editing room to see if it had the desired effect and they said they were surprised it was a child.
I was faced with finding interesting ways of editing the rest of the image together, i decided to create a sequence in the beginning of the film comprised of some of the shots i had gathered in the caravan that was on the yard. During this sequence, Harry washes his face and looks at his own reflection in the mirror, i intercut this with the shot of the fly, i thought these shots complimented each other nicely, they are both quite small creatures so there was a link in that, also the fly took flight and moved on somewhere else, which echoes Harry's life. During the edit also i was faced with a decision about using the shots i had captured of out of focus lights on a black background, i decided to cut them together, i think the piece has a nice break in the middle with these shots in, although i am not 100 percent sure.

For the colour correction i used the 3 way colour correcter, i didn't want to oversaturate the colours, i wanted to create a dullish misty effect over the top, i tried doing this but it just didn't work with some of my footage. I ended up playing up the colours orange and green, Harry had green eyes, there was a lot of greenery around it made sense, orange seemed to be a neutral bright colour connoting something inbetween danger and sunlight. I brought the saturation down and adjusted the mids to orange and the lights to green on most of the shots, doing this individually shot by shot. I spent quite a while doing this as i knew it was important for my film in particular as it was very colourful.

Here are some screenshots of clips.

I captured this by chance, i noticed it as i was changing lens on the table.

Water Container just outside of the yard.

Harry with Ruby on the shoot, Ruby invited herself into quite a lot of the shots and became a main focal character of the film, i think the connection between them shows up on film.

During this shot i asked Harry to open his eyes a little wider, and as a consequence he didn't blink for 20 seconds, i think the image is stunning and is made all the more eerie by the fact he doesn't blink.

We found this bathtub at the end of the filming day, i think this shot is really pretty, and i think you can see some of my strong film influences in this shot.

This was an experimentation with lens flares.

During the First Shoot.

During the  first shoot i had enlisted my participant Harry, i wanted to screen test him and see how well he did on camera, he had the right look for the kind of film i wanted to create but i didnt know if when i asked him to carry out a task he would look too unnatural, as it turns out he did look quite awkward, for the sake of the film i decided to make more time for filming and cleared my schedule to allow for more time to capture his natural reactions to things on film. During the first shoot i had various technical problems, because i was using a canon d600 instead of a 60d and i only had the stock lens as the university stores werent open over easter which i didn't realise, i found it quite difficult to film in low light situations without a grainy effect, and because of the small screen on the camera it was really hard to see the quality of the shot until i got home, i also wanted to do a stop motion of the yard before i left but i was borrowing a friends photography tripod which wasn't as sturdy as the film ones there was too much shake and i didnt feel confident leaving the camera alone in fear of it falling over. This was a shame but never the less some of the footage i captured on the day was pretty good, i had captured some really interesting lens flares, and some good footage of harry doing some work on a car.

I used this day mostly to scout locations for my second day of filming, there were a few places in the yard that i thought were quite visually interesting, the warehouse with all the tools and the fact that there were a few 'yard dogs' running around made the whole thing have a lot more character. I took a walk around the buisness park and found that there was a huge roud that ran around the entire thing, with interesting buildings along the side, it also had various fields behind with lots of dumped material in, when i got home i wrote a list of all the key features i wanted to use. This is when i got the idea for the moving shots from the car of Harry running. I had seen 400 blows before and this had inspired me to do a similar shot, the running scene for me in that film conotes a kid running to and from his past and future, he is trying in the most basic way possible to move forward, he just loses it and begins to move. There is something striking about seeing a child run and i wanted to capture this on film for myself.

Here is a test shot i took that ended up in the final film, it needed some color correction but it looked very nice.

This was a large sticker that was in a window, it gave me the idea for the working title of my film, although i didnt use this shot i thought that the words had a deeper meaning in the context of my film.

 

It was during this shoot that i realised that Harry was a smoker, i felt bad that i filmed him smoking but in reality he is almost 16 and able to make his own decisions, edit (i put this in the final film as i thought it gave the right effect, it was shocking in the right way).

 

 

Overall i felt like this shoot was a success in terms of planning, but i think if i could have done more filming and started earlier i could have caught a much wider range of footage.

400 Blows - Francois Truffaut, in relation to 'Means of Escape'.

This film stars a young Jean- Pierre Leaud, who starred in many of Truffaut's later films through the course of his life, Antoine Doinel his character is a young boy who truants from school to go to the cinema and various other places, he eventually gets picked up and arrested and is taken to a young offenders home, at the end of the film he breaks into a run, this shot remains unbroken and unedited for a long while, the audience are left wondering how the boy feels while he is doing this, is it freedom, escape and a sense of relief, or has he become overwhelmed with life, saddened and helpless. The ambiguity of this shot is overshadowed by how beautiful it is.

 This is something i wanted to implement in my own work, the sequence in my film with my character running is a direct reference to the 400 blows, it also provides a plot development that keeps the audience wondering if the main character of my film is running in past present or future.

Treatment for 5 - 10 minute Experimental film.

Working title at the moment - Young'un

For my experimental film I want to create a piece that touches on stigmatisation and social conformity. I aim to use experimental techniques within my film to further highlight this and provide a basis for further analysis of the image. The film features a young male who looks around the age of 13, set amongst a back drop of an industrial estate, the film is supposed to look as if it has been shot as a drama, but utilising experimental techniques, Because drama is the most consumed type of film medium i feel it is open to experimental interpretation as the audience are used to a certain code of film analysis and i want to turn this on its head. I have been very inspired by French new wave director's such as Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer, I like the fact that they have used experimental film within the medium of feature length drama pieces, i feel as the audience are lured into seeing something quite standard and usual it gives their films extra shock factor.
Below are the brief requirements;

–         5 – 10 minutes in length

–         x1 person or x1 object should feature within your piece focus

–         A Real location must be used (no sets)

–         No linear narrative should be used

–         No found sound used – you must record and manipulate sound

–         No use of sound purely as an explanation of screen action

–         You must include at least one aspect in your production that references the mechanics of filmmaking

(e.g. breaking the fourth wall?)

My film will centre around a real location on a business park in North Yorkshire, it will feature one main character throughout the film, a young man as i stated above. I will be referencing film making through the manipulation of the image, such as removing and repeating frames to give the effect that the camera is stuck like a record unable to move further on, the character will acknowledge the camera, and there will be many plot developments that seem like they are going to lead into a story but that don't progress. I am attempting to play around with the film form in every aspect to remind the viewer that they are watching a film. There will be no linear storyline, because the audience are used to a certain type of film making i will be implementing what looks like flashbacks, but they will have no specific meaning or relation to the film storyline, allowing the audience to seek and create their own meaning as this is what they are used to.

The Treatment:

A young boy is kicking stones around on an industrial estate, his facial expression is glazed an bored he finds a key on the floor, he puts the key into his pocket. A group of lads in overalls are smoking a cigarette outside their place of work. They start to shout angrilly at the boy, they try to shoo him away he runs over. The sound is non sync, a hard clanging noise takes over the diegetic sound, the sound is menacing. The boy runs over to the group of lads and starts to play fight with them, they pick him up the boys are now smiling and laughing with the boy friendly, the sound of clanging dies down.

A 'flashback' starts, the boy is running around a field, he runs and lies down on the grass, we see a close up of him smiling and looking at the sky, we see a POV of the sky, the POV turns into a timelapse, the sky gets darker and then the image reverses itself, we hear the sound of birds, and cut back to the boy who opens his eyes, he gets up and dusts himself off.

We see the sparks flying, a man with a protective mask on is welding, he finishes and lifts his mask, he is wearing a red lipstick. We see a montage of machinery and tools, they are laid out in a very stylised fashion, the edit becomes quicker and quicker and ends on a close up of the boys eyes. An overlay of flashing lights appears over his face.

The face dissolves into black, the lights continue to flash, they are unfocused, blue lights, the sound comes in industrial sounds make up a rhythm. The viewer is taken into a more abstract world, this world follows a repetitive rhythm, it seems chaotic at first, but the viewer is taken in by the blue light dividing and multiplying among the screen.

We come back to a view of a field, there is a pylon in the middle of the field, there is a menacing buzzing sound. The main character is walking away from it with a stick, he finds himself unable to move forward, he is stuck, his leg keeps jarring forward but he cannot move, he is stuck almost like a broken record. This creates a sense of unease with the audience as they watch the character try to move forward.

We see a view of the industrial estate, the camera tracks along and we see a boy outside a cafe, he is eating  sandwich against a green background, he tucks into it, we feel that the boy is isolated he is extradited from this working man's lifestyle. He notices the camera, he comes to look at it, he stares right into the audiences eyes.

Kathryn Bigelow.

Kathryn Bigelow films are not really my style usually but one of her films 'Near Dark' is interesting as it transcends genre, splicing horror romance and western into one. This is something i am interested in looking at within my own film as i want to make something that is visually intriguing but also in terms of narrative i want the audience to be confused as to what kind of film they are watching.
The cinematography within the film is beautiful, this reflects my own film making style and is something i would like to implement in my own work.

1 Minute Film, Inspiration and Ideas.

During the making of my one minute film i was inspired by Oskar Fichinger, i liked especially an optical poem, the use of colour and sound was mesmerising. I wanted to make something that was deconstructed but still aware of itself as a film, i liked the idea of using only colour and sound, the next problem i face was how would i do this without editing the image and only using in camera sound, i decided to look around my house for items that i could use within the film as i was working on a budget, i found a pack of sparklers some paints and some balloons. I had originally wanted to use paint dripping into a bath using a mirror underneath to reflect the image, but i learnt that some students who did experimental in first semester had done similar things so i wanted to try something different. I filled the balloons with paint and water, I had originally tried throwing them at a wall outside of my house that had graffiti on it already, but the balloons were pretty hard to burst. I decided to pin them to a board with a sheet over. I wanted to add an extra dimension to the sound so i decided to use sparklers to pop the balloons. To be honest this didn't go as planned and when i filmed the piece i decided not to leave the balloons in shot, which was a fatal mistake as the result was a dribble of paint rather than a stream, and the sparklers just sounded like white noise without them in shot for the audience to know what it was. There were some parts of the one minute that i liked, such as the paint droplets coming down onto the white sheet, it looked asif they came down in slow motion. I struggled with the obstructions within the piece. It is something i would like to do again as it is only a formative mark.