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.