#unit 16

FRAME OF MIND Louise Bjørnskov Schmidt | Unit 16 - Bartlett School of Architecture Location: Panama City, Panama

Site Plan

Upper Level

I edited some of my footage to display Walter Murch’s six rules of editing. 

The shots of the group all together shows a range of emotion, mostly happiness. This is seen by the laughter and playful nature of their interactions.

The story is shown by the different shots being placed together as it portrays a party/gathering and then the morning after as if it is a flashback with periodic returns to the present time.

The rhythm of the piece is different, with the party shots being more upbeat to show the emotion, and the morning after shots being a lot more calm and still. The music is fairly calm to display that the party is not currently happening and is a memory.

The eye trace is broken up by the placement of the shots. Every other shot is the morning after, and between those are the party shots. The morning after shots are ordered to be in similar positions to where the shots of the party occurred in the room. 

The 2D place of screen in the edit applies as it follows the 180 degree rule. It is all filmed to the front and left of the camera’s placement as it was set up along a wall.

The 3D space does not apply as the subjects were actively moving during filming and the camera was not moved to show their interactions.

In this essay, I am going to discuss the workflow of editing, what type of workflow I follow for video editing, what does a video editor do and what kind of skills are required to be a professional editor.

First things first, if you think about it, everybody edits in order to make perfection, it’s an advantage to better yourself and better whatever mistakes you have made in order to correct them, examples of this can be a person talking and then they realise they said something wrong so within the middle of the sentence they try to find a better word, this is more of a subliminal aspect and some people realise it while others don’t.

Video editors edit content for others enjoyment on different softwares, after all the content has been filmed, sound has been recorded, it gets edited to become a rough cut and then becomes a final piece to be shared wherever on social media, this normally referred to as post-production.Now in terms of what an editor does, their job is to edit footage to a standard to which is good and outstanding, video editors are given footage to edit such as films, TV shows, documentaries, music video, corporate/promotional videos. Within the industry the workflow for editors has changed slightly, in the modern world today, editors work in a society where almost editing is done and accomplished on a computer and editors are now taught  in a particular way depending on what type of software they are editing with. Editors are usually linked with TV, broadcasting and Film industries where most of them are employees of a post production house or many work freelance as for people who work freelance specialise what they do and work in sub categories such as sound, film, TV, music. On the other hand, with the up bringing of technology within the years in terms of Media(meaning broadband, internet and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Vine, Vimeo) that have the capability to share videos and content, the industry has grown and advanced to a whole new level and businesses are taking advantage of this.

Most companies are employing video editors in the TV and Film industry to give video editors the opportunity to edit their businesses/companies videos so that video editors produce promotional video, then when editors are finished with the final pieces of the final edit, they distribute the complete product either onto the companies/businesses website or on social networking sites.

The workflow of editing is not as simple as people believe it to be however it’s still attainable, some people might find it easy and understandable and other on the other hand might find it confusing and very complex. If you follow the workflow of editing a numerous amount of times within a certain amount of weeks, editors should be able to master the workflow of editing. In terms of post production, it can look very terrifying but if you approach it in analytical way, it be much clearer.  It’s only a matter of correcting your clips and audio, colour correcting the clips and mixing audio then it’s only a matter of exporting you final edit and publishing it.

The two editing softwares that videos editors use nowadays in the Creative Industry is Avid and Final Cut Pro. These editing softwares are utilised by a large amount of production companies and in order to use them in a professional standard, there is extensive training that is required to use these programs. These softwares have the capability of bringing professional film content for others to be amazed by.

So with the workflow that I am going to discuss, it’s described to be called a ‘component workflow’ it concentrates more on a specific amount of task that is included in a big process.

So you start by importing all of your clips onto the your PC/Mac and here you import you files to the editing softwares but before you import your files, you must transcode your clips on MPEG Streamclip and export your files either it to a .mov or whatever settings you are working on. Some cameras set up all the transcoding exporting settings internally in the cameras, an example of a camera that can do that is a Blackmagic Design Cameras. Once you have imported your footage onto your preferred editing software, editors tend to organise their content so that way it’s more easier to put the content on the timeline and for it to be neat, this way is more easier to work around. The way I organise my edit is by renaming the shots in each clip, it’s also easier to organise it in folders or bins too in order to direct you of what clips and content you want to go into. The sound quality on most DSLRs camera are not going to be the best quality, this is the part where you find your clips and you find the audio for the specific clip and synchronise the audio and clip together, this way the sound is much clearer for the audience to hear. After you have done all of this and have constructed your story onto your timeline, it’s now time colour correct your content, this will give colour to clips and show definition, most editing softwares can do specific colour correction such as Adobe After Effects and DaVinci, but some editing softwares like Final Cut Pro and Avid already provide colour correcting applications provided with the software itself. After editors are happy with their colour correct final piece, it’s time to export you final piece either into an MP4 or .mov or any other preferred preset. Now at this point it where you can publish your content onto social networking sites or any sharing networks so that people and view and watch.

I thought the Fmp was successful because we managed to put on a reasonable show to an audience and had sold out the first night so there was no tickets left. Secondly, i think it worked well as the music came together well with the story of the three characters that was getting shown on the big screen behind all of us musicians as the music portrayed the story well. For example, the band i was in played soft mellow music that changed into more of an up beat piece. This was to show that in a particular scene that we had worked on, our character was having an enjoyable morning with plenty of time to get ready for the day ahead.

However, i don't think our Fmp was no where near as great as what it could have been for our last ever show. This is because lots of people had lots of different ideas that sounded great but none of them got done as i feel everyone wasn't pulling their weight to make the show to the highest standard it could have been and a lot of people didn't really seem to care or have the enthusiasm for it to be pushed to a high quality. I think a lot of people felt like this because of some were fed up of others not trying certain ideas out or people saying no to doing other people's ideas without even trying them first. I think the way the idea of the show came across to most musicians as well about making music to three individual characters, certain people believed it was down to each band that revolved around that one character they were working on to do the work for that one character only and that wasn't necessarily the case. I'm not sure if this happened due to the lack of explanation about making music to the one character or more or if it was because of the process on how to go about rehearsing and making the music. 

Furthermore, it doesn't only come down to the musicians that made it a success or not it also comes down to the lighting/technical teams and the sound engineers for the whole show as i feel that the other teams were no way near to the standard i would of liked them to be as i feel the lighting team did a bad job of our lights. For example at certain times of our show it was almost pitch black and we would still be playing on stage and there were no lights on the particular musicians that were playing on stage, they would sometimes get ques wrong on certain parts of our show when to turn on and off certain lights on parts of the stage and they did not seem to have much of an idea at all for our whole show as i personally think that they could of used more mood lighting to set the scenes better and to make the performance look more outstanding by using certain lights at the right times. 

I think the set design team could of done a much better job too as i feel that where part of the stage was placed (i.e. the stage i was on) they did not seem to think of the fire exit clearance as my drum kit had to be crammed right in the corner of the stage i was on for people to get to the fire exit if needed. This resulted in half of my drum kit falling almost off the stage and falling to an angle on apart of the show as i was given no where near enough room for a drum kit to be placed and instead of feeling like i was doing a live performance to an audience i felt as if i was doing more of a theatre show and i was stuck in a pit behind some guitar amps. Therefore i could barely be seen on stage to an audience. 

Moreover, i think the sound team did a terrible job too as i wasn't even given a monitor to be able to hear other musicians on stage and instead i was given a front of house speaker that was placed almost right next to my ear which you would believe would be better but wasn't as every time i put my ear closer to it to be able to hear what was going on on the stage i could barely hear anything coming out of the speaker at all. This was rubbish as it made me play out of time on particular pieces and made me seem terrible when it wasn't my fault at all as i couldn't hear everything on stage that i needed to hear and was down to guess work sometimes which it shouldn't have been. Another point i'd like to make about the sound team is that i feel that they could not do their job properly because on one of the shows that we had done the front of house speakers were turned off for the whole show and the audience could only hear our music through other monitors that were placed on our stage. Therefore, the sound team should of realized this before the show even started so that the performance would of came across a lot better to our audience and on pieces of music bands were playing on, certain musicians couldn't even hear themselves or hear other people so others had the same problem as me and it wasn't just me who had this problem. 

If we was able to change certain things about the process or idea of the FMP i would of first said keep the idea of the show as i think that was a brilliant idea about using three different characters. However, i would of liked to see everyone playing on each piece of music on most parts of the show as a lot of the time when it was a particular band playing for the character they had to make music for, there was hardly anyone else playing with that band for that character. I would of also said that we should of had more rehearsals indeed and explained to us clearer of what we had to rehearse in our rehearsal times that we had as a band.

Moreover, we should of used more unique and unusual ideas in different pieces of our music for example i said about using basketballs or different objects to make different sounds and rhythms out of so that everyone could join in with and i said about possibly using actors/dancers to create a bigger and better performance so we could experiment with them by them doing bits of acting and dancing to make our story come across clearer to our audience as the feedback we got from our audience after our show wasn't brilliant because a lot of the audience didn't understand what our show was about but they said the music was good. 

If i could change anything else about the process of our show as well i would of said for us to move into the space earlier so the other teams would have more time to practice and run things with us musicians. 

Furthermore, we had a green screen that the media team let us use for a couple of days which is where you get a person or a bunch of people to do something in front of it and then put a different background behind them to make the scene look realistic depending on the actions the person or people are doing in front of it or to make the scene look really funny to the audience and i feel that we didn't use it enough as we only had a couple of scenes in our show where the green screen was actually used.

Was the show successful? If so why?

Today we were in the venue at 10 and the majority of people decided that we wasn't going to do the idea of the bomb idea for our FMP as certain people weren't sure where we could go with the idea and most people wanted to change the idea of it as they wanted to do something different so everyone formed a circle and started discussing new ideas we could do with our tutor. A few ideas people had were using the 4 elements like fire, water, earth and wind and to try and make music to the elements. I personally didn't think this was a brilliant idea as it would get too complicated making music to it i thought. A second idea someone came up with was going through the history of music from when it first started up until now so we would make music to the different eras of history and i thought that wasn't a bad idea because you can be as creative as you like with that sort of thing. The last idea someone chose was to base a story plot around a day in a persons life and we could make music to it. After discussing this last idea everyone decided that we can base this story around a person that's on the same course as us. In the end this was the idea everyone chose and we all decided we could base the story around three different peoples lives and the people we would choose to be the three main characters to base our story around would all be on our course so one of the characters we chose was our tutor Tom, Hayden and Josh. 

We then started developing on this idea so we would get film footage from people recording parts of the three main characters lives off of people's phones but only use certain phones that we know would have great cameras.

Later on after coming back from  a break, the few people that came up with this idea about using three different peoples lives as our story line for our show had made up a plot for each of the three characters (whilst having our break) to what they could do during this day of their lives and how it can mix with the other characters in the story.

As there are three different people to base our story around we decided to have three different bands that each individual character could have so for Hayden's band we decided that would be an electronic band so they would use the electronic drum kit, sampling drum pads, a couple of singers, a couple of keyboards with some cool synth sounds/electronic techno sounds on and then they would use various settings on amps to make guitars sound powerful so that they can cut through the sound and use effects like reverb, distortion and settings like that.  

We decided Tom's band would be an acoustic band with cajons, bits of percussion i.e. shakers etc, three vocalists, acoustic guitars/electric guitars but with a clean quiet sound to them, bass guitar and a acoustic drum kit.

For Josh's band we would have an ordinary rock band so there was an acoustic drum kit, vocals, bass guitar and an electric guitar accompanied with piano. 

After deciding what bands each character would be titled under we then had to decide who goes into what band and we did this by getting into groups of who are the drummers, guitarists, vocalists, pianists and anyone who wants to play bass and in these groups we would discuss who wants to go into what band for that individual character. I decided i wanted to be in the acoustic band as Hayden who's a drummer was already in the electronic band as he was one of the characters and the other drummers didn't really mind what band they went into. I decided to go into the acoustic band because i thought it would be unique and give a chance to try something different for a change like bringing in my own cajon into college and playing that or to bring my own mallets, hot rods, brushes and sticks in and find different ways to play a drum kit softly as an acoustic band so this would further my playing. 

After deciding who was in which of the three bands, my group decided to split into smaller groups to find out some ideas we can use for the music we would be making for our character of Tom.