Moving Image 1: assignment 2

Film: Safety Catch.

As I am so new to film making, I decided to combine two project films: ‘Single-shot-drama’ and ‘Subjective and objective’ with my assignment: ‘Creating atmosphere’. My learning objective was to see how the same subject would be affected by restrictions and techniques. The order I chose to make this work was to put the single-shot drama first, then build from there.

Single shot drama: this took some planning as I only had my actor for an hour. The most important thing was to make sure that my actor understood the narrative, then we were able to block out her moves. From this I could block out mine with the camera. The biggest challenge turned out to be lighting – using natural light with my DSLR set to manual exposure, I chose the best compromise I could, but shooting indoors with light pouring in from windows (which were sometimes onscreen) proved to be problematic in editing. On top of this I am just learning how to use Final Cut Pro X, so there was lots of discovery to make by necessity.

Objective and subjective. This allowed me more creative freedom, as in cutting away I could control the tempo of the piece more, creating a sense of tension. At this point I also started to play with the editing software to see what I could do by increasing and decreasing the speed of certain shots (e.g. when the woman panics at receiving her warning text). I found the effects of slowing the sound just as interesting as slowing the visuals and this helped to create heightened narrative in a film with no dialogue. (The original exercise was the source of the film’s theme: searching for keys to get out of the house.)

Assignment: Creating atmosphere.  Having learned a lot from editing the first two sequences I felt a significant sense of freedom being able to edit anyway I chose to create atmosphere. I was now free to truly play with the possibilities. Of course I also had to bear in mind what I wanted during filming and make sure I filmed every shot I might need, as I could not recall the actor. I was interested to note in editing this final version that I did not feel the need to use everything available (for example I had a subjective shot of the actor opening the front door from the outside but chose to stay with the single shot from the front gate to the door). Now I was making creative choices in the edit.

Although I could have used music and more sound effects in the first two sequences I chose to restrict this to the final assignment, partly because I knew the timings would be different and I would have to score separately, but also because I saw this as part of the developmental process. I wanted to know how much atmosphere I could create with restricted resources.

What did I learn through this exercise? Firstly, a very steep learning curve technically, as I got to grips with the editing software. More than that, though, I learned that pace, drama, atmosphere, mood can be generated in different ways. I will think carefully about how I make choices in filming sequences, by starting with what I want to convey in a sequence, then think about how I will achieve this technically.