Final Project.

Please follow this link  to view my final documentary, entitled Foodie.

Please note, I recommend the use of with Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. Please select the browser you are using when prompted.

Also, it is recommenced that this project be viewed upon a monitor with a minimum horizontal resolution of at least 1000 pixels.

Enjoy.

Transient Spaces Learning Contract. Redux.

So, here is my revisited learning contract, taking into consideration the changes i’ve made to both my documentary topic and distribution method. If a question is left blank, it refers to the fact that the answer has not changed wince the last contract, which can be found here. Here goes.

CONTENT

1. What is the community that you will make your documentary for?

I have made a documentary about the ‘Castlemaine food community’. Casltemaine is a small town in central victoria (where it so happens i ‘grew up’). Over the last few years, the town has seen a steady ascent in the level of quality food services available, and has been hailed as the next ‘foodie’ town in regional victoria. I wanted my documentary to explore how the rise in the town’s cuisine culture had been felt from those in the town itself, and to explore to what extent the changes and developments have affected the community there. I chose to explore these stories through the connection they all have with the local fuit and veg supplier. It so happens that my brother Max works as the local delivery driver, so i decided to portray ‘a day in the life of’ the food community in castlemaine. As well as the aforementioned issues of, I also feel that we explore notions of community through Max’s interaction with the town, as he provides a physical link between the businesses and economies of the town, and has a unique overview of, and relationship with, the various establishments in the town.

2. Why do you think it is a community?

HTM ‘ell yeah. sorry.

I’m not much of a web designer, but i’m i can say i’m pretty happy with how my coding skills held up in putting this thing all together. well, when i say coding skills, i really am referring to my ability to copy and paste code from w3schools.com and do trial and error from there. still, not too bad.

Basically, to re-clarify, i’ve gone the max video – map max video -map – max video route, and i’ve decided to scroll up and down rather my initial tests in side to side. Getting it to the finished point was not as hard as you’d think. Basically, i just estimated the height and width in pixels of the different map and video elements, and then coded some vertically stacked tables to match this. Then, with InDesign, i created a jpeg image covering the same frame as the table, and built in borders around the elements and graphical links between them. I then used the CSS tag for a background image, loaded up my jpeg under the table, then filled the embed codes for the maps and videos into the table. There was some subtle table adjustment required to get the tables and embed elements in line with the background jpeg, but all in all not too tricky.

The only hiccup occurred when i tried to open my page up in firefox, after doing the coding while testing in chrome. All the tables were again out of line. Now, as i mentioned, i’m no web designer, so i have no idea why this was. There was probably an easier solution to be had, but the only thing i could think to do was to recode a separate page for firefox users. So i think i’ll have to put in a pre-project page with a little selection for browser choice.

Unfortunately, i don’t have a PC to test it upon, but i can clarify that the page now works on chrome, safari, and firefox. If IE doesn’t like it, well, who the heck still uses IE anyway.

Observational vs. reflexive.

Horaah, i hear you say. Yes, editing is finally finished. Apologies for the lack of blogs recently, dear wordpress, but it is only due to the fact that i’ve been a little busy editin’. So, i have 7 videos all up, 3 with my brother and the fruit shop, and 4 based on particular restaurants around town. They range from between 2.30 – 3.30. So almost have a standard 22 min doco on my hands here. SBS here i come.

So, how’s it look? Overall, i’m pretty happy with it. I’ve remained pretty close to the initially  envisaged shooting style throughout, which i think is evident in the consistency between the videos. This is particularly true for those focusing on the restaurants, all using similar mix between interviews, coverage from their shop, and portraiture.

For the most part, it also sticks pretty closely to the documentary mode that i was aiming for – that being observational. This is clear in the fact that there’s no narration, and the majority of the interviews have been edited to sound as if it where a continuous stream of one way dialogue, without any questioning or prompting from me, the filmmaker. Yet, while i initially had hoped to keep me out of it entirely, there are a number of little moments that came to the fore in the editing process that reveal the true nature of the man behind the camera – i mean that there was a man behind the camera, and that what appears is a constructed artifact. This is probably what i would define as fitting within the reflexive mode of documentary.

So rather than hide these, i’ve decided to include a number of them. the most obvious is the final sequence of the film, where my voice, off camera, can be heard correcting my brother about which streets in melbourne are the busiest. Another showed my brother handing me a greek coffee to sample after i’d just documented the process of brewing it. Admittedly, these moments made the final cut to add humour as much as to tick another box in the Nichol’s mode matrix. Which, as i mentioned waaay back, is a good thing. As far as i’m concerned, no filmmaker should appear in his own film unless it adds something to the story. In my case, with humour, i believe it did.

I also think that there’s a bit of reflexivity going on in more subtle ways too, and generally which i hadn’t identified until finally viewing the finished product. These come about in the composition of the shots.

Firstly, we have the portrait shots that i’ve used. While there is nothing explicitly reflective about them, i feel that in some ways, having a subject look directly down the lens makes the viewer more aware of the filmmaker in the process. It’s as if by staring down towards the audience, the audience brought to realize that the subject was, in the creation of the shot, directly engaging with the filmmaker. Or at least his camera. These variations of framing was something i touched upon earlier.

The other possibly quasi-reflexive aspect that could be noted in the finished product is the overt out-of-focus shots. And no, this is not me trying to pass off my poor camera work as an intentional meditation upon the reflexivity inherent in film. As anyone that’s used a large sensor camera will know – particularly those with the 5D – the otherwise beautiful shallow depth of field means that it is a difficult beast to keep in focus. Constant refocusing is required, and even gaining good focus on a static subject will usually mean zooming in, focusing in, going too far, then pulling it back to the right plane. This is unavoidable if you want to get an image correctly focused. Where the deliberate part comes in then, is in the fact that i have chosen to keep them in there. I could have chosen to cut out all sections where i’m still trying to find focus, and present the viewer with a focus perfect world for the entire duration (although the duration may have been significantly lessened, were that the case). But by keeping them in, i feel the audience is forced to recognize the fact that it is through a camera that we are seeing these images, a mechanical object, and one more fallible than our own eye. The occasional refocus means that the audience are brought into the filmmaking process, and made aware of the imperfect nature of it. What they are being presented with is not the image they would get if they were there, in the kitchen, in the van, but the image that has been produced as a result of my work in recording it, in the kitchen, in the van.

However, yet again, the choice to leave such sections in the final film were not just to elucidate the audience to the films constructed nature. Again, more shallow than that. I just thought that their, for want of a better word, rough – and – ready nature somehow added to the visceral experience of the works. Seeing these cameras actions does somehow bring us closer to the action, and makes it all feel a bit more hands on. i believe it works well with the quick cutting style, giving it an overall more “real” quality to it.

Either that, or it just shows up my poor cameramanship.

A day in the life.

Ok, so after messing around with the second map embed test, i think i’m going to go the max video – map – max video – map – max video approach. As mentioned, it allows both interaction and a somewhat guided narrative. I thought about the max video – map – max video approach (that’s less one map and max video for those playing at home) but upon reviewing the footage again, i think i’ve got too much good footage of the fruit shop and max doing the deliveries to be crammed into 2 videos. So spacing it out between three might suit better. It might also be nice to return to max after we get a taste for the kind of places he visits throughout the day.

Which brings me to my next conundrum. how to divide up the videos of max? There is some distinction between the material covered, so perhaps they could be grouped according to theme – eg one about the job, one about the restaurants, one about the community. or something like that. But, i feel that the community theme in particular is present across a number of different parts of the film, and not just those with max. so maybe it won’t work to try to put it all into one, at least explicitly.

The other option i was considering, was to take a bit of documentary liberty and arrange the videos in a morning – afternoon – evening fashion, so making it appear as if it were all shot in one day – a day in the life of a fruit and veg delivery driver, for example. this could also be a nice way to frame the project as a whole. Plus, it would allow me to use the morning preparation and evening pack down sequences to their full effect.

Plus people might just believe that i somehow managed to organize and shoot 7 different short films in a single day. not too unbelievable?