Final Edit of my Documentary

After a long night I am now happy with my video. I rerecorded some of the narration and made more concise statements and this significantly cut the length of audio creating more space for imagery.

I now have a 14 minute film (couldn’t get it down to 10 minutes without losing some of the space and this ruined the pacing so I thought 14mins was a good length. For the final touch I added a few transitions to make the images flow into eachother better. Also I have wanted to integrate some of the radio into the documentary. I found this quite difficult but decided to give it a last try and after a few hours it seemed to work. I selected two separate segments and put them at different times throughout the film. I am really happy that I made this final addition as it added more voices to the film(this was needed as this keeps it more exciting, one voice continuously can become a bit tiresome) It also broadened the conversation about the points I was making. The final film is 15 minutes long.

Showing my documentary at the degree show

Now that I have finished my documentary, I feel that I want to show it at the degree show allowing people if they choose to, to learn more about the context of the work and hopefully transmit my curiosity into other people. Today I had an idea to use the largest rock in my collection and as it contains a large hole, allow people to view my documentary being screened through the hole…

Setting up my space & making my portfolio

I decided to make my space completely white so that it was neutral for my work. I attached a shelf for the rocks to create space on the desk for the portfolio.

For the portfolio I chose to use the colours of maroon and gold as I thought this combination would work well with the paintings. I was slightly worried about how it would look when I actually put it together but in the end i was happy with the result.

Documentary editing

After a tutorial with Anna I am now much more confident with how to go forward. We talked about pacing and creating space. I needed to create space for the images to be absorbed without my voice over. I have now prioritised what I am saying to focus on the main points. This has worked well. Also some of the imagery went on for too long so this was cut.

While I continued to edit, I gave a copy to first year Tom Margett who helped as a fresh set of eyes to judge what worked and what didn’t. I felt I had become too close to it and wanted another opinion plus Tom is much more experienced at editing videos so I also wanted his expertise. This collaboration worked really well. He managed to significantly cut the film’s length. I used what he had done to help me cut more out of my film and today I am now happy that the film is 17 minutes long. I have been told to get it down to 10. I plan to keep chipping away at it and hopefully will get it to this length.

Continued editing of my documentary….

Each day I have been slowly cutting down the length of my documentary, I have now realised that I need to prioritise and focus on the main points that I want to make and show the progression of the project. I have made large cuts now and it is taking shape. After some tutorials I now realise that I need to cut out some of my narration that is not truly needed again focusing on the main points I want to make, by doing this it will create space for the images of my work to be viewed with the music in the background allowing the viewer to take in what i have said and view my imagery without interference. At the moment it is a bit like information overload so my next step will be to prioritise my points.

Degree Show plan

For the degree show I have asked for a booth and a smaller thin space. I need the booth to create my installation but I also want to show a selected amount of the paintings. After discussion I decided on a thin space as this will force people to view them up close. Also in this space I will display them as seen in the pics below in order to make the viewer follow them in a stream one after the other which will create more of a journey as if you are moving through the world inside a rock.

Sound within the rock

I have had this idea for a while now about putting sound within a rock, it has taken me a while to understand how to do it and get it set up but I have today got it working (with help from Neil)  and have experimented with different sounds.

Up till this point the characters of my story, namely the worm, the mollusc and the sponge have remained unseen. With sound I aim to portray the presence of the creatures and to do this I have looked back at how they create the holes in the rocks.

The worm wees so for this I needed the sound of water trickling (also this sound makes the connection back to the rocks origin or previous life where they would have been underwater.)

The mollusc creates the holes in a different way by gripping onto the rock with their fleshy foot and using their hard ridged shell to act as a drill that bores into the rock.  So for this sound I needed scraping noises and noises of friction.

Over time I have collected sounds while on day trips to the beach but also anything of interest even around my house, anything that I think can portray the noise of the creatures inside the rock. I have also creates sounds from the rocks I have collected, particularly the white chalk covered flint rocks that I collected from Severn Sisters. These make a piercingly loud noise when crashed together.