Evaluation

My finished individual film had been intended as a piece that showcased the impact of man-kind on nature and I do think that it shows this. The paint represents acid rain, and it is clear to see the damage on straight onto nature directly in this way as the colourful paint shows up extremely well. However, I did then do a reshoot after getting my marks back. I shot the film indoors with a background of nature sounds. This included the sound of the filter of my fish tank and the water, and my neighbours chainsaw on a rainy day. I redid the sound, as sound was not a strong point on my initial individual piece. I made the paint solely black, to highlight the damage done to nature through human influence- as black would give connotations of decay and deterioration. I then ran into the problem of the quality not exporting correctly, which meant that although the footage on my camera and on my computer is HD, it exports with a grainy feel. This was a big blow, as I had only been able to do a couple of takes due to the fact that I ran out of plant material and had to buy my own. However, I feel like this can be overlooked and it is a good piece regardless. I am happy with my film but I know that there could be a lot of improvements that would have improved the quality of the piece dramatically. I feel like I learnt a lot from it even though it did not meet my expectations, as I really struggled with this piece in a creative aspect as I was unsure of an idea for a long time. 

Our finished group experimental film was intended as a piece that showcased what I did in my individual film- but to a larger scale. We wanted to juxtapose the beauty of nature with the destruction caused by man made structures such as power-station and roads. We intended from the beginning to use archive footage, and in our finished piece I think that this has worked really well and is extremely effective with our shot footage. Our nature scenes are very visually stunning, and my favourite sound parts come from the underwater scenes that we use halfway through the film. The nature segment really achieves what we set out to do, which was to show the beauty of nature and yet also how fast it is vanishing and how differently the world would be for when our own children will grow up. The archive footage also exemplifies this, as in years to come images of nature that we have shot like these will also be nothing but a distant memory.

Our industrial scenes are very looming and imposing, out of place in the film just like they are in nature itself, and that is also something I love about the piece. I think the shot of the pollution cloud curling up to the sky is my favourite one, which we sped up and is very effective. What we set out to do and what we achieved is extremely similar, we planned everything down to the last detail and we stuck to it and this way we knew exactly what it would look like when we edited it. We were also extremely tight when filming and we had some luck on location which meant that we got some shots that we weren't planning on that happened to go extremely well with our theme and the look of the piece overall. I feel this also does the job of taking the film away from the beauty of nature and to the eyesores that man has created upon the world.

One weakness I feel our project does have is sound- as none of us were particularly good at sound editing we had to do our best with the sounds we had shot. We did several cuts of sound and although I am pleased with how it sounds, I do think that sound could have been a stronger point for our film and we could have had a few more sessions working on the sound. The ending could also perhaps have been a little stronger, but we had planned on using the sunset as the ending and the pacing of the film meant that it had to be sped up to make sure that the sun hyper lapsed, meaning that we lost some of the serenity and impact of the ending. I feel however that the ending is a beautiful close to the film, and really hits home the point we are trying to make about how much of this beauty will be left when we are finished with this world.

Making my individual film I found to be difficult as I had to change location and the weather did not work to my advantage. The complication of the sounds of the bottles of paint in my film also meant I was at a disadvantage, but other methods of trying to get the paint onto the leaves (such as throwing a water balloon) had failed and it was the only option. Even though I'm not completely happy with the finished piece I feel like I learnt a lot from it, as its harder than I previously thought to make an unedited static single shot film and therefore you have to be even more resourceful than usual. Not being able to edit it meant that more than a few takes were essential, which is a practise thats idea for making any film just incase you end up with not enough footage. I do feel like the exercise has given me a fresh look at film-making and also helped me to develop some independent skills when it comes to making footage. 

Making our group film was a lot easier than the individual, and we used a few cameras to produce the footage and I had never worked with more than one camera before which was a new experience for me. The locations we used and the footage we got weren't in Sheffield, which meant we had to travel and in doing so we came across opportunities to film that we would not have done had we not gone further afield for the footage. Learning how to angle the camera to make sure that objects were not in the shot was also a learning experience, as when we were across the road from the power station there was a main road and a car park between our camera and the cooling towers. This meant that we all had to position the camera in places and ways we would previously have not thought of to make sure that we had a clear shot. I also learnt how to edit archive footage with Amy, which I had never done- we were inspired to use archive footage by the workshop we had with Martine using the Steenbeck, both of which were experiences I had never had before and were extremely informative. 

When making the group work, although we did not go with my initial treatment that I had created for the group that we presented, we did an amalgamation of all of our ideas which meant that I was very present for the planning process and we did have a lot of meetings to go with this. I feel like we all had an extremely equal part in the process of creating and planning the film, which has not happened on projects I have previously been involved in. The only challenge I encountered with working as part of a team was time management, as we all work and therefore we had to find days which we were all available to film and meet up to plan and to edit. However this was a minor inconvenience as we managed to work around this quite easily by planning ahead of time when we would meet and what work we would bring to discuss to meetings. 

I think that working as a team has widened by employability as group work and working with others is a large part of the film industry. Going to different locations and getting experience is doing so has also broadened my horizons with film-making. I also think that doing the experimental main project on such a far reaching and important subject has further impacted my employability as a film on such an important issue shows that we are aware of the world around us and are capable of educating others. The pitching and presentations that we have had to do have improved my verbal communication, as before the course I used to dread standing in front of a crowd or a group and presenting, but now I find that I am not bothered as much by this. The individual assignment has also improved my initiative which I carried over into the group film, and I think I have come out of this module with better skills in those areas that will help my employability.

Our influence for the works came from some material that we watched in sessions, such as 'Continental Drift' by William Raban. Our influence to use archive footage came heavily from this piece and also from the workshop that we had using the Steenbeck. The seamless transition into archive footage from real location is what we wanted to capture in our own film and I think that we really managed to connect the scenes between the nature and the archive footage well. When it came to recording the archive footage, the super 8 film was played onto a Steenbeck and the filmed the played back footage.

A powerful inspiration to do the juxtaposition of industrial and nature for me personally was 'Rezign Live' by David Myriam, as although he does this by split screen it was something I thought would be easy to show by a mix of the two types of footage we had shot. Another influence from session I believe on our film is 'Without You' by Tal Rosner, the sounds and the matching onscreen industrial landscape are something that really influenced the feel of our industrial footage and we really like the film itself. Another film that influenced me on the subject personally was a documentary I watched called 'What a Way to Go: Life at the End of an Empire' by Timothy S. Bennett. The ruthless cinematography and message behind it in this film inspired me to put climate change forward as the subject matter of our main film. I feel like it is impossible to not make the connection between environmental issues and nature in our film, which is what we were aiming for.

When it came to the cinematography of the film, Nicky Hamyln's 'Film Art Phenomena' had a informative, interesting chapter on space and proportion that I tried to put into practise with pull zooms and positioning of objects inside the frame. This was to make the power plant appear even more looming than it already was in the landscape and to hit home our points. We really wanted to explore 'what it was like to be human' in this piece, knowing how you are effecting the world, knowing you are both the problem and the solution and this is really the entire theme of our film, and we became well versed in the subject of climate change both before the creation of this film, and after.

I feel that the work comes between industrial experimental films that were popular since Stan Brakhage who that took influence from land art film-maker Robert Smithson. Some of his main work married the innocence of nature, which is also what our group did with our experimental film. His work at the time was a contrast to the urban experimental films that often prevailed. In the shine of the industrial revolution at the time, nature had been put to one side and forgotten about. But now it is more important than ever to realise what our industrial spread as human beings has cost the planet and nature as a whole. This means educating a lot of people, some of whom don't even believe that we are the source of climate change and that we must act now in order to secure the planets futures. Now, even though there are just as many films on nature as there are on the industrial climate, I feel like our film hails from these beginnings rooted in the industrial revolution and the past.

Word Count: 2,095

References

Continental Drift (2005). Short Film, William Raban, UK.
Hulme, Mike (2013). Exploring climate change through science and in society: an anthology of Mike Hulme's essays, interviews and speeches. Routledge.
Goudie, Andrew (2006). The human impact on the natural environment: past, present, and future. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hamyln, Nicky (2003) Film Art Phenomena. BFI Publishing. Chapter 9 - “SPACE” p.126-128
O’Pray, Michael, (2003), Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions, London, Wallflower Press.
Rezign Live (2008). Short animation, David Myriam, France.
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of an Empire (2007). Documentary, Timothy S. Bennett, USA.
Without You (2008). Short Film, Tal Rosner, UK.