The second day of the shoot saw the arrival of Fleur Poad playing Dr. Francis Wende, Fleur was excellent to work with – she made everyone around her feel at ease and relaxed and her focus and composure was infectious to the other actors. Sam Morgan playing DI Tony Morton was equally concentrated and gave an expressive performance. Kirsty Proffitt   was seriously impressive battling a nasty illness to give a brilliant performance that was moving and heartfelt.

The crew were equally impressive. DOP Chris Watts and 2nd camera Alex White worked hard on multi-camera setups getting the right angles and walking through everything sometimes rather quickly! James Kum did sterling work on sound, often fighting wide camera setups and small box rooms as well as the usual planes, trains, and other such unwanted noises. Subhadra Colley was superb to have as a runner, clapper loader, makeup artist, set designer, and medical adviser - blown away by her ingenuity. Lucy Cole was great to have on board with a brilliant laugh and on it with the clapper board and log sheets. Tamsin Graves made sure that the entire cast and crew were fed and watered with fresh home cooked tasty meals every day and well fuelled for when the cameras turned over. Thanks to Alex White for taking the stills.

In truth this film represents my first foray into the realm of fictional drama. Well almost, my second if you include a seven minute short I made nearly ten years ago. Other than that I haven’t really produced my own fictional film. I’ve filmed other people’s but not my own. For this reason ‘Not for Human Consumption’ holds a pretty special place for me, but beyond this it’s experimental and gleans much from my personal background. Personal experiences as an ‘on camera’  actor in the past have helped inspire my approach to both writing and direction. I have found writing and developing the films’ narrative through improvisation and compiling test shots to be an incredibly liberating experience in the end. Though it’s been a bumpy journey.

The single greatest lesson that I’ve learned from this production so far is to realise that one can alter one’s perceptions of problems and creative barriers and use the negative energy in a positive way. To sound less of a hippy about it – I simply mean that one must look at problems with a constructive and open mind. If something doesn’t look or feel right then it probably isn’t.

The performances and the camera and sound setups have worked for the improvised setups that were employed. Shooting multiple camera has been of real benefit – especially in the key scenes 12, 14, 16, where 3 cameras just about allowed me to capture the best moments over minimal numbers of takes. (5 takes in all for 3 scenes!)

As I write this I have a rough cut pretty much in place that requires sound mixing and basic design and a whole load more cutaways. It looks as though there will be one or two more pick up shoots to finesse the final cut – but well worth it in the end surely? Hopefully that will all happen within the next two weeks. For now the end of this week will see a rough cut go off to George Cooper, (composer) to begin work on scoring and I will be off doing some more field recording for the sound and getting to grips with the titles and a whole lot more.

The film is to be an experimental non-narrative piece comprising of visual portraits of the city and landscape in which I live. The portraits will seek to show the extra-ordinary in some everyday sights of a typical British city – fusing together a variety of photographic and digital cinema imaging techniques with an improvised soundtrack, intense digital audio sculpting and design and abstract audio interviews. Think Peter Greenaway meets Terrence Malik.

The film will combine content shot using the latest mobile phone camera technology, DSLR video recording, 5K sampled Digital Stills Time lapse – right the way through to 4K digital cinema camera recording. It is my intention to employ the various digital acquisition tools listed here to each of the themes the film will explore that are detailed bellow.

5 Act Thematic Structure.

Although the film won’t have a narrative in the conventional sense of the term there will be a rigorous formal structure in place that orders the visual style. The five parts will be as follows;

1. Flâneur – POV style camera, things as they happen, mobile phone acquisition, walking the city.
2. Architecture – Views of buildings and city vistas.
3. Power and Consumption – Gas and Electricity, Gov, People, Energy, Corporate Greed, Visual Media.
4. Place – Local, global, regional identity, national identity?
5. Landscape – Escape, the nature of being an island, ports, Dartmoor, the solar system – sky timelapses.

Music and Sound Design.

To elaborate just a little further about my current ideas for creating music for the film as follows – each section of the film will be approximately 5 minutes long, so the aim will be to edit the sequences after all the footage has been shot and begin the sound editing process after the picture edit has been roughed out. The workflow would be roughly:

edit images > create 5 video sequences > sound edit and design audio interviews > design foley and location sounds recorded in the field > remix > master out with video image into Logic > CUE and rehearse rough improvisation to 5 sequences in Logic Pro > Remix the film with improvised music added.

The workflow will allow me to use digital instrumentation alongside live instrumentation and pre-programmed sound design and sculpting to affect how we are able to approach the improvisation as musicians. The music will be performed to a projected image in the studio so that there is something in the performance that harks back to the silent era when music was sometimes performed with films.

Samples and Initial Test Shots.

Rough idea for a look on this shot

Above: This is the first test shot I’ve taken for the film it’s a time lapse of the gas towers opposite our flat. The time lapse really needs to be longer but unfortunately I ended up rained off as the large grey cloud loomed ahead. First lesson learnt is that I need a way of waterproofing the camera in case rain occurs during a long time lapse, and it’s also going to be a very good idea to weigh down the tripod especially when it’s windy (as it was the day I shot this), as any movement of the tripod is going to create a wobble in the lapse. Not good. Finally, it would be great to get some neutral density filters so that I can do longer exposures in daylight which will give smoother time lapse. This can be seen in the second video bellow here (longer exposures possible here without ND as it’s night time).

Ignore the music on the following it’s just there to make something dramatic out of a few shots:

These two brief pieces hopefully demonstrate some of the themes articulated in my outline but in the meantime I await better weather before I can begin to shoot the rushes for this project properly.

The stills bellow show the location the following evening and also the gas towers  being photographed.

Okay this is clearly not your average Go Pro Hero camera! This is the work of Chris and Jonathan Watts at British Technical Films. The lens is a 10mm aspherical and the GoPro has been fitted with a C mount to accommodate it. Truly wonderful, though I am yet to see some images from it. Chris tells me the plan is to fit the lcd backpack to it and to build a new mount for their Skybot system so the camera can fly. Expecting this to be a vast improvement on the GoPro lens! We will do a comparative video this week hopefully.

There are some elements of the camera style seen in this video that I will be using on my upcoming major PhD film production, I really love the crop and the slight shakey feel to the handheld here.

Had a quick tour of the Arden factory before Christmas and cut this quick edit for them.

I’ve finally purchased a Lilliput monitor and articulating arm to complement my 7D rig and it’s not disappointed me. I’m really pleased with the quality of the image and the scaling given the low price of the monitor. The supplied cable, hood, long life Sony type battery, and the ball head mount are all of good enough quality. I’m especially impressed with the cable as I was worried about the reliability of the HDMI connections. This tripod rig is going to be my A rig for shooting my next PhD film production, the hot shoe extension allows for mounting of a radio mic receiver to input into the zoom, so probably going to input a boom radio for drama production.

Okay – so I’ve really geeked out this morning with the exciting sneak peak at the new fully re-designed Final Cut Pro. So there were some rumours that Apple were totally destroying the app and that they were going to risk alienating dedicated users/followers! Only Apple could pull off a move this bold and it looks from what we see here that they will indeed pull it off. There is a lot of information missing from this presentation – no mention of the other ancillary programmes and it looks as though the new release will be a move away from the ‘all in on box’ production possible with Studio 2. However, the new release price point for fcp at $299 will certainly get many hot under the collar. Personal favorites here are – background rendering, the new ways of linking to secondary layers on the timeline, compound clips, the magnetic timeline, the look of the interface and some of amazing automatic features that will allow processes on ingest. Looking forward to hearing about the other apps and of course new ways of outputting and sharing our media…. blu ray anyone?

Larry Jordan has a great detailed review here http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1452

There were some interesting and highly emotive subjects and debates surrounding the impact of the move to digital, the arrival of 3D and the shortfall in costs of equipping cinemas with new projection systems. And the same traditional debates about whether digital technologies will ever match the richness and the clarity of film. The conference was encouraging in terms of my research as it confirmed that my arguments are extremely valid and current and will be valuable within the academic study of digital film.

The problem of digital archiving reared its ugly head in discussion and this seems to be one of the stumbling blocks of the digital age. Film is indeed a great medium for archiving and maintaining our digital works for future re-release and mastering on future formats presents the greatest challenge to contemporary practitioners. This is not something I had previously thought of integrating into my thesis (other than the problems of storing ever increasingly higher resolution media) but it is an issue I shall need to address in my thesis on ‘Digital Fluidity’.

I’ve moved the arm to mount on the left side of the body so took a little getting used to; the arm seems more isoelastic on the left side than the right which is odd and is going to mean modifying the vest as well but it’s starting to behave more like a steadicam! Running with the rig is interesting – fast running not possible to get continuous smooth shot yet partly due to operator (me) skill level and fitness (though at the end I’d just run a couple of hundred meters at full pelt!) and also partly due to the fact that the arm still isn’t doing it’s job properly. However the results here are vastly improved – can’t wait to get a monitor now so I can see what I’m shooting. Today I had to use the LCD VF to expose and focus a shot and then pretty much shoot blind as the cameras LCD is useless in direct sunlight.

STILL TO DO LIST:
Sled

• Cut bottom off the post to shorten by 10inches find another post that goes inside it to make it quick release extend-able
• Make monitor mount on standard 15mm rod assembly
• Make battery mount with 12v dtap for monitor power (current plan is to buy IDX and Vmount Plate and screw this to the Flycam’s provided battery plate
• Embed HDMI mini to HDMI cable and an RCA cable

Arm

• Replace steel cables with 3.55mm cable and add an additional spring in each arm section
• Re-grease bearings and replace bolt on the main gimbal arm attachment, look into getting a better fitting stud machined

Vest

• Replace standard webbing. Now that I’ve moved the arm to the left side of the vest the buckles on the vest are kind of in the way. Either get some new webbing sewn up with standard fittings or replace with ratchets
• Open up stitching and insert more padding