The last few yards 12.12.08

We came in at 10 and had 6 hours before it had to be handed in. Chase and I worked on finishing off editing. Joe and Rossi got all the production files printed and on to disks and Jack was in charge of finishing off the Making of and we wanted to make a DVD menu page for it so Jack was in charge of getting this sorted. Me and Chase after about 2 to 3 hours had the final edit done it had gone quite smoothly.

We did have a few problems though, the first was that in the part of the interview that i have spoken about earlier where the sound levels just dropped randomly in the middle of something Nathan was saying (we found out after talking to the Danny the lecturer that this could have been from something small as we were using a boom mic they are very sensitive to the direction the sound is coming from so just him turning his head could have caused this), is still there and we tried to use the audio mixer to drop part of his voice and raise the quiter bit. It wasnt having any of it, i had it set to touch and i would move the volume bar depending on the sound level and when i stoped it, it would all be set to the last place i had it before i stoped it playing.

We then had problems with making the DVD menu and Jack knew how to do some of it but not all of it, so i went around and asked some of the other editor's from the other documentary groups, including Hits, Kez and Danny, all of them wernt sure. I then saw that Hits had figured out how to do it and i went and asked him how to do it, but he couldnt remeber but pointed out the third year AV student Richard that had showed him and so i went and got him to come and show Jack how to do it. This shows how networking works within the university and between other students. Althoug even after this the DVD menus kept messing up and Richard kept cuming and giving a hand but then something happened and he couldnt fix it and then the computer Jack was on crashed and somehow messed up the making of files too i dont know if it corrupted them or wat though.

Come 3.30 we had the documentary finished, all the production files on cd and all the recce, safety and release forms photocopied. I was happy that we got it all in on time but it was a bit disapointing/ annoying that we couldn't have a dvd with dvd menus and have a making of section on the dvd as I think this would have shown the extra effort put into it.

Here is the final edit thou....i hope you enjoy it




Im really happy with the final outcome of the documentary, especially as we had so many problems like having to restart the editing on the last week. I think our group worked quite well together and everyone played their rolls.

After doing this documentary i have decided my favorit part was definately the editing and beleive this is possibly the direction i want to head into in the future and due to this I plan to try and make a making of video out of the extra footage we do have thou in my spare time and possibly a short trailer for the movie.

Editing 9 Video 11.12.08

This is our last full day and so came in at 9 am and have said we cant leave the computer room until all the work is done. Chase and I worked on editing the main documentary but chase had to leave a bit early to do something, Joe and Rosie worked on getting the documentary files together and Jack put together the making of from the footage off Chases camcorder. We had a slight problem with the new footage it was put into a VOB format, I'm not sure what this is but it was not supported by Premier Pro and so to be able to import it you had to change this to MPG. By about 7 pm I had finished a First draft 4 minute long version, i showed it to my group and asked what they thought the feedback i got was:
-Footage of the road was too long
-To incorporate 2 shots one of Nathan smoking a cig and one of Nathans hands (this is was planning on doing already)
-To fade pictures in overlaying the current ones
-To try and shorten some of the longer clips of Nathan grafting
I took this in and tried to change the video to incorprate this feedback into it. I had finished basically the final movie by 8.30 pm.
I was very happy with what i had got done today and for how long i had worked on it for. Joe and Rossi got most of the production files completed and Jack got a first edit of "The Making Of" done.

Editing 8 Finshed Audio 10.12.08

Today all we did was continue on getting all the interview together and making sure it was about 4-5 mintues long, as we cud cut it down more after we had got the main bit of it done. We didn't encounter any problems whilst doing this. Mark my girlfreinds dad had said on monday that he sent a compy of the footage from the american tape on dvd, and that arrived today but after i had gone to uni so we couldn't look/ work on it today.

Editing 7 Song, Narration 9.12.08

I was ill yesterday so didnt know how much the group had managed to get on edditing with, i found out the had cut up the footage except for a little bit of the Interview. There was a slight problem now though that where i said before about trying to get the image of Nathan fading into the Oxygen Thievez picture, now the image of Nathan wasnt showing up at all. We went and asked Owen if he could fix it. He wasnt sure wat was wrong with it to start with. I told him that the still of Nathan was actually video running at 0.1% speed, and he said we shud try making a still of it. We wernt sure how to do this so he showed us and basically all you had to do was set the point on the timeline to the frame you wanted then go file - export - frame. We did this and then changed the video of nathan to the still of him and it worked fine. So it was time to start putting the story together. This went quite well and by the end of the day we had about 2 minutes of the story done. Joe also came up with a new song for us to use which is a song by The Specials called Ghost Town.

Editing 6 Finish Capturing and Intro

Today we captured the other tape. We wrote down the time codes for the footage from the Above Gallery and The Russel Youth Centre, we didn't write down the time codes for the Interview though as i think no one was at the computer for the whole time it was capturing. After we had captured all the footage back on to Premier Pro (and saving onto Chas's hardrive now as we figured out that the Hell on Earth song messed up mine and Joe's ext harddrives and didnt want it to ruin our new footage) we bagan setting up the begining of our documentary again exactly as we had it before. We came against a few small problems here though the first was that a certain part in the interview was going really quite and we couldn't remember how to use the audio mixer so we asked Danny (a lecturer) how to do it. He came and showed us where it was and then showed us how you must change a tab to "touch" on the selected track of the timeline (1,2,3,4 etc) and then you play the movie and as it goes through you move the sound level up or down depending what you want. The second problem we had was we were trying to have a still of Nathan fade into a Picture of a grafiti by the Oxygen Thieves (the grafiti group that Nathan is part of) by changing the opacity of the two pictures but it wasnt working properly and it kept jumping we could not figgure out why. We decided to leave this problem for now and move on with the project. We next put in a film Chase had taken on his camera at one of the Detonates. Detonate is a premoter/ organiser of drum n bass, dubstep and hip hop nights at various clubs. We used this footage as in the interview Nathan is talking about how the rave scene has helped to inspire him, he also latter goes on to talk about how he designed flyers for a drum and bass night which is detonate.

Editing 5 Game Over 4.12.08

We were still having the same problems today. We asked Debs if she had any ideas of what to do and she said to save regularly and when i told her i was, also to see if saving some where other than my harddrive worked but again we needed Owen. We did get some feedback today from debs and a few other class mates. here are some of the feed back we got:
-didnt like where we had put some pictures of flyers into whilst nathan was talking about when
he was designing flyers.
-a good first shot very bright and clourful
-Too much of just nathan painting - more vairety of shots
-The titles needed to cum up slightly later and stay up for a bit longer
After having got the feedback we went to find Owen. I explained the problem and he said to check the scratch disks which i checked and they were all set up to save to the computer whilst the project was saving to my ext harddrive and this seemed to work for a while but then the problem occoured again. At this point we thought it could be possible that the song Hell on Earth had a virus and thus managed to corrupt the files so it was decided that we had two options. We could either stick with this and hope it stopped messing up or we just had to start all over. We ended up choosing the second option and started capturing again. We only captured one tape, whilst it was capturing thou we wrote down the time codes of any shots that we thought looked good this then makes the edditing easier as u can just flight through the footage to the time codes you already have written down. We had forgotten to do this the first time we capptured the tapes.

Also remember the extra camera we took with us belonging to Chase? well as its an american camera we couldn't get the footage off it the normal way but my girlfreinds dad said he may be able to do it for us and so we sent the tape off to him today also.

Editing 4 Problems Really Begin 3.12.08

We went in and started working on the edit and very soon the problems began. Everytime we made any head way an error message would pop up saying that there was a problem saving certain files and we would loose everything we had done in the last 20 mintues or so even thou i was saving the files under 3 differnt names. This problem kept occurring all day and so decided to go and talk to Jools and see if he had any ideas of what to do. He basically told us to try and save the data onto the desktop rather than the hard drive but to do this we had to speak to owen to get a special login and password for the editing software and he was not around. We neva really got any further on the work today because of these issues.

"Hell On Earth" 2.12.08

My dad came over to visit today from switzerland and i think this left joe on his own editing. i was going to go in and help him after my dad had left but about 4.30 pm i got a txt. Saying that joe had just lost everything he had done and error messages were cuming up and he couldnt get the song we wished to use "hell on earth" on to the documentary and thought it was something to do with his ext harddrive. So later that night he came over to my house with his hard drive and we got the song onto my ext harddrive i plugged it into my computer and straight away a message from my virus scanner came up saying Trojan detetected, i healed it and that was that for today.

Editing 3 The beggining 1.12.08

Today we worked on getting the start of the documentary rolling. Chase and i had a seminar in the morning and so worked on it here and got about the first 15 seconds done with out too many problems. It seemed to be running smoothly.

Later in the day Joe and Jack worked on doing some edditing but typically as we always have to have problems the program crashed after 2 hours and they lost all the edditing they had done.

We then worked a little more on the beggining in getting the write fonts we wanted for the title screens and changing the spaces between the letters and getting the overall layout of the beggining exactly how we wanted it.

Editing 2 Still Cutting 28.11.08

Today we worked on the editing for about 4 hours. We started by finishing off cutting up the footage from nathans workshop which didnt take too long as we had done most of it the previous day. And then we started cutting the interview even more, again cutting up the small pauses but making sure not to miss off ends or begginings of words. We then started to place differnt bits of cut up footage together to make get the basic story. The hardest part of this was because Nathan tends to almost slur his words which made it hard to get cut points. Also the change in tone in voice from one part of the answer to another makes it hard to put together. It was off putting as we were using the film obviously where we had cut one bit and put it with another the video we were seing was him tweeking out and looked as though he was twiching constantly from where he was sat slightly differntly in the shots and made us think the audio wasnt running smothly when in matter of fact it was.

Editing 1 Cutting

Finally the bit that i have been looking forward to the most being the editor and finding it fun to do. Chase and I started doing the edit in a seminar. We had decided that the best way to approach it was to speed up the visual bits and cut out what we want and delete anything we didn't think we would use. The lecturer then came over to see how we were doing and said that he recommended cutting the audio first and laying it out so that it makes a story so we stooped cutting the footage from the studio and tried to cut the interview that we had recorded with the edirol but it was really quite and the sound quality wasnt very good, so we started cutting up the filmed interview. We basically were cutting out all the footage that was before he started answering the question and allot of the pauses or errs and ums which probably took up a good 10 minutes all together! This took about 2 hours to get the footage down to just the parts we thought we may use which was about 15 minutes long.

The rest of the group now joined later in the day and we started cutting up the footage of him painting the graffiti. First of all we set the speed to about 200% and then started cutting out all the shots we didnt want and kept which shots we all liked, if there were any that were unsure i put them too a differnt line on the video timeline. this took about another 2 hours again but we didnt manage to get it all done but had about 10 to 15 minutes of footage again.

I was quite pleased with our days work and had enjoyed starting the edit.

Pictures

Chase and I went walked around Nottingham looking for potential places to film and took some pictures, i am not sure when this was though as i didnt keep ontop of my blog and didnt write down the dates, but here are a few of them all the same:

Capturing the footage 26.11.08

It was time to be bored for 2 hours as we put the tape into the machine opened up Premier Pro pressed play and then record. We then got to sit and wait untill the film had played all the way through with the first tape then again with the second tape....

Shoot 3 The Interview

We collected the same equipment as at shoot 1 but had also got a boom mic. Chase and I explained to the rest of the group the feed back we had got from the seminar so that Jack (the camerman) could think about what shots to take. We got there and set up a place for the camera and where the light was going to go and set off on the interview asking the questions as seen in the proposal. It went quite smoothly and Nathan has been on camera before and so didn't take long to loose the nervous that showed at the very beggining of the interview. We got alot of usefull information and audio that we could straight away tell would work well in our documentary, as he gave long answers and told us some stories such as about his parents going to see his work and what they think of his art work.

I think overall the shoot was a success and we left with around about an hour also, but again it took longer than we had originally planned for it to take and missed out on getting shots of his studio he has upstairs and some of his other work he had at his house.

Feed back

During one of the semminars soon after we shot all the groups showed the footage we had so far from our documentarys. Whilst watching ours we realised, as we planned on only doing a voice over during the documentary we didnt take a mic with us to record any of the audio (except what we got on the edirol) and it didnt have too much to keep everyone entertained. The main bit of feedback we got was basically that people wernt sure if we had a large enough variety of shots and footage to put into our documentary. We originally were not planning on showing him at all and were only going to take the edirol, but now we thought we would take a HVR-Z7U camcorder with us also if only to do as Joe our director had mentioned about only showing his mouth or his hands to give the audience a slight glimpse but not give away what he looks like or who he is.

Shoot 2 The Above Gallery, Street Art, Russel Youth Centre 21.11.08

Today we drove around to a few places that Nathan had told us to go and look at to see his art work and other graffitis. We started off with The Above gallery which is above Oh My Gosh record shop, which had some of the work he has done and other art for sale. We then went to around the Blueprint club area where we got some footage out of the car whilst driving past and a wall that had a few large grafitis outside it. Finally we went to the Russel Youth centre which had a few basket ball courts outside the back full with graffiti some that he had done. We were all happy with this footage especially the shots taken whilst driving past.

The Shoot of the graffiti.19.11.08

Chase and I had gone the previous day to check that it would be possible to get the equipment as i hadn't had an email back saying if we were able to get what equipment we had requested. We were doing our shoot in the evening as it was inside his studio, so we went and collected all the equipment which was:

- Sony HVR-Z7U camcorder and tripod

- Light and stand with some gloves for safety against burns.

- Reflector
-Edirol R-09 Audio Recorder

Chase also took his small hand held camcorder as we want to add some extras onto our DVD such as the making of.

Rosie had her car which meant we could just pile into that and drive to the studio.

On getting to the studio and setting up the equipment we asked Nathan to explain the order he had to paint the piece and what he was planning on doing in order to be able to get good shots of the piece.

We had asked him to paint a character that represented himself (seen below). After getting to know him a bit i can see how the overall angry feel to the graffiti portrays his slightly angry side he has and has mentioned. To explain the rest of it from head downwards in the had the buildings show the urban style of his art, the spray can is for the grafting obviously and the skull and cross bones a dark side to him. The paint roller in the one hand represents art and how much he loves to paint. I think the colour, especially of the body make it look quite criminalish which represents the criminal side of graffiti. We didn't need to use any lighting as there was enough light in the studio.

We ended up getting about an hour worth of footage at the end of it which myself, Chase and Jack (the cameraman) watched when back at our house and thought about what shots we thought were good and which ones we may not want to use, although we did not write this down which now i would have known to do.

The shoot went well overall and everyone seemed to be enjoying it and contributing. The only draw back was we were planning on trying to get the interview done that night also which we ended up running out of time to do, as we were there from about 5.30 till 9 this meant that we organised to shoot the interview at his house on Monday. This meant we didn't use the Edirol to much we did get some audio of the spray can and background noise though.

Here are some of the pictures from the shoot:

More Problems 17.11.08

Today we took the forms and the storyboard in to uni, but we could't find a lecturer to sign the forms before the equipment store had closed, which was our first problem we then found out that the forms were not done well enough and had to fill them out again, we ended up getting them signed but this meant we had to cancel doing the shoot today and planned with Nathan to do it on Wednesday. We also sent an email to book out the equipment for wednesday 19th. We left the storyboard however on Jools desk as he wasnt about.

Problems with our forms and story board 14.11.08

Today we went to give our forms and our story board to Jools but hadn't got the supervisors signature as we wernt too sure who this was meant to be, we found out it was meant to be Nathan as it is his studio we are filming in. This then caused a bit of panic as we were planning on filming on the monday, luckily he was in the pub later that night that Rosie another member of my group works at and she was able to get him to sign it. Jools also said that our story board wasn't really up to scratch but gave us the weekend to work on it.