So far the blog posts about my professional development bursary work have been about the upsides to the project. This time I’ll present a round-up of some of the challenges – project work is often not plain sailing.
- Filming a whistling/ steaming kettle repeatedly in my kitchen during a heatwave. (Actually more fun than it sounds.)
- An unfortunate series of technical glitches which emerged on viewing much of our conservatory footage.
- Understandable delays as Simon adapts his working process in order to teach me the job of editing. (Penny drops – this is a two way learning process).
- A corrupted upload form a memory card.
Well. No-one ever said filming was going to be easy or without incident.
My response has been to dig back in to my own video practice to feel my way into the creative concept while I wait for our next shoot.
I’m such an immersive maker that I’ve found the systematic approach to film making fragments and distances my grasp of the film as a whole. I need to be able to see how it all fits together – image, music and voice work. This has been what got me into video making in the first place – a need to see and do for myself within collaboration. It’s ultimately why the editing skills I learn from Simon (on Final Cut Pro) are so important to me – ultimately I need to be able to make high quality videos on solo projects too.
So I made some basic capture on my iPhone and created a short iMovie to try it all out.
This was an opportunity to practice reciting my poem, and I’m so glad I did this before recording the voice work with Simon. I was nowhere near ready, and now resale that this is a new skill of it’s own and takes practice.
It’s been lovely to get back to making videos. I so needed to do this to articulate what I’m aiming for in my film collaboration.
I now feel we’ll need to pare things right back. The poem is the narrative engine and there could be a tendency to illustrate it and this would feel overdone.
My return to video has been hugely beneficial. I know exactly what I’m looking for.
