Documentary Reflection

                  For this documentary project, my group members and I created a short film about The Shoe Game. This is a community of people who buy and sell the latest, most rare shoes, most of which are Jordans and Nikes. This was always an interesting thing to me as I’ve seen kids at school who wear a different pair of shoes every day and have collections worth thousands of dollars. I still find it very interesting although the amount of drama within our school shoe game was less than I first expected. This however, did not affect the quality of our film. I don’t think we could go too much further with our topic but I don’t regret choosing it. I thought having the freedom to choose our own topic was vital, otherwise I don't think we would have been as interested and this would have made the final result not as strong.

                  Throughout the process of making this film, I discovered that documentary filmmaking is much different than other forms of film. I found it to be much more difficult than creating a film where there are actors or just something experimental. In other types of films, lines can be changed and you are delivering something from your own imagination and can be creative, while with documentaries you must stick to the truth and not stretch facts to make the film more interesting. I also learned about editing a documentary and all the possible ways to format it. This allowed me to get more creative with how to edit it.

One of the most challenging aspects of the process was planning how the final result would look. Once you have all of your footage, information and even script for a voice over, it can be very difficult to see what the final product will look like. You may have a plan but it will always change until there is a stable rough cut on the computer. One of the ways I overcame this was to edit our interviews and parts that I knew would fit, and then recorded voice-overs. As soon as the voice-overs are added in, it becomes much easier to put in other b-roll. I under estimated how challenging this process would be but I found it very rewarding in the end.

                  If I were to do this again, I would probably focus less on what the final product would look like and plan out what information would go into the film first. I also would not write a script until all of our interviews were done because I found that what the kids had to say compared to what they did say had a huge affect on how the film turned out. Besides these few things I think we made a pretty strong documentary for our first attempt.

                  I think that it went generally smoothly for this first year. I thought that it was good to show us examples of other short documentaries but maybe you could also give more general ideas of how to structure the film. Also I think there could have been a bit more individual guidance throughout the process. Instead of going over some things with the whole class you could have weekly meetings with each group to go through what they need to work on and what’s going well. Overall what we needed was simply work time, which you did give us and truly helped. At first I was slightly stressed and felt rushed but once you gave us a bunch of full classes to work I was able to overcome some challenges and that’s what allowed us to finish.

                  Overall I think this project went smoothly and we were able to come out with a fairly solid documentary that I think captures The Shoe Game quite well. The deadline extensions helped a lot and without them we would have rushed and that would have affected the final product. I think showing some of our films to next year’s class would help them greatly. At least from our group’s point of view I thought this documentary project was a success. 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Review

     I recently watched a documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This is a Japanese, expository documentary starring the world's greatest sushi chef Jiro Ono. His restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro is located in a Tokyo subway station and has only ten seats. To eat there, you must make a reservation at least one month in advance and the minimum cost per meal is $300. Because you eat sushi as soon as it is prepared, the average meal is only about 20 minutes. Jiro himself has recieved many awards from Japan and is the only sushi chef to ever receive three Michelin stars, one of the highest if not the highest honor a restaurant can recieve. This documentary captures his perpetual need to keep pushing the boundaries of what he can do with sushi.
   85 year old Jiro Ono works along side his oldest son and several apprentices. The apprentices must work for years and years to master the craft of sushi. It took one apprentice ten years before Jiro allowed him to cook egg sushi and even then it took him hundreds of tries until he could get it right. The film also explains Jiro's background of living on his own since the age of nine and working in sushi resturaunts ever since then. Because his parents weren't around, Jiro pushes his sons to be the independent and great chefs like he is. Although his sons work just as hard as Jiro, one person explains that they will never live up to Jiro as he has become such a legend in sushi culture. In addition to working hard, Jiro and his son explain, that it is also the constant preparation and choosing only the right ingredients that makes a great sushi chef. They will meticulously plan out every detail including where each guest sits and will even make smaller pieces of sushi for women so they can finish at the same time as the men. The film shows how Jiro has come so close to perfection yet will never retire because he is always working to become a better chef.
   An interesting cinematic aspect seen in this film is the use of time lapses and slowmotion in the making of sushi. This shows how long they work, as well as the detail that goes into crafting each piece.  One dramatic aspect of the film is when they staged some dimly lit scenes with just Jiro and his son evoking a dramatic mood.This is showing how Jiro truly is the master of sushi and his sons will do their best to carry on the legacy. Another interesting literary aspect is the point of view. The filmaker made it feel as if the viewer was part of the conversation by having the camera be at eye level and filming conversations between people. This became interesting when it showed Jiro's fish and rice dealers.
    I would highly recommend this film to a foodie or someone who is interested in different cultures. Just seeing how long these chefs have been working for one goal is truly remarkable. If these topics don't interest you as much, you may find some parts to be slow however it will still be very captivating.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi    81 minutes     PG

Capture The Fall Film

    For our most recent assignment we were to capture our interpretation of fall as best we could in a one minute film. When I think of fall, the first thing that comes to mind is color so that is what I went out to capture. Here is my attempt at capturing the fall:

(Watch in HD)

   To make this film I used a Canon 7D with a tripod and edited the film in iMovie. I used a variation of shots to capture the colors and overall theme of fall. First I used a time-lapse, which is a long film of a setting sped up to show change at a high speed. For me that was capturing the changes in light and clouds. I did this by setting the camera by the window and recording for over ten minutes. I then took long chunks of the clip and sped them up by 2000%. I also incorporated lens whacking, which I showed how to do in a previous post. Besides these techniques I mostly used rack focuses and boosted the saturation in most clips to make the colors of fall stand out. In addition to capturing colors I showed the theme of Halloween because I feel that it is a very important part of fall as well. 

P.S. The coughing sound is not me. All sounds are part of the music file.

More filming and photography techniques coming soon...

5x5

• Clip 1: Kitchen Sink 
• Clip 2: Bathtub 
• Clip 3: Garden Hose
• Clip 4: Shower
• Clip 5: Dripping Bathroom Sink

    I created my 5x5 by filming sounds and movement of water throughout my house. I filmed these clips using a Canon 7d and used iMovie to edit it. One issue I found while editing my clips was that the shot of the dripping faucet had background sounds of the camera. To fix this I lowered the sounds in-between the drips so you can't notice it as much. I like the way it came out and I feel that even though the shots are simple they were well done.

   For our next independent film challenge I  feel that we should do something similar except this time incorporate music. One idea is we could show a story in less than 15 or 20 seconds then use music to help tell the story.

Article Analysis

     Tonight I read the article, "Preparing Students to Learn Without Us" written by Will Richardson. This article discusses the topic of using technology to learn outside of the classroom through the use of blogs and other resources. He mostly focuses on the idea of students finding a passion and building upon that. The point I found interesting about this article was that he suggested using a non-academic passion or a passion that is not talked much about in class and digging deeper into that and relating it to a class topic. For me it would be interesting to learn more about cinematography because one of my hobbies is photography and I could find relations between the two. I think the use of our blogs to learn more about a topic we are interested in would be a good thing to do within CAP. This would allow for a more personalized and exciting way of learning.

Annotated article: http://diigo.com/0sy4n

     Today I read, "Review: 'The Bourne Legacy' Retroactively Poisons the Prior Trilogy" written by Scott Mendelson for the Huffington Post. This review of The Bourne Legacy seems to lack much structure and focuses much of it's energy on personal opinion. What I can say about the structure is that paragraphs typical started with plot descriptions then carried into a critique of the film and it's effect on the Bourne Trilogy. After plot descriptions he soon described some of the acting (but not much) and continued to throw in his opinions. This film review lacked cinematography and editing comments besides one saying he liked the choppiness of some editing sequences. This review was also written in a rude and sarcastic tone which did not help me sympathize with the writer. He did not even convey a real theme (besides it didn't have one).
    Because of seeing this lack of structure I feel this review was confusing, so to help me and the rest of the class there should be some form of structure when we are assigned to write a movie review of our own. This would help with making sure we cover everything. Also when writing our own reviews we should be allowed to choose the topic and movie itself. Besides that there should be guidelines on how we write it.

Link to my annotations: http://diigo.com/0sua5  

   

Introduction

      Hi I'm Peter. I have two dogs named Floyd and Bayley. I play baseball and one of my hobbies is photography. The component of film making that most interests me is cinematography. Since fifth grade I have enjoyed going out and making short films with my friends. We never wrote scripts but our films still ended up being decent. This is still something I like to do however with more organization and planning.

     The most I ever enjoyed making films was in sixth grade when I lived in Germany. Me and my friend would spend our weekends coming up with stories such as a robbery or someone who is in love with nutella and would make them into films using our apartment building as a setting. We would both act, direct and edit.

 I think we could use this blog to:

• Share images related to our class discussions.
• Share films we make outside of class.
• Suggest new projects.
• Continue class discussions online.
• Share completed school projects with everyone.

One of the pictures I have taken. Shot in Copenhagen from the water using a Canon 7D.