Friday 19th August, 2011

Our second day at the Bayside Film Festival started out pretty much the same as the first one. I got there early, found Cameron, and then waited for everyone else to arrive.

It started out with youth documentaries. As more people came into the cinema, I noticed there were a lot more schools than the previous day. And majority of these schools were consumed of students much closer to my age. This gave me some of the optimism that I had lost from the previous day's films, considering that most of the student piling in were in fact the directors of these documentaries that we were about to watch.

And just as I thought, the results were much better than Thursday. I enjoyed more of the films and a couple of them were really well done.

There was the same few films after the first youth documentaries that were on Thursday, so Rob told us if we didn't want to watch them we could walk around for a bit and come back for the guest speaker of the day.

I was at first going to stay, but considering I had literally just seen all of these films, I quickly changed my mind.

Once we were back, the guest speaker came out. These are the notes I took during his talk:

Amiel Courtin-Wilson

• Amiel has been making films for about 20 years.
• Made his first film at age 9 about smuggling cocaine.
• Both parents were artists.
• Had made about 4 or 5 short films in Super8 at age 16.
• "Bastardy" (his second film) was a documentary about an aboriginal actor and a cat burglar. 
• He followed his feature man around for years documenting his life.
• He worked a lot of time with ABC and would make 3 or 4 documentaries a week.
• First film was called "Chasing Buddha"
• "Each story deserves a very individual narrative treatment."
• Believes more in a subjective way of filming, rather than objective.

These are the notes I took after watching the clip they showed:

• Opening credits to the film (it is about 83 minutes long)
• Started making 'Bastardy' at age 22-29.
• The man would constantly take drugs and every night steal from 5 or 6 houses.
• "A junkie's life, is a junkie's life, is a junkie's life."
• The man moved into his house and they became very close - which helped develop the film.
• The feature took almost a decade to film. (From the man being 58 to when he was 65).
• He was more interested in the person rather than considering him just as the subject of a film. He got to know him as a human being.
• Man's name is Jack.
• Made a "lifetime journey". It began talking about the theatre company he helped start, to the darkness and turmoil throughout his life, to when he turned his life around and got a lifetime achievement award from the theatre company 40 years later.
• 'Bastardy' had about 300 hours of film and took about 30 weeks to edit.

5 tips Amiel would give to film makers:

1.  Trust yourself. (Trust your instincts)
2.  Keep your eyes open. (Be receptive)
3.  Keep a journal.
4.  Be sponges.
5.  Always keep looking.

Thursday 18th August, 2011

Today was our first day at the Bayside Film Festival.

The program didn't start till about 10 o'clock, but I got dropped off at around 9, so I decided to get a coffee. Not long after I got there, I found Cameron, so we stayed together till the rest of the class and Rob came.

From 10 till about 11 we watched Youth Documentaries and Digital Stories. They were okay, but all of us got very bored, very quickly.
Next from 11-12 were Youth Documentaries. These ones were slightly more interesting, and you could tell they were done by a more advanced youth than the first clips.

After lunch there was a guest speaker, who I found very interesting and inspirational.
These are the notes I took on the day:

Jonathan Auf Der Heide

• Originally wanted to be an actor but wasn't feeling fulfilled.
• Went to VCA film school in 2004 and liked everything they did.
• He didn't have the confidence to become a film maker originally.
• 1st year he made three of his own films at VCA.
• Researched Alexander Pierce because he became interested by the story when travelling around his home town in Tasmania. He couldn't believe no one had made a film for his story yet, so he decided to go further into it and tried to develop deeper into Australian criminals in history and the concept that to be a man you must be 'strong'.
• He sent around his movie and beforehand he had to try and raise money for it. His dad won the lottery and he won a few awards (at VCA, etc.) 
• In the story, 8 escaped and one survived due to them killing and eating themselves.
• He tried to relate the audience with Alexander and go into what it is to be human, and what it is to survive.

These are the notes I took after the short clip that we watched during Jonathan's talk:

• He set up showing that the convicts had "a fate worse than death".
• "These are the men that the land has forgotten. Time has forgotten them."
  - Even the dog was eating and they were not.
• All of the actors grew their own beards and lost weight for the film (also learnt other languages and accents, etc.)
• A lot was shot in Victoria (80% probably), and Jonathan location scouted himself.
  - But had to shoot in Tasmania to get the wide landscape shots.
• They paid everyone $200 a week because they didn't want anyone other than themselves in dept.

Overall, I had an enjoyable day, and I personally found Jonathan very inspiring for such a young director.

Wednesday 17th August, 2011

In todays lesson, we all jumped onto our computers and went straight into completing the International Student Program clips. I was pretty happy with my end result, but I knew it could be improved much more.
I really wanted to re-film a lot of the footage, and after watching mine again, I found that there were a lot of jump cuts and it didn't flow as well as I was aiming for it to.
But despite this, we all had to get ours done.

After everyone felt they were finished, we all went around with Rob to each computer and watched everyone's different version. As we went along, I could tell that everyone had both something better and worse to someone else's. This made my nerves go down a bit as we got closer to watching mine.
It annoyed me though, because I was in such a rush to finish in time, I forgot to ask Rob how I could fix the sound. Thankfully, no one had really fixed the sound. I was the only one who had adjusted it it seems because I made mine louder. This became a continuous joke within the class, the fact that the sound was awful, but also the brown-on-brown in Denise's shot.

Once we had reached my video, Rob made a small comment about the jump-cuts, and I couldn't agree more. Luckily, that was the only critique I got.
Personally, after watching all of the class' videos, I found Darcy's was one of my favourites.

After this, we all sat down at the desks and discussed the next two days, which were when we would be attending the "Bayside Film Festival", which was a film festival for all of the local film makers and for the local schools.

Wednesday 3rd August, 2011

In todays lesson, Rob was away on ski trip, so we had a substitute.

We all knew what we were doing, due to the previous weeks lesson, and went straight to our computers to continue editing. I decided to further develop my International Students Program clip instead of doing the After Effects tutorials. This was mainly because the I.S.P was due much sooner than the tutorials, and also I had already done a fair bit of the tutorials so far and found it'd be more productive to finish that at a later date.

As I was editing, I was very disappointed with the sound quality. I tried to match all of the volume together throughout the entire clip, but there were some pretty fuzzy parts, particularly when Denise spoke.
Cameron tried to help me, but I understood he had his own work to do and was trying to fix the sound for himself, so I tried not to bother him too much. I made a mental note to ask Rob about it next lesson.

Wednesday 27th July, 2011

In todays lesson, we continued on from the previous week and worked on our International Students Program clip. Also, previously Rob had given us some tutorials to do for the editing program Adobe After Effects CS5, so I decided to get a move on with those.

The whole lesson was based on the computer mostly, which was quite draining after a while. Overall, it was a productive lesson and I got a fair amount of work done.

Wednesday 20th July, 2011

Today Rob sat us all down to tell as about Sandringham's International Student Program. He told us that we were to make videos to promote what the school has to offer.
As we all dispersed to our computers, we were informed that there was already footage (filmed by another year level a few years back) on the computers for us to use. This was partially good news, but not very good news. It was good because we could just concentrate on editing, but it was bad because we weren't sure as to what, or how they filmed.
It turns out the footage wasn't that bad, but there were a couple of shots where the sound wasn't very good or clear, and also there is one interview with Denise (the program leader) that wasn't very good looking. She had brown clothing on and there was a brown background...so in other words, it clashed quite badly and didn't make the school look like a very 'attractive' building.

With us viewing all of this footage, and starting to edit, this consumed most of the lesson.

Wednesday 1st June, 2011

In todays lesson, I tried to spend most of my time completing the tasks I hadn't so far. This included finishing any questions (from chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 15, 17). Luckily, I had completed the majority of the questions.
Considering this, I checked what else I needed to complete to be handed up. At this point, I was very thankful that I had finished all of the theory work that we needed to do, but I still had some prac to finish.
So in that case, I went straight to my computer and got to editing my music film clip (Bohemian Rhapsody) considering I had evidently 'wasted' my time the previous week. Thankfully by the end of the lesson I managed to pull together an edit that included a background.

At the end of the lesson Rob asked us to both put all of our prac work onto a disc, and also print out our blog entries. As I was uploading my work to the disc, I decided to put both versions of my music clip onto there just incase.

By the end of the lesson I had handed up my disc with all my work and all of my journal entries. I was fairly happy with the work I had done this lesson as I left.