One Minutes

Right, it's about time I put something up about the progress of the second part of the video module. Exciting brief this one, working in a team of 3 (myself, Rob and Szymon) making a 1 minute film. Started this one out spending a lot of time watching the winners and entries for various minute film festivals from the last few years (well, as much time as you can spend watching 60 second films). Standards varied considerably, there were several on The One Minutes that were really quite poor. Nearly everything on the filminute site was really good though, and it showed the variety of ways you can make something really interesting and engaging in just a minute. As we were all quite into this brief, we decided to make several films, making one each on a more individual basis, with input and help from each other as it was needed, and to make one film as a proper collaborative team effort. After getting together a few times, in various states of sobriety, we came up with a pretty big selection of ideas to work from, in terms of both content and style. Collectively we worked on a documentary (mockumentary really) about the new blood sport of slug sumo. My individual effort is a misleading, anti-climatic drama.

We made a lot of effort on this one to ensure the production quality was high, getting the lighting, white balance, exposure, focus etc as dead on as possible. The things that could have really done with improving on mine and Katherine's video for the first part of this module were the white balance being a bit off and the focus being a bit soft, so I was keen to try to improve on those areas for this part.

My ideas went through several different stages of evolution before coming to their final versions. Steven D. Katz, in his book Film Directing Shot By Shot, writes 'As I understand it, the imagination does not guide the hand, but is led by the hand when we have forgotten ourselves in the application of some craft. Once each stage of invention is committed to some substantial form, it is like a mirror revealing the imagination to itself. Suddenly, things we did not see before become clear, or new possibilities emerge, and there is new material to work with.' This is probably the truest statement I've come across personally, in terms of getting an initial idea to fruition. More often than not, my ideas remain as just that, ideas. The times I do actually get pencil to paper, ideas usually open up in completely different ways to how I first saw them, and develop into something much better than the original thought. Same goes for when you're not sure where somethings going to go after a certain point, just get it down in some form, and a solution is that much closer. Going off on one a bit there, but it's just something I'm really realising the importance of, and I'm going to try to stick to it and hopefully generally be more productive, rather than having ideas knocking around without anything to actually show for them. Deep lesson right there.