Finding the right project can be pretty hard. It's not just the responsibility of the subject to hold an audience's interest, but mine as well as to make it enticing. Look at any number of documentaries. Ninety minutes of an elderly gentleman talking about the war can get pretty boring. If the interview is interspersed with photos of him during wartime, some well-timed music, and other footage (medals, family, home), you get the sense of a more fully realized story, and in turn a better movie. I was given some advice back in June by a vastly more experienced editor that a project that can tell a story, and tell it in an entertaining fashion through editing, would draw people in and open the doors to new projects. Simple enough, but now I needed to find the project in which to utilize this formula, and I've already been searching for months and months with little luck. Then I just looked next door. It was the kick in the butt I needed.
14-year-old Lauren Morrill and her family has lived next door to me all my life. I had remembered hearing from my dad that she raised rabbits through the local 4H club. What I didn't know until I started doing the project on her was that Lauren and her mother Colleen have essentially built a rabbit dynasty right in their back porch and back yard. They raise and breed a few different breeds, have shown them off at shows in a third of the country, won numerous awards, and have even sold them to other people. Their back porch is lined with dozens of floppy-eared beings of which I had no knowledge, and their living room is littered with rabbit show accolades. There was a lot of great fodder here.
So in the middle of July, I went next door with my camera for two afternoons. One spent getting footage of the majority of their rabbits, the other for a sit-down interview Lauren, footage of her prizes and magazines she's been in, and more rabbit B-roll. Over an hour of footage in all that, in the finished project, amounted to a little over ten minutes.
I decided to shoot it in 4:3 aspect ratio. I always prefer widescreen, but because my version of Final Cut Pro is a little outdated, the exporting codec that would offer the widescreen format still lead to black bars on the top and bottom and stretches the picture just a little. I wanted this footage to be in the best possible condition when exported into a Quicktime movie, plus I was playing around with some new editing tricks and didn't want them screwed up by the aspect ratio. Such editing tricks included using new kinds of titles (the ones I've done in the past have been really basic) and cutting to still shots with some motion to them. It all went really well and led to some nice montages within the project. These tricks combined with the usual transitions and B-roll played over the main interview definitely spiced things up.
My one big self-criticism is the sound quality. Lauren is very soft-spoken, so I used my camera's regular mic so I could pick up her voice in full two-channel audio. Unfortunately, I did not take into account how loud the air conditioning would be picked up. Live and learn, so I worked with the sound enough to make Lauren's voice much more audible. The other option would have been to use my XLR shotgun mic, which would only pick up one channel of sound, and then fill the other channel with the background music. The other drawback, related to the sound in general, was that I was interviewing Lauren on my own while the camera, positioned in front of her while she faced me at an angle, just ran on its own, so I wouldn't be able to check the sound while in the middle of talking to her. Plus it just felt a little better to rely on the built-in mic as opposed to a battery-powered mic I need to keep an eye on. Nevertheless, the sound is passible and Lauren is easy to understand in the finished project. The music I used was a mix version of Train's "Hey Soul Sister," chosen because it was one of Lauren's favorite songs and had purely instrumental sections I could isolate and repeat in the track.
I'm very happy with the finished short and feel I can hang my hat on it. It can lead to some good word-of-mouth as more people see it. I've already received extremely positive feedback on it from Lauren and her family as well as my own. The full project is available upon request - for a good price (to make up for used resources) - but for now I put the opening moments of it on YouTube. Just a note that I imported the finished Quicktime movie into iMovie for the benefit of that program's easy YouTube sharing capability, but iMovie enhanced its 4:3 ratio to 16:9. It still looks fine but isn't reflective of the finished project. Check it out HERE and let me know what you think.
More information on Lauren and her rabbits can be found at her own web site.
No comments:
Post a Comment