EVALUATION - QUESTION 4 - DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY II

My second director's commentary for 'Textual Chemistry' accompanies the film's opening sequence and has been uploaded to Google Drive. The commentary answers the following question:

Q4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

 

This is the script for this director's commentary: 

Hi. I’m Tali Lewis and this is the second of my director’s commentaries about my new romantic comedy ‘Textual Chemistry’. In this commentary I want to talk about the planning, production and post-production of my opening sequence, and the ways I integrated technologies across the project. 

I used a Panasonic 4K digital camcorder to film all of my footage, which was lightweight and portable. I stabilised all of my shots by attaching the camera to a tripod, which made the filming process much smoother than I had anticipated. I learned a lot from my test shoots about camera placement and shot composition, which helped cut out lots of mistakes on the day of filming. I knew that the camera had a large memory, so I made sure a filmed lots of extra takes, adding a number of extra shots to my shot list. This made a huge difference during the editing because I always had a choice of shots to pick from. I could film lots of extra footage, adding to the shots I had written down on my shot list. 

I edited my opening sequence at college, in the editing suite, using a PC and a laptop. Using Adobe Premiere Pro allowed me to carefully organise my chosen footage onto a timeline for continuity, and the trim tool meant I could cut each shot down to the right length before assembling the shots together. Once I had divided my shots into separate bins for Amy and Jack, I alternated between the two so that I could show the differences between the two characters by cross-cutting between them. I added titles at certain points, which I had created using Photoshop, and I also used some of the software’s more advanced tools when editing the music around the shots, such as the rolling edit tool to overlap audio from one clip with the visuals of another.

I used Blogger to record separate posts for all of my research and planning, including analysis of existing opening sequences, research into fonts and music, and for presenting my shot lists, storyboard, my prop and costume lists, and my finished sequence. I added images (from Imp Awards), videos (from YouTube) and sound clips (uploaded to SoundCloud), alongside links to websites I used for my research, and created a theme for my blog which matched the romantic comedy genre of my film. 

Accessing websites was an integral part of my research into genre, fonts and certificates, but was also central to my planning. The BBFC website, for example, helped me understand the UK ratings system, so that I could choose the most appropriate rating for my romantic comedy. I was able to see the ratings for existing romantic comedies and the reasons those ratings had been given. This helped me decide that ‘Textual Chemistry’ should receive 12A because of its content, a certificate that would help me target a younger audience.

I needed to conduct research into fonts that I would use on my title cards and a number of websites were useful in helping me pick my final font. I used websites such as DaFont.com, which allows fonts to be downloaded for free, and font meme which categorises fonts by film genre. Dafont.com has a feature where you can type the name of a film into any font, so I was able to see which fonts captured the genre aesthetic I was after.

For the research and planning of my audio elements of the project, I used Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube. On Spotify I was able to listen to romantic comedy soundtracks which helped me pick an appropriate song for my genre, and also create a playlist of potential songs. I uploaded any sound effects, but also these evaluations, on SoundCloud and embedded them into my blog. I used YouTube to source some of my potential songs, but I mainly used YouTube to access existing opening sequences for analysis, uploading these to my blog as well.