EM8 Time-based Media
Extracts from an account of creating a film in Adobe
Premiere
Concept
Filming the Shield
Images of War
Backgrounds
Adding Sound
Titles
The Clock
Making the final video
Regrets? I have a few ...
Notes on producing a one minute video
I had the concept for the video very early on in the course. It was largely
sparked off by watching Tom Phillips' version of Dante's Inferno.
I liked the concept of using a multi-dimensional media approach to the poem, and
I wondered if more could be made of that. At the same time, I thought aspects of
the presentation were flat - it was very much square box within a square box.
(Or rather 4:3 ratio). Therefore, from a very early stage, the idea of doing
something with poetry appealed.
Secondly, the idea of the restriction of the requirement to produce a one
minute video introduced ideas. Obviously, the clock is closely associated with
the division of time, and I was reminded of the concept of the nuclear clock,
set at four minutes to midnight. I saw how I could telescope ("microscope"
might be a better word in this context!) the four minutes to four seconds at the
end.
This combination reminded me of Auden's poem, The Shield of
Achilles, a powerful condemnation of warfare, which links modern warfare
to the Trojan wars. At that point, I had the idea of the turning shield against
a tranquil rural background and the images of war shown on the shield, described
in the poem.
It was quickly apparent that I was not going to produce a straightforward
presentation of the poem. For one thing, it is too long. It would take over two
minutes simply to read. In addition, although Auden talks powerfully of the
horrors of modern warfare, he has no specifically nuclear references - and this
I did want to incorporate. Also, I could have hunted for images that captured
the scenes he was describing, but I felt this would take too long and was
probably unnecessary for the message I wanted to put across. The video, should -
I felt,use the poem - in the way that it was using images and music. Thus the
overall presentation became an interpretation of the poem rather than a
presentation of the poem straight.
I quickly decided to show four different aspects of war, presented
chronologically: ancient (represented by Roman war), medieval, First World War
and an atomic explosion. My original concept was for the shield to turn four
times - once for each segment. It quickly became clear that this was
impractical. Firstly, it would be too time-consuming - there would not be enough
chance for the audience to appreciate the image on the shield before it
disappeared. Secondly, it would be rather messy - with such a complex piece I
felt I should aim for simplicity where possible. The war images should be linked
by editing or possibly transition, but the shield should remain flat and
constant, after the initial turning.
At this early stage I also intended that the clock should be super-imposed
throughout the film, but faintly, only becoming more vivid as the film
progressed. Again, this idea was abandoned. It would also have unnecessarily
complicated the overall effect of the war portrayed on the shield, and the
sudden appearance of the clock after the bomb had gone off would, I felt, be
more striking and sinister. The sense of time passing was already suggested by
the ticking, faint at first, but gradually (and, I hoped, mysteriously) becoming
more dominant. In actual fact, there are rather fewer than sixty ticks, as the
clock is only heard for about fifty-two seconds. However, I don't know if anyone
will count them!
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I began by filming the shield. Some young friends supplied me with a small
gold plastic shield from their dressing up cupboard, and helpfully made a
circular silver one that, they thought, might look more historically accurate on
film. I did film both, but the gold one looked better. It did have the
disadvantage of an awkward shape, but I decided I would just find a way of
masking that as I went on.
As I was going to need to mask out the background, I muttered the magic
incantation, "Blue screen" and pulled that down in the photographic
studio as my background. This was probably the result of watching too many
documentaries. I could have used almost any colour and masked it out in
Premiere. A blue screen is used in film mattes as it does not reflect on human
skin. It did, with my relatively primitive technique, reflect slightly on the
shield, but just added a kind of mottled bronzed effect to the edges of the
shield when the matte was applied which, I felt, was actually rather effective.
I had thought of teaching myself Swivel to produce the shield as an
animation. The gulp my tutor gave when I mentioned this, and the gentle way he
suggested I use a real shield instead instantly convinced me I had been
proposing a marathon task. I stuck with the "real" shield.
To film the shield, I attached it to a bamboo pole, wrapped in the same
blue as the blue screen. This was suspended on a pile of chairs at either end,
to ensure stability. A friend carefully turned the shield from the horizontal to
the vertical while I filmed the process. To ensure that the shield would be
exactly in the middle of the screen, I made a string grid over the monitor
screen so that I could position it exactly dead centre. This was primitive, but
effective.
I then captured this into Premiere, as well as the film clips I wanted to
use. This went relatively well. I rarely had a problem with dropped frames on
any of the capturing that I did. I started by creating my work in a Presentation
preset so that I could work simply, and later made the full version. This had
only one problem, which I will discuss later.
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As a Film and Media Studies tutor, I had few problems obtaining the film
clips I wanted. The films I decided to use were, to some extent, iconic,
representing images of Roman, medieval, First World and atomic war.
Perhaps a more significant point here was that the first three clips were
in colour while the last was in black and white. However, I was able to use
this. The Roman sequence was produced in very rich colour, on a film stock
popular for spectacle in the 1950s and 60s. The medieval shots used the more
muted colour tones preferred in the 1990s. The First World War sequence used a
stock between the two.
When capturing this, I deliberately muted the saturation and hue, so that
the wars not only appear to progress chronologically but also move from rich
colour to monochrome. I do not want to overstate this, as it should not really
make too much of an impact on the viewer. Nevertheless, the technical aim was to
make the jump from the colour of the third extract to the black and white of the
fourth not necessarily imperceptible, but certainly much less noticeable.
I then worked on combining the images of war with the shield. At first,
the best I achieved was a square image super-imposed on the shield. Then I
discovered the wonders of the travelling matte, as described in the appendix to
the manual. That was my solution. I took an individual frame of the stationary
shield in its vertical position, exported it into Photoshop as a Pict, and
created a black and white matte there. This then enabled me to show the rim of
the shield and the background, with the pictures of war superimposed on the
centre of the shield. However, it was at this point that I received the first
inkling of a conviction that was to grow on me strongly. I should have done
Visual Image last term, and learnt all about Photoshop.
I should say here that I was already working on superimposition layers
before I had worked on my main film tracks. This was because I was intending to
place my background on the main track. I had always seen the shield and the war
scenes as a superimposition, so this way of tackling the video caused no
problems. This worked for me, as I had a very clear idea of where I wanted to
go. I am not sure it would be the best way for someone who was experimenting
with effects.
I then had to edit the war clips together. I quickly discovered a problem
with superimposition that I was not able to overcome - there seemed to be no way
of using transitions on the superimposition tracks. I had two choices - I could
fade, or I could cut. Unconventionally, in classic editing terms, I chose to
leap aeons of history with straight cuts. I decided to try for an effect that
linked aspects of the images to cover the cuts, so that the audience would at
first not realise the cut had occurred. I think this worked quite well. The
melee of struggling Romans shifts to medieval soldiers; the mud of Agincourt
links to the mud of a later Northern France, and the artillery smoke links to
the atom bomb explosion.
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Next, I turned my attention to the backgrounds. My original concept was to
use a single photograph of a beautiful, tranquil, rural scene. Then I decided I
could use several photographs, and move from one to another. It would
demonstrate that I could do transitions too, something that was proving
impossible on the superimposition track.
This was the plan, and I went hunting for photos. However, in a remainder
bookshop, I came across something that suited my purpose even better - a volume
of water-colours of the rivers and streams of England. Here was my pastoral
idyll with a vengeance. The slightly hazy, misty effect of the water-colours
actually formed a better contrast with the film images of war than any
photographs could have done.
I finally settled on four scenes. My choice was dictated by three factors:
firstly the water should not play too prominent a role; secondly the images had
to be peaceful and tranquil; and thirdly they should be roughly screen-shaped. I
scanned these in using Photoshop (another skill I learnt!) and then transported
them into Premiere. I extended the duration and used simple cross-dissolve
transitions to move from one image to the next. Again, the need for simplicity
dictated my choice of transitions; I did not want to have anything that would
distract from the overall impact of the war scenes on the shield.
Next I matted out the background of the shield on the first
superimposition track. At first, I did this simply by creating a matte that ran
throughout the film. However, this was unsatisfactory. The image of the shield
wavered between frames, despite the studio conditions of the original filming. I
would have to modify the blue screen background in Photoshop to achieve greater
consistency. It rapidly became clear that to do this for a whole minute would be
unbelievably time-consuming and - even more significant - would need vast
amounts of memory. Therefore, although I had filmed the shield turning and
stationary for a minute in real time, I created a film strip of the three
seconds when the shield was actually turning, followed by a single frame Pict on
the stationary vertical shield. I then worked with the film strip and the Pict
in Photoshop, building up a consistent blue background that could be matted out.
This was still very time-consuming, but effective. It was at this point
that I heard a murmur of "layers". I knew I should have done Visual
Image.
Re-imported into Premiere, the filmstrip was positioned, the Pict added
afterwards and its duration extended, and the matte applied. The visual aspects
of the video were almost complete, with one key omission. But I was now ready to
work on the sound track.
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I had decided that I would use a piece of English music, suggesting
the countryside very powerfully, and I eventually settled on Vaughan-Williams'
The Lark Ascending, with its lovely violin solo. I had already
decided to experiment with distorting the sound, so that as the images of war
progressed on the screen, the violin would become more screechy and penetrating.
The reading I decided should feature male and female voices over-lapping - the
account of Achilles' shield read by a female, the description of warfare read by
male voices - and relatively young male voices (the age that soldiers might be).
Originally, I thought about having the male parts read with a nasal 1930s middle
class accent, an echo of the reading of Auden's poem in the famous Night
Mail documentary. However, listening to people reading, I decided this
was unnecessary. The poem made a sufficient impact read with a 1990s delivery.
Recording the sound was the easy part - thanks to Tristan, Gavin, Andy and
the facilities of the music studio. I was able to record the music (or rather,
Tristan turned the knobs while I demanded, "Make the violin really scream
here!"). The clock tick was made by a metronome, as that could be conformed
to tick regularly every second, something one cannot guarantee with all clocks.
I then set to work to capture and edit the sound from the DAT I had
produced, and here was where I hit my first real problem. I really tried every
possible method of sound capture, and they all sounded dreadful. Audio capture,
video capture (video off, sound on), through the microphone, Radius Studio -
nothing worked. I knew I wanted my violins to screech - but not from the opening
bar! I could do without all the hissing too. Finally, I had a stroke of luck.
Working in the studio one Sunday, I ran into Tim. I explained the problem and
played him a few seconds of distorted Vaughan-Williams. He promptly offered to
help me make AIFF files of the whole thing. Okay, I should have done Electronic
Music too.
So this was what I did. I transferred the whole DAT tape into AIFF format
and simply moved the files into Premiere. The music was now perfect. The only
problem left was that one voice was slightly louder than the others. I adjusted
this in Premiere, but in the final version it still remains dominant, although I
took the volume level down on that AIFF file and boosted the others. This does
seem to be a problem with Premiere, as I think other people have discovered. The
quality of visual editing seems far greater than the potentials for sound
editing.
I should perhaps say that the clock tick, for some reason, captured
perfectly through audio capture, and I therefore did not make an AIFF for it.
However, the same problem with adjusting volume was clear here too, and I think
it probably becomes too loud too quickly.
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Next I worked on the titles. This was very simple. I designed them in
Premiere, black on white, exported them as Picts into Photoshop, reversed the
image to white on black, re-imported them and positioned them. I particularly
like my end title. It has resonances of slightly pretentious sixties films where
British film-makers strove to emulate the French New Wave and the brevity of
FIN, and at the same time it states what has happened. My opening titles are,
perhaps, too short for all but a very literate, speed-reading audience.
Here I thought about animating my titles, so that I could demonstrate the
use of motion. I tried this. Accomplishing the movement was relatively easy, but
it did not look right. I wanted the stark simplicity of the motionless titles.
Little did I know that using the motion keys to achieve stark simplicity was
something I was going to be sweating blood over all too soon.
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Finally, I set to work on the clock. These four seconds were perhaps
to cause me more grief than the rest of the video put together. First of all,
there was the problem of finding a clock. I thought it would be easy to use the
clock that sometimes shows before the start of a programme. Unfortunately, this
is never predictable. I even approached a friend at the BBC and asked if he
could get me film of one, but at my foot I could certainly hear Time's winged
chariot hurrying near. Then I had a stroke of what I thought was genius. I would
use the BBC clock at the end of the day. It was no problem to record it and it
also had connotations that would fit well with my film - the BBC with its
associations of reliability and security, especially in time of war; the clock
it used for the ending of a day, used to represent the ending of the world.
Brilliant, I thought, poor fool that I was.
The clock was recorded and, after a tussle (full hard disc) captured into
Premiere. I created a four second film strip to export into Photoshop. While
capturing it, I had taken as much colour as I could out of the original blue
background. The rest would have to be done in Photoshop. Layers? What were these
layers? I could do it frame by frame.
It was a big file. The opticals did not like it. Photoshop did not like
it. Working on it was like trying to convince a recalcitrant fifteen-year-old
that GCSE examiners do want you to use the apostrophe. But I persisted. Frame by
frame I wiped out the smudges of colour on the background. Then I increased the
magnification and, frame by frame, erased the BBC logo and the hour and minute
hand.
There are a lot of frames in four seconds of video.
So, finally the filmstrip was finished. I hauled it back into Premiere and
put it on the track. Now was the time to apply motion.
The problem was, the BBC service does not end at midnight. On the night I
had recorded, it had shown fifteen seconds of clock at twenty past two in the
morning. My four seconds were now somewhere down the right hand side of the
clock.
Now the motion command came into its own. I rotated the clock (working out
the degrees to get that hand pointing up towards midnight was sheer luck. No
mathematician, I could have been at it for days, but I struck out second time),
then told it to start and finish in the same position and stuck such a large
delay on it that it did not dare to move at all. It meant that my finished clock
was perfectly positioned and ticking down to midnight. The film was finished.
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There were, of course, problems with making a movie and printing to
video. At
first I had the presets wrongly set, and made the movie in JPEG
rather than Radius Studio - the jerkiness foxed me for ages until I finally
worked it out at 11 o'clock in the evening. The movie was finished at 1.30am. I
printed it straight to video - two copies - one S-VHS and the other to show
friends and family - possibly even, she dreams, to form part of a portfolio. I
rushed home and
played it. No sound. You can see the silent version on the
S-VHS tape before the final version. I failed to plug the audio socket in.
After a couple more hic-coughs the next morning (the sound-only version,
prized by the collectors of rare objets d'art, was erased), the final version
was produced.
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So, how do I feel about it now?
Well, firstly I can see weaknesses in it, which I would correct with more
time and if there were more machines available - I have probably had rather more
than my fair share as it is). When I did try to do a little more work, I was
unable to download the clock filmstrip from my optical to the hard disc, or even
to open it at all. I could probably overcome this with time but, unfortunately
...
I would extend the titles slightly. They are definitely over too quickly.
As they do not form part of the minute of the video, there is no excuse for
rushing them.
Secondly, I am not happy with the First World War images. They are jerky
and look slightly pixellated. I am not certain whether this is a problem
resulting from earlier work in a lower preset, whether it relates to the way I
altered the colour when I captured, or whether it is a simple case of too many
dropped frames. However, I think this is a serious problem I would like to work
on further.
Thirdly, I would still like to work on the sound more - particularly the
clock tick (should be quieter to start with) and Andy's reading (too loud
compared to Gavin's).
Finally, an aesthetic consideration. I am not happy with the flight of
arrows in the medieval clip. It works in the context of the original film, but
not so well, I think, in the shorts series of clips I compiled from the original
film for my video. The use of the sky is a distraction, when all the other
scenes have been of mud and bodies.
Apart from these niggles, I am quite pleased with the way I was able to
realise my concept. I think it works and has the impact I intended. People who
have seen it have reacted in various ways, but never with incomprehension. So
far the audience who has seen it has decoded it successfully, and frequently
made pertinent comments, not about the techniques or Premiere, but about what
the film has said, and I like that. Of course, this state of affairs might not
continue, or might even indicate that the work is trite ... I hope not.
Perhaps one regret lingers. I made my decision as to what I should do very
early on. I had a fixed concept, and I followed it through. I must admit I was
deeply envious as I saw some of the decisions others made as the course went on,
avenues I had closed off before I knew they existed. To use the analogy that we
had on the course, I had already picked my sandwich before I went into the shop,
and I do regret some of the flavours I failed to try.
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