LEARNING JOURNEY
We changed the original plot of the story 2 times because with the footages we had, it would be impossible to follow through on the intended stories. Our first plot was to show the band as normal civilians by day and Rockstars by night but we realized that most of our footage consisted of their night lives and a bare minimal of their day lives and given the band’s tight schedule, we were not able to come to a compromise to get the footage we required.
We then decided to revolve the story around the band itself and then finishing off with a climax of the band performing at the Night Festival but the rain on the day of the festival meant that we had to change our plans once again.
Thankfully, there were still other on-going performances going on at the Night Festival and since these performances also tied in with the concept of performing arts, we decided to include them in our film as well.
While editing the film, we encountered several setbacks as well.
On the first day of our editing; a day’s worth of work went down the drain as we forgot to save the scenes that we digitized from our tapes.
When we finally started on our editing, we realized that we were working using the files we saved into the hard-disk and not the Mac itself, and when we unplugged the hard-disk, the media would go offline and we were unable to play the clips. Much time was once again spent transferring the clips and redoing the edits.
Problems faced during filming:
We also encountered problems earlier during the process such as timing, venues and technical problems. At the start, due to the different schedules of each member, finding the dates and timings for all members to meet up was a pretty difficult task.
However, as time went by, we overcame this problem by compromising our personal commitments so that all of us could meet up often enough to discuss our art direction and filming angles and script.
Secondly, the venues of the jamming studio of the band were also a problem. The jammimg studio that they frequent was very far away from school and the homes of most of the team members. Thus, meeting on time for jam sessions was also a problem at the start and due to the availability of the public transport near the studio, the team had to leave filming earlier than we wanted many times.
Thus, some good candid footage might have been missed out this way. Lastly, we also encountered problems with our tapes as a few of the tapes we bought were faulty and whatever we filmed was faulty. Thank goodness that the footages captured in those tapes were very little thus we bought new tapes and checked them first the second time round and continued filming there after.
Problems faced during editing:
We also faced editing problems. The biggest and worst obstacle we faced was the fact that we were all still pretty new to Final Cut Pro as because due to the lack of practise, all of us were helping one another to figure out how to use FCP to edit the film the way we wanted to.
Thus, we took a lot of time going on youtube to search for resources to teach us how to use FCP. On top of that a lot of time was used to trail and error the different effects on FCP, this caused us to have less time to come up with our final project.
Also, on the 1st day of our editing, we did not save any our digitised footages and this caused us to lose a lot of precious time. We overcame this by asking other friends and the STA staff for help and while one member was editing the rest of the team took turns to research online on how to use FCP. This helped our team a lot in editing.
