rough cut
August 19, 2008
Here is a very basic (just using imovie) scrapped together product of some of the footage I took last weekend. I want to re-shoot a lot of this, but this should give the pacing/feeling I’m going for. and…I think I want to use that song. tell me what you think…keep in mind this is supposed to be very rough. and I’m just using a crappy home camcorder….
I like it. Jade seems very natural in most shots. The music is very evocative. I like the fort in her room. I wonder if perhaps it would be better to just hold that wide shot of the room showing the fort longer and cut the panning-across-the-room part which felt weird to me because because we’ve already seen this stuff. I understand you’re trying to show the character of the room but maybe that could better be done by cutting to shots of various other objects we haven’t seen yet. Maybe the pan would feel better, though, if you had a tripod which I think you really need to have. Overall rating: awesome (on a scale of not awesome to awesome).
Yeah, I took lots of random “insert” footage and that pan across the room was one of them. It wasn’t planned and I wasn’t sure if I liked it, but I felt like I needed at least one more shot before going inside the fort for pacing purposes. I actually preferred going from a wide shot to a close-up shot of the parakeet. but the one shot I got of that was so dark you could hardly even see the bird at all.
I tried just re-taking that yesterday with better lighting but something about the footage didn’t feel right. I think I might want to just re-create the entire room/fort and re-shoot that first part. I can do that without Jade and still keep the little montage of her inside the fort with the lamp.
You don’t think her concentrated face-scrunching is distracting? I wasn’t sure if it looked natural or not. I didn’t tell her to do that, and I think it is okay but I wanted another opinion.
Oh and I am going to re-shoot the beginning where she opens the closet door. As you can see I cut out everything in between. I shot stuff for that, but I ended up hating all of it. It might make it a little choppy but I feel like showing less and letting more be inferred. It’s not supposed to be much of a linear story anyway…just a mishmash of images. a vignette that gives a feeling more than a tightly compacted mini-story.
and now my over-analysis is done. =]
There are six different shots of Jade inside the fort. The ones that look natural are shots 2, 3, 5, and 6. Shots one and four look like she’s faking it.