Mix with the local gentry and don't crash Tarquin's Bentley

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: Seasonal Greetings Or Not

I'm renouncing narrative filmmaking.

At least for next semester.

This, to a film student, is apparently like moving from Christianity to Satanism, but, if so, sign me up with the Horned God, because fucking hell but narrative filmmaking has become irritating to do.

It's not so much the writing - although that has it's own annoying qualities - so much as recording the dialogue.

Be the first to tell me when I'm wrong, please, but dialogue recording for student films has proved - for me, if nobody else - to be the biggest ballache this side of the Alps. It's literally almost never perfect on the day, and ADR and Looping have yet to prove particularly useful, although perhaps more useful than the alternative.

The main reason for this is that we don't have sets - every location is, by definition, a found location, and if you have electricity points, then hey, you're bouncing already.

Last year, I made four short films of a fairly low quality. The first was, curiously, the best in sound terms; four conversations over a three-minute period, decent boom work. From there, it was all downhill; the second had some ADR (and, ambitiously, some foley work), but wasn't that great in sound terms. The third was a dancing film, dialogue-free, based around the cuts and the dissolves, and was pretty fun. The final one had an entire section of dialogue that was cut out, followed by a dialogue-free opening sequence that was pretty solid - nice visuals, but the rest of the film didn't materialise anywhere or anywhen. 

Of the four films, 25% had decent sound, 50% were all the better for being dialogue-free, and on the last one, the less said the better.

This year, the first film made had decent dialogue because we were, curiously enough, subbed all the best equipment for a day.

The second film, however, currently awaits editing, and I'm dreading it, because we pretty blatantly didn't have the good equipment. So continuity editing is going to be appalling, because the light changes over the course of the day, during a single conversation. The evening's filming should be fine, although it's kind of a reprise of a film from last year.

That last sentence should give you a bit of a clue about one of the major student film problems, however; time.

The filming took place over the course of a single fourteen hour day, at the end of which I was wondering why I'd thought it was a good idea in the first place, although to be fair I always ask myself that question upon making a new film.

I want to edit it, because there are some odd little moments of beauty in there. I've uploaded the footage - a process made laborious because the computer here in the Eton Crow offices with a working firewire port has a tiny hard drive and the computer with a large drive doesn't have a working firewire port, which meant transferring all the footage piecemeal from one to the other. But it's done, now, and ready, now, and I'm not ready, now, at all.

Instead, I'm ready to renounce my faith in narrative filmmaking. From now on, it's all music videos and maybe documentaries, baby, because no dialogue means no worries...

... At least, in theory...