Existence = Error - Final Film and Evaluation

FINAL EDIT

EXISTENCE = ERROR

by Alice Ball and Danielle Winter

EVALUATION

Research

When we began thinking about how we wanted to make our film, we took a lot of inspiration from the research we had done and the films we had looked at in class. Our concept for this film came from our short film we made on Digital Materialisation. We thought a lot about how the digital world has an overbear on our lives nowadays and how we could visualise this concept in a film.

Looking at films such as Piplotti Rist, Black Ice and Berlin Horse we gained an understanding of what experimental films are presented like and how we could go about beginning our film.

We also did a lot of research into articles surrounding the overtake of digital technology in the 21st Century and how the younger generation is now heavily influenced by things such as iPhones and social media.

We used some archive footage in our film as well, meaning we researched into old television adverts and the way technology was presented as a new life-changing thing.

Planning

As we had clear ideas to what we wanted to produce, I'd say our planning was really effective and made our whole filming and editing process run a lot smoother. We planned out everything we wanted to film so we had a clear check list, meaning we didn't miss anything out or have a lack of footage.

For our voice over we wrote a script of what we wanted to be said, over compensating so that we would have more footage to play around with and decide between. This meant that we wouldn't have to shoot more things in the editing weeks as we had more than enough to use.

Development

From the beginning we had a clear outlook on what we wanted to achieve, however this didn't stop our idea from developing throughout the filming weeks. We started off thinking a lot about archive footage and how we could achieve the concept of a digital overload. This led us to think about using a projector to project glitches and footage onto our own faces and bodies to achieve the idea that the glitches were taking over our minds.

Although we knew what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted our ideas to come across, the constant development of our ideas throughout meant that our ideas were stronger and the making of our film went smoother and we managed to try out a lot of different ideas before establishing what we really liked.

We also knew that we wanted a robotic voice to almost narrate throughout our film, so we did a lot of research and development into websites that would allow us to create a speaking robot with a voice that we chose and decided upon.

Edit

The editing process went pretty smoothly for us. As we had planned out what order we wanted the clips to appear in, it was mainly a matter of putting them altogether on the timeline and cropping them to how we wanted them, so the film wasn't too long and each clip got a fair showing.

We also watched a lot of tutorials to gain experience of how to use Adobe After Effects efficiently so we wouldn't waste time messing around and risk tampering with our footage and not being able to take back the mistake we would make. This sped up the entire editing process as we were able to just get on with creating the glitch effects and not having to mess around trying to figure out how to make them work.

Communication

Alice and I had really good communication throughout the entire filming and editing process. We were constantly discussing ideas and planning things together, so we were both up to date with how the film was progressing. It helped that we both had similar ideas to begin with, so by combining these ideas we were able to create something that we possibly wouldn't have been able to do alone.

We also improved each others weaknesses, as something things Alice was better at and could help me with, and some things I was better at. This meant that everything was flowing smoothly and we didn't really encounter many problems.

Time Management

I think because we had planned everything so well, this really improved our time management as we were really focused on what we needed to get done. We had clearly established our ideas and what we wanted to shoot, meaning we were very focused and able to complete our filming over two days. We also managed to shoot a lot of extra footage in case we needed it in the edit.

The same thing applied in the editing process, we had planned out what we wanted to achieve well enough that we had a clear schedule to stick to, meaning our time management was one again very good.