Well, For most of it I simply held it. Documentary live action styled. It would have been too hard to follow the action if it was on a tripod ie. the hotel scene. I did use a tripod for the scene of me walking and talking about what the film was going to explore. Also for the interview shots. The reason for this was that they were non-moving shots and a mildly shaky camera would not have been appropriate like in the moving shots. The camera was sufficiently controlled for the kind of film I'm making. It never wobbled too much and camera movement as opposed to the movement of the characters is never obtrusive to the flow.
Composing Shots:
Starting with the framing of the shots for the interview portion. The interviewer is generally shown waist up, as I am for the majority. I never cut off heads or have the subject cut down the middle to the side of a frame. This was dificult during the scenes in the morning, with me having to follow the character up the hall and having to adjust the camera. Some crafty as editing made it so these moments of poor framing were non-existant.
Lighting was horrible, and the cameras that I used did not help in the slightest. I tried filming the morning scenes using the camera I had in Australia but after an hour and having to be restrained from taking to it with a hammer I decided I had to find another camera. I understand cheaper cameras have issues with different lights and the new one still had light streaks and things so I removed some lights from the roof and the lines disappeared while still providing adequate lighting. The lighting was also an issue during my takes. My scenes of me asking questions had to be taken in 3 different locations. Twice I had a half-light half-dark scenario going on as the sun was much brighter from one side and my camera thought it was smart trying to adjust its lighting settings. Silly thing. So I had to take it from a location without light coming from either side. It wasn't ideal, but it is alright and seems to fit alright now.
Recording or using sound effects, dialogue, music + manipulation of:
Dialogue was my biggest disappointment. Having to re-dub the whole first half of the film with post-recorded audio is hardly documentary style outside of narration. Possibly only what advertisers do when they introduce ads to new countries. At least I did it so you can't tell unless you really pay attention and am OCD about perfection as me. So, I used Audacity and lined up my original recorded waveform and then used the waveform cues of my voice to re-record and then over-dub into the film. Muting the original sound. (Refer to picture below.)
Sound effects only included the establishing shot with city sounds and birds chirping. Juxtaposing the beautiful sounds including the sea to the aggressiveness of the mother. Oh, and also waves during the boat shots in the montage.
Music. One thing that I learned while doing all of this is that in documentaries you must make sure that the music fits the type of doco and also that you do not over-do it. I played around with including background soft music during the action outside of the montage. Especially the beginning, however it seemed out of place no matter how much manipulation occurred.
To fit 'When Doves Cry' by Prince in I had to make 5 edits to the sound file. The biggest being the complete cutting of about 3 minutes of the middle of the song. I then levelled the song to remove the dynamics so it fitted better with the volume of the rest of the film and for the playback systems that will be used in the classroom setting - laptops, cheap speakers. I did this in audacity. I also changed the volume so it is much lower while I talk then gets loud for the snare hit. The verse I kept in I felt had relevant music to the doco. The lines 'don't cry' and the general depressed, broken feeling of the lyrics showed what the holiday was like.
Importing Images, and also manipulation of:
I added them all to premiere pro. With the ridiculous amount of footage I took it did at times take a lot of sifting to find the best of each shot, however generally when I got one I knew was absolutely perfect at the time of filming I stopped filming and moved on or took one more. So generally the best was at the end of each section of shooting.
Starting with the general transitions between shots. Tacky transitions are my biggest pet peeve. How many films, or documentaries have you ever seen that actually non-ironically use the star wipe. The only ones that I utilize are the Film dissolve between the establishing shot and the hotel room. This is because the shots are parallel to each other, time wise. There is no break in flow, they go directly from one view to another. And then the dip to black. These are used between different segments eg. the start and end of interview portions and also once in the montage. This is because the shots are not happening one after the other, and are not sequential in the timeline. the rest is simply a cut transition and is the most commonly used in real documentaries. Simply flowing between shot angles or shots designed to fit sequentially one after the other.
I used still titles for the Title of the film and also the names/just painstakingly funny occupations of the people like they do on the news. It took me a long while to figure out how to actually make these appear on the image. But none-the-less they are there now. They need to be on their own track and set so that they are transparent to the background video. the font type and size also had to be changed to be appropriate. The fading out of the title in time with the image also took careful manipualtion. Originally the title was fading too late, after the image so I had to play with its track length.
On the section with me walking and the Dreamworld ride I had to cut the video tracks into multiple sections and then edit their 'crop' and 'position' setting. Cropping 50% off either side and moving it by the appropriate amount of pixels.
the only other thing to really comment on is the fitting of the montage clips to the snare hits on When Doves Cry. I zoomed right in and listened to where the snare hit in regards to the location on the timeline, then edited the clips to that length. This left about 4 seconds at the end before the family shot so I had to add in some cutting room floor footage of the swing ball game.
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