Schizophrenic Love Evaluation
When we began this project, our plan was to make a musical about a man with schizophrenia who falls in love with a girl and the problems they overcome through their lives to try and overcome said schizophrenia. To an extent we followed this up, however the outcome suffered many cutbacks and failures which lead to it in total being a complete mess that is at best a mediocre short film.
I will first start with the strengths of the project (as there weren't too many). The concept itself, albeit very ambitious, seemed quite strong and compelling. The abnormal boy trying to get along in a normal reality which hates him for who he is seems to practically write itself with character interactions being able to be very realistic despite this not working as all but one dialogue interaction was cut and the one that made the final cut was mid-song and so rushed that the characters have no chemistry together which was the exact opposite of the intent. The camera shots also turned out well, I believe both me and Dan did a good job capturing the moments and working mostly on the spot to thing of good camera movement and composition that would help emphasise the atmosphere of the moment.
Unfortunately that is a generous list of positives. On the other hand the negatives were so crucial to the delivery of the musical that it ended up being so unrefined. While the concept was strong, as i previously said its overly ambitious. We originally wanted a run time of 15 minutes which was shortened to 8,4 and then 1 and a half minutes. The major cutback meant that entire scenes were cut from the film, leaving us with the bare minimum to tell the love story and due to the extremely massive cutbacks, we had no character build up, no character introduction, no real way of knowing the main character has schizophrenia(except for the title), no real build up of the romance between our two main characters, no side characters to help forward the plot or give it more depth and not much of a variety in music- all of which accumulated into a convoluted, amateurish story with no direction and a twist that itself is very vague and unclear.
While we did get some good shots, there wasn't enough to use. With my previous project - 'The World was Wide Enough' that I did for photography, I had more than enough footage to fill in gaps and make the film last over 5 minutes in length. This time due to limited filming time and so many changes happening to the length of the story, we barely got enough footage for 1 and a half minutes and no footage to stretch the length of the songs which later absolutely ruined the audio as i had to mess with the footage. Acting was also very sloppy. As we had little direction as to exactly what to do in shots and (as I said before) the story had become less and less clear, our acting was very all over the place and lip syncing was nigh impossible later in editing as we didn't even have a clear direction as to what lyrics to use in what shot or even if we'd use the lyrics we had wrote at the time. This lack of focus and 'we'll fix it in post' attitude lead to an extremely stressful and tenuous job during editing that really made the musical fall apart at the seams. I had realised before from 'The World was wide Enough' that lip syncing was hard enough when you know the lyrics- you have to change the timing to fit the song and make sure everything matches to flow with the song; with this musical we didn't even record us singing the lyrics, much less to the beat or with actions that follow the lyrics.
Another issue was casting, originally we had myself as the evil voice in Charlie's head, Luke as Charlie, Dan as the side characters and a one of Dan's friends to play the female role. This completely fell apart on shooting. With cuts in the story and Dan not finding a willing actor, our roles began to shift and merge to a vague point where we didn't know who was playing who until right before shooting the shot. I ended up becoming the female role which changed to a gay lover, Dan became Charlie's feet in one shot (which instead of helping caused continuity issues later) and Luke remained as the main character Charlie. This wasn't too big an issue as we did partially work around it but it once more fed into the fact that are story was so hard to follow we barely knew what was going on.
The next big issue was music. Originally, we had planned to make our own music with Dan getting some of his friends to accompany our singing with Luke playing guitar. This all was thrown away at the last second due to overambitious goals and not enough time. Due to Dan's friends not being able to help we were brought down to Luke on his guitar solely which with one instrument would make for a very repetitive and boring musical so we all decided to use backing tracks from YouTube of other people's songs.This wouldn't have hurt the musical too bad had we recorded after making this decision. However we didn't so syncing the audio with the visuals was very hard to correctly time as I had no idea what to time it with. A key part of musicals is that the music itself controls the mood. The accompaniment has louder or quieter dynamics to represent the atmosphere and certain instruments or the melodies they play can determine how a scene is perceived and either draw a person to interpret it the way you want them to or to give an ambiguous response, leading to discussion of what it meant, making your musical stay with people and keep them coming back in search of answers. Having a backing track stole off of a non-musical performance at that makes it not only stuck to one mood but also means that the visuals and the audio can betray each other or don't really complement each other. The singing also didn't turn out perfect but I don't think you can really expect anything better off people with a very minor experience in music. The main problem that arose here was that we didn't record the audio as one piece, it was recorded as lyrics and the backing track which made syncing them a pain as I had to use memory and pray it sounded right and most of them were very off beat and not too out of tune but it could have been miles better had we recorded it as one piece instead of as two separate pieces.
Of course this all brings it back to the stage where all the previous faults mattered most- editing. I am mostly to fault with this as the editing I practically did individually but I am not a miracle worker and being given the space of around 2 and half hours at a push to import the correct clips we are going to use, import the backing tracks, edit them to fade in and out of each other to fit the scene, try and sync the visuals with the backing tracks only to have to re-sync all of it to the lyrics, import the audio that fits best with the short amount of footage and cut footage down to excuse some parts where the acting wasn't perfect and try and determine which one of us should be singing at which point which wasn't chosen by prior directions but instead by who could sing the part the best which once again falls back on our lack of being able to sing well which was already a bit of a stupid oversight considering we are doing a musical. Originally I was supposed to rap my parts as I am better at that and we took inspiration from 'Hamilton' however this was also thrown out due to the massive cutback in footage which cut all of the scenes where I would rap my parts. As I said before not singing to the track made it even harder to implement the audio as most of it was not on beat and the only way to solve that would be to cut the audio to fit the beat which without a lot of time and precision would make the audio extremely choppy and perhaps even more amateurish. I tried speeding it up and slowing it down but it just amplified the pitch of our singing voices which made it more comical than anything.
I have learnt a great deal from this project. The first is that there is a fine line between optimism and over ambition which looking back makes me feel rather foolish for not seeing that we did not have the time, resources or skill to pull this off effectively. The next is to not rely on outside help. We put too much faith in Dan to bring us musicians and a female role which he wasn't able to follow up on
which lead to one minor and one major issue in the long run. I also learnt that rushing something leads to gaps and problems that only get bigger the further along you go. As we had limited recording time, we weren't able to even reach 2 minutes, much less our actual goal of 15 minutes. We should have spent recording time getting b-roll footage to fill in gaps rather than trying to perfect each shot when they would be used for a mere few seconds, which once again I did with 'The World was Wide Enough' to fit the run time and while some shots didn't turn out perfect, it actually filled the time, if the lyrics and most of the shots were actually good due to the fact that we spent 2 two dedicated to actually getting them correct.
Overall, I believe that this whole project was a complete flop. It was way too ambitious and really when it came to, it was sloppy and not strong at all as a whole piece, in fact it probably would work better as a silent film and even then the vague story and lack of real focus or portrayal of story in the shots (as there was no story) means that it would be just as hard to follow. I will aim to improve on all of these weaknesses in the future for my final piece which i think should be a lot more focused and centred as instead of 3 people's ideas trying to assimilate into one 'perfect' idea which ultimately fails, it will be have more of a style and artistic feel to it while being organised and balanced to fit the time.
I will first start with the strengths of the project (as there weren't too many). The concept itself, albeit very ambitious, seemed quite strong and compelling. The abnormal boy trying to get along in a normal reality which hates him for who he is seems to practically write itself with character interactions being able to be very realistic despite this not working as all but one dialogue interaction was cut and the one that made the final cut was mid-song and so rushed that the characters have no chemistry together which was the exact opposite of the intent. The camera shots also turned out well, I believe both me and Dan did a good job capturing the moments and working mostly on the spot to thing of good camera movement and composition that would help emphasise the atmosphere of the moment.
Unfortunately that is a generous list of positives. On the other hand the negatives were so crucial to the delivery of the musical that it ended up being so unrefined. While the concept was strong, as i previously said its overly ambitious. We originally wanted a run time of 15 minutes which was shortened to 8,4 and then 1 and a half minutes. The major cutback meant that entire scenes were cut from the film, leaving us with the bare minimum to tell the love story and due to the extremely massive cutbacks, we had no character build up, no character introduction, no real way of knowing the main character has schizophrenia(except for the title), no real build up of the romance between our two main characters, no side characters to help forward the plot or give it more depth and not much of a variety in music- all of which accumulated into a convoluted, amateurish story with no direction and a twist that itself is very vague and unclear.
While we did get some good shots, there wasn't enough to use. With my previous project - 'The World was Wide Enough' that I did for photography, I had more than enough footage to fill in gaps and make the film last over 5 minutes in length. This time due to limited filming time and so many changes happening to the length of the story, we barely got enough footage for 1 and a half minutes and no footage to stretch the length of the songs which later absolutely ruined the audio as i had to mess with the footage. Acting was also very sloppy. As we had little direction as to exactly what to do in shots and (as I said before) the story had become less and less clear, our acting was very all over the place and lip syncing was nigh impossible later in editing as we didn't even have a clear direction as to what lyrics to use in what shot or even if we'd use the lyrics we had wrote at the time. This lack of focus and 'we'll fix it in post' attitude lead to an extremely stressful and tenuous job during editing that really made the musical fall apart at the seams. I had realised before from 'The World was wide Enough' that lip syncing was hard enough when you know the lyrics- you have to change the timing to fit the song and make sure everything matches to flow with the song; with this musical we didn't even record us singing the lyrics, much less to the beat or with actions that follow the lyrics.
Another issue was casting, originally we had myself as the evil voice in Charlie's head, Luke as Charlie, Dan as the side characters and a one of Dan's friends to play the female role. This completely fell apart on shooting. With cuts in the story and Dan not finding a willing actor, our roles began to shift and merge to a vague point where we didn't know who was playing who until right before shooting the shot. I ended up becoming the female role which changed to a gay lover, Dan became Charlie's feet in one shot (which instead of helping caused continuity issues later) and Luke remained as the main character Charlie. This wasn't too big an issue as we did partially work around it but it once more fed into the fact that are story was so hard to follow we barely knew what was going on.
The next big issue was music. Originally, we had planned to make our own music with Dan getting some of his friends to accompany our singing with Luke playing guitar. This all was thrown away at the last second due to overambitious goals and not enough time. Due to Dan's friends not being able to help we were brought down to Luke on his guitar solely which with one instrument would make for a very repetitive and boring musical so we all decided to use backing tracks from YouTube of other people's songs.This wouldn't have hurt the musical too bad had we recorded after making this decision. However we didn't so syncing the audio with the visuals was very hard to correctly time as I had no idea what to time it with. A key part of musicals is that the music itself controls the mood. The accompaniment has louder or quieter dynamics to represent the atmosphere and certain instruments or the melodies they play can determine how a scene is perceived and either draw a person to interpret it the way you want them to or to give an ambiguous response, leading to discussion of what it meant, making your musical stay with people and keep them coming back in search of answers. Having a backing track stole off of a non-musical performance at that makes it not only stuck to one mood but also means that the visuals and the audio can betray each other or don't really complement each other. The singing also didn't turn out perfect but I don't think you can really expect anything better off people with a very minor experience in music. The main problem that arose here was that we didn't record the audio as one piece, it was recorded as lyrics and the backing track which made syncing them a pain as I had to use memory and pray it sounded right and most of them were very off beat and not too out of tune but it could have been miles better had we recorded it as one piece instead of as two separate pieces.
Of course this all brings it back to the stage where all the previous faults mattered most- editing. I am mostly to fault with this as the editing I practically did individually but I am not a miracle worker and being given the space of around 2 and half hours at a push to import the correct clips we are going to use, import the backing tracks, edit them to fade in and out of each other to fit the scene, try and sync the visuals with the backing tracks only to have to re-sync all of it to the lyrics, import the audio that fits best with the short amount of footage and cut footage down to excuse some parts where the acting wasn't perfect and try and determine which one of us should be singing at which point which wasn't chosen by prior directions but instead by who could sing the part the best which once again falls back on our lack of being able to sing well which was already a bit of a stupid oversight considering we are doing a musical. Originally I was supposed to rap my parts as I am better at that and we took inspiration from 'Hamilton' however this was also thrown out due to the massive cutback in footage which cut all of the scenes where I would rap my parts. As I said before not singing to the track made it even harder to implement the audio as most of it was not on beat and the only way to solve that would be to cut the audio to fit the beat which without a lot of time and precision would make the audio extremely choppy and perhaps even more amateurish. I tried speeding it up and slowing it down but it just amplified the pitch of our singing voices which made it more comical than anything.
I have learnt a great deal from this project. The first is that there is a fine line between optimism and over ambition which looking back makes me feel rather foolish for not seeing that we did not have the time, resources or skill to pull this off effectively. The next is to not rely on outside help. We put too much faith in Dan to bring us musicians and a female role which he wasn't able to follow up on
which lead to one minor and one major issue in the long run. I also learnt that rushing something leads to gaps and problems that only get bigger the further along you go. As we had limited recording time, we weren't able to even reach 2 minutes, much less our actual goal of 15 minutes. We should have spent recording time getting b-roll footage to fill in gaps rather than trying to perfect each shot when they would be used for a mere few seconds, which once again I did with 'The World was Wide Enough' to fit the run time and while some shots didn't turn out perfect, it actually filled the time, if the lyrics and most of the shots were actually good due to the fact that we spent 2 two dedicated to actually getting them correct.
Overall, I believe that this whole project was a complete flop. It was way too ambitious and really when it came to, it was sloppy and not strong at all as a whole piece, in fact it probably would work better as a silent film and even then the vague story and lack of real focus or portrayal of story in the shots (as there was no story) means that it would be just as hard to follow. I will aim to improve on all of these weaknesses in the future for my final piece which i think should be a lot more focused and centred as instead of 3 people's ideas trying to assimilate into one 'perfect' idea which ultimately fails, it will be have more of a style and artistic feel to it while being organised and balanced to fit the time.
Comments
Post a Comment