As a run up to the release of the documentary a trailer was made for promotional purposes for the project. I didn’t want to give to much away in the trailer so a few snippets from each interview were inter-spliced acting as a nice teaser for the film.
A lady, a project name and the final month
The final rush of the last few weeks has been pretty crazy, deadlines and presentations falling out of everyones ears. I haven’t had a great deal of time to continue with further editing but I have however filmed a lady! This was delaying me getting back into the edit as the project was really missing a girls voice. I had intended to Interview Lisa Hannigan a week after the mid-semester review but this ended up falling through as Lisa couldn’t make time as she’s back and forth between Dublin and London between now and may which was a little upsetting at first but I was able to get over it! Here’s an email from Lisa’s lovely manager Una telling me about it:
Sive to the Rescue
After the news about Lisa I began to panic a little inside about not having a lady penciled in to interview. I wrote a wall post on my own personal facebook page asking if there were ‘any cool lady songwriters I know willing to take part in a documentary on songwriting?’.
Straight away then I received emails from two previous girls I had filmed for my own YouTube Channel – Musicians With Cameras. The first email I was greeted by the amazing Sadhbh O’Sullivan saying how she’d love to help out. I met Sadhbh last year when she got in contact with our channel asking to do a video, and only recently just done another video where she invited us down to her hometown of Naas to film a show she was playing with her band in a church converted Arts Centre.
I went ahead and Interviewed Sadhbh this bank holiday weekend gone by, I met her in town on Saturday and we strolled to Merrion Square park and I interviewed her.
Here’s a screenshot example from the interview:
Conversing leads to good things
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been really stressing out about still not having a name for my documentary, I had chosen the approach of and hoped the name would just come to me at the right time and place, “I’ll know it when I hear it” etc. The other day I was chatting to my good class mate Ciaran about our projects and general stuff, I mentioned I was still having trouble with a name and he asked ‘had I thought of any or anything’ which suddenly got me thinking about something I remembered hearing looking back over the Interview I did with Conor O’Brien of Villagers.
Conor had mentioned and compared some aspect of the writing stage to making a Patchwork Quilt, which I remembered loving. So during my convo with Ciaran, this suddenly flushed into my mind. I began making connections of this name to various different things other people said including Peter Doran saying how songwriting is all about craft which is a nicely juxtaposed next to Conor’s quote.
I told Ciaran there and then “I think I have a name”.
Short and Sweet.
Cutting back the Introductions
Some feedback from my classmates and friends after watching my current Rough cut was that the introductions drag on a little to long. I definitely see this now.
Current Rough Cut of Introductions.
If I want to make a 15 minute piece, it will definitely have to be shorter than my current one of 3 minutes. And that’s just with 3 people at the moment and I still have 1 or 2 more people to interview, if I continue with how I’m introducing the interviewee’s now the opening part will be around 5 minutes!
So my plan over the next week is to try and edit down the opening of the documentary to around 1-2 minutes and find away of connecting everyone together in a nice cohesive manor.!
Mid-Semester Presentation Review
So just this week gone we were asked to present all the work we had done so far for our final year projects. Tension was high in the camp as everyone tried to finish of any final touches on the work they had done so far.
Ian my supervisor told me to mainly concentrate on my rough cut in the presentation. We were each given a 7 minute window to present so I prepared a quick 2 minute presentation summing up everything I had done since January leaving the remainder of the time for my rough cut hoping the work would speak for itself. In my presentation I focused on the Interviews I had done so far, my workflow in the editing room and my plans for the last month of the semester.
Password is the subject matter. 5 letters. Come on.
As we only had a 3 hour slot for everyones presentations so the feedback from the panel was short if not nothing. The general response for mine was quite good I think.
Someone mentioned they all looked comfortable and were given great answers which can be the hardest thing to get right in interviews, other comments included fixing audio levels and trying to stick with a particular style for my cutaways and interviews (which I’ve already been discussing with my supervisor the past few weeks).
Over the next few weeks I’m going to begin an Internet social media campaign in support of my documentary through facebook and twitter. Before I do that I need to hone in what I want to call the documentary.
The best and funniest name I’ve thought of so far and friends have recommended include “luke byrne investigates, a luke into songwriting, songwriting 101 with luke byrne”
Here’s my slides from the presentation:
What do Artists do all Day?
I just watched a great documentary on BBC4 called “What do Artists do all Day” and was very inspired by it. It’s basically like an insight to an Artist’s process. I will speak more on this later I promise. They guy featured on this episode is a Scottish painter called Jack Vettriano.
It gave me great ideas for in the editing room.
Definitely worth the record button.
Great Reading
I read this this morning and it went on to gave me a burst of inspiration.
I’ve been struggling a bit lately with the editing of cutting between each interviewee but after reading this I think I’m finding it much easier now.
Easter Break Filming and Interviewee Number 4: Conor O’Brien
Since the day we got off on our Easter Holidays I don’t think there’s been a 2 day gap where I haven’t been filming or helping out different classmates with their projects. It’s been great fun, I swear I’m not complaining!
One of the special things I was invited to film over the break was Villagers two sold out shows in the Olympia a few weeks ago. I’ve been filming and exposed to loads of different Irish musicians lately through working with Irish Filmmaker, Myles O’Reilly (who I’ve mentioned in a few posts). Myles was asked to film a few songs for these gigs and asked if I’d like to give a hand in filming. Naturally I said yes.
Being a pretty big fan of Villagers myself it was kind of a dream come through for me. I helped Myles shoot Conor O’Brien before playing a solo show for the Simon Community’s charity organisation Young Hearts Run Free before but to film a full band show was pretty amazing.
The two nights were magical. The band are having a great time playing the new songs live off the 2nd album ‘Awayland’ and it definitely comes across in the shows so no doubt the finished videos are gonna be great, not to mention the beautiful surroundings of the Olympia venue.
Some screen shots:
Young Hearts Run Free
All of this somehow leads to me interviewing Conor for my final year project. I’ve met Conor a few times now and over the past couple of weeks I’ve been plucking up the courage to see if he’d be interested in taking part in my Documentary. I thought getting in touch a week or so after the Olympia shows would be suitable enough so after much contemplating I sent him an email seeing if he’d be up for it.
That weekend he got back in touch saying he’d be playing another event for Young Hearts Run Free and that the lady organising the event was looking for somebody to document it so said if I’d come by he’d definitely be up for doing the interview. The event was a pub crawl around Dublin on the eve of Easter Sunday with scottish musician – the very talented Alasdair Roberts. The whole thing was Alasdair would lead the crowd around 4 different pubs and in each new pub would be greeted with a new musician to play along with. Some of the people he was greeted by were Lisa O’Neill, Conor O’Brien and band Come On Live Long.
It was a super fun night, but it carried on so late that there wasn’t really a suitable time to talk to Conor so we arranged to meet later during the week and hey presto!
Little Green Café to the Rescue
I interviewed Conor in this really nice café near Christ Church called the Little Green café, would definitely recommend it for a coffee..lovely place with some great people running it who were very welcoming to me filming after getting in touch at the last minute before the interview.
I approached this interview the same way I’ve done the others for this documentary. The only difference this time being the location of the interview. I filmed the other musicians in their homes/ studios where as this took place in a café setting. I made the most of it and thought it would make for a nice contrast in the overall piece cutting between each musicians ponderings/answers. I asked the people in the café if they could lower down the music in the section we were sitting in which they were very accommodating in doing so. I placed the rode mic very closely to Conor on the table between both of us which I think worked really well. I asked Conor to kinda sit forward a little which he had no problem in doing so to get better sound out of the Mic.
The interview went brilliantly and Conor gave great, honest and insightful answers into his process and I think will fit in very nicely into the finished documentary!
Editing Workflow
I seen this quote the other week by Philip Seymour Hoffman and it’s pretty magical.
The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It’s like going to get all the ingredients together, and you’ve got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake – or not.
I was recommended by my supervisor Ian to first listen to the audio from the interviews separately and take notes or mark whatever parts stick out to me, gathering the gold as they say. Then to next begin looking at the picture and begin to piece stuff together. Ian also reminded me that I should look at editing together this like working on a jigsaw puzzle, each part no matter where it is in the interview can be anywhere in the finished piece. Just because I asked a question first in the interview doesn’t necessarily mean it should be the first answer in the film.
At the moment I’m watching the interviews now in Final Cut X and marking parts I like and giving it a name so I’ll remember what section/question that was.
I have synced up both cameras from each of the 3 interview’s now into multi-cam clips so I can simply cut between both cameras in Final Cut and have added the good zoom audio to the clips so everything is coming together nicely now.
Ahead and beyond
I can see some issues ahead with not having enough b-roll to insert between each of the interviews so I’m currently trying to gather together and asking permission to use little bits of existing footage already of my 3 subjects I have spoken to so far.
Anything from studio footage to live performances etc.
Possible Typography segments?
Something my project supervisor Ian suggested to me the other day was using Kinetic Typography for possible segments/parts of my documentary. Initially I was completely turned off by this idea. Not because I hadn’t started the assignment or anything…
It now seems like a pretty fun idea to try and incorporate into the final film and could definitely separate my documentary from others. I think it may work to use this style in an intro section or a part where a subject is making a point they are very passionate about.
The software we are using in our Post Production module is called Motion 5. It’s pretty much does the same as Adobe’s After Effects, the only difference being Motion is made by Apple and is connected to Final Cut. For the assignment we have to use Kinetic Typography to animate alongside either a speech or a song for 1 minute.
Here’s a screen grab to give you a little taste of my project, will post the finished product here when it’s done:
Luke Byrne's CDM Blog 