The Broken Light bulb.

Last Saturday I went up to the derelict buildings in Nantlle quarry to get some footage to make a film along the lines of the exercise 'A Sense of Place' as detailed in the first semester unit of the Filmmaking MA led by Joanna Wright.

It is an atmospheric place with the melancholy of lost lives and lost livelihoods.  When the quarry was in operation, it was a place of great suffering, where poor people were exploited by those who owned it.  There are some accounts to be found on YouTube, one of which I used the sound track from for a video piece which used still images of a blank wall in one of the quarry buildings.

See here:

 

 

Anyway, I used a lightweight 'travel' tripod, and a tiny plastic table top one, but found that for some shots I could have done with something in between to have the camera at about 8 inches above the ground.  I noticed how quickly I worked to frame and set up the shots I wanted, despite having forgotten my homemade cardboard monitor hood.  On a sunny day this makes seeing what you've got in frame much easier.  It also helps with checking focus.

 

There was a light wind in the grass, and grasshoppers and crickets were chirping, so I was looking forward to using these natural sounds.  However, when I got home and reviewed what I had, there was an annoying hum on the soundtrack, which made it of limited use.  I had previously used the sound captured by my camera (Nikon 5200), but clearly for subtle background ambient sounds I need something better.

 

I tried editing using my hooky copy of Premier, but it crashed, so I reverted to Movie Maker.  Despite this being a very simple program, it does all the basics, and I can use it quickly.  This reminds me of an impressive use of the Paint program I saw when studying for my PGCE in ICT - if you know a program well, and are creative, you can do impressive things, even if it's not a 'professional' level piece of software.

 

I had 37 minutes of material on the timeline, which quickly came down to 10 minutes.  I played with the speed of the clips, and tried some colour grading, including monochrome effects.  I ended up with some quite 'contemporary' images reminiscent of perfume ads - at the beginning of each clip there is always a wobble from starting the camera, and when this is speeded up it gives a nice organic, down to earth, home-made feel, which has been used extensively for some styles of TV ad.  Needless to say, I immediately trimmed the clips to get rid of it. I also realised that leaving the footage effect-free was better, except for the time manipulation.

 

Further whittling brought things down to around 3 minutes.  Having discovered the central theme of the light bulb, I kept some of the ambient sound in for these clips, which creates a certain feel to that bit of the film.  The clips are in the order in which I shot them, so the film is a journey into a sad place.  The broken light bulb, for me, is a powerful metaphor.  We all feel like broken light bulbs sometimes; We have an identity, form and shape, but not in a functioning one...we are void of ideas...we have no ability to illuminate.  Some people feel like a broken light bulb hanging in a derelict building, swinging in the breeze, unseen.

 

I made a simple sound track using the 'chapel organ' pre-set on my keyboard, recorded using my phone.  I couldn't help humming along towards the end of the three minutes.  I'm not sure this works, so I think I will have to re-do the sound before I upload the film to my YouTube channel.