Final Thoughts on the Light of Our Lives (and the link to final film)

Friday the 13th was our last day of uni and our screening day

On friday we had our screening day, which was so exciting. We met early in the library to go through some final stuff (paper work and presentation). Our whole class then gathered at the cinema room to watch our films. I enjoyed watching every single one of them and I was so impressed with the quality of everyone´s documentaries.

I was happy with our documentary, although there stilll were some things that bugged me. This is no suprised though, because I´m never a 100% happy with things that I´ve worked. Anne and Jeremiah´s comments I though were all very valid. The sound of our interviews weren´t quite loud enough, and something that bugged was that the sound of the pub was equally loud, even though I had asked if that could be changed. That bit bothered me, because we go from listening to an interview, to straining to hear what they are saying in the pub (thinking still that its part of the interview) even though it was just meant to be background noise. I also think it would have worked better if the pub noise was only when the camera is inside and not when we are filming from the outside (or at least have it a bit quiter outside). There were also some shots in it that I thought weren´t that good, and that aesthetically bothered me. The very beginning also bothered me, because I wanted that to look really good. I believe the first shot of any film is super important and we had planned to do a slow fade in with sounds of birds, but because of the time limit it couldn´t be done. I kind of wanted the first shot to be something really stunning, and although it is a nice shot, it bothers me that the first thing in our documentary is a dirty window.
Anne and Jeremiah also said that it was a little confusing to begin with, because it´s not clear what the documentary was about. I noticed thiss while watching it too. There is quite some time in the benning where nobody speaks (I don´t think we could´ve changed it though) and althoug it looks like, you´re kind of thinking why am I looking at this. They suggested that putting the title at the beginning could´ve helped and now looking back on it I agree. Having the title then would´ve given the viewer at least a clue of what our film is about. I think we maybe could´ve used some of the interviews more, because some of them were cut really short.
And of course what really bothered me was my spelling mistake. I didn´t notice it until Flora told me that Morning and it was so annoying. I was angry at myself, because I had spent so long working on the end credits and I had read threw it a hunrdred times and not seen it.
Like I said though, I´m never completely happy with my work so please ignore my complaining.
I think I worked really hard for this project so hopefully that will be taken into account when all of it is assessed. I had many sleepless nights and poor meals, so please don´t let it be for nothing. I was involved on every shooting day, doing the best I could. I was also a bit involved in the edit, even though I wasn´t originally planning on being. I shared ideas and listened to others and responded fast to any message in our group chat. I also worked super hard on the animation, and so was happy when people told me they liked it.
I feel like I´ve learnt a lot from this experience. Obviously I learnt a lot about the xf305, and although there´s probably a lot I still don´t know about it, I can use it for basic shoots. Talking to strangers is a big thing for me. We´ve approached a lot of different people and at first I was really nervous and embarressed, but it doesn´t feel too bad anymore. I´ve really understood that the worse thing they can say is no, and that most people are very friendly anyway. Talking to people is obvioulsy really important for film making so it´s good that I´m not only learning how to, but also getting more comfortable with it. I also learnt that there´s a lot of paper work involved in things like this. I had never really even thought about paperwork in film, but there is a lot and is quite complicated. It´s great that I´m learning about things like risk assessments and permissions, so next time we can think about it in advance. Working in a group too was an experience. It´s not always easy, and I think we all had our own ideas about what we wanted, so sometimes it was hard to agree on things. People don´t always do exactly what you want them to but that´s part of the fun. This way we get to feed each others ideas and always come up with new things.
I would love to do another project like this again, and I´m super happy I chose this course.

To watch our documentary click on the link below:
The Light of Our Lives