The process of making this film has been equally enjoyable and exacerbating. In this post I’ll go over in detail the final changes I’ve made to the film as I’ve submitted it including, the narration (or lack thereof), the garden and bread making scenes, and the credits. At the end I will also talk about what I think the final message of the film is.

With respect to the narration, I shot of a lot of takes of me talking about the message of the film, and trying to fill transition moments where there was some ambiguity. At the end though, I really didn’t feel that my narration could add the kind of thing I was really looking for, or at least I couldn’t really figure it out in a way that would be satisfying. Beyond the fact that I really couldn’t stand listening to myself talk on screen, I found that the the narration did not add anything that couldn’t be perceived just by watching the movie.

The garden scene is the best scene in the movie (in no small part because Jess was so excited to talk about their garden). At the time that I filmed this scene (yesterday, ha!) I had accumulated enough experience with the camera, and had enough control over the scene, to actually focus and get the shots that mattered. Filming that scene took maybe an hour? Less? It was painless and easy. A major reason for this scene’s success is that Jess was so eager to talk, and to talk confidently, about what she was doing and why. She was also a good sport when I asked her to repeat things or let me get a close up of her doing something (like pulling up the radishes). I think the addition of the scene helped to break the tedium of people just explaining things in a serious tone, because Jess was willing to just play along with her role in the movie. Overall, I was very happy with the scene.

The bread making scene was definitely more difficult. To begin with, the space in the kitchen of my house where I was filming is super small, and so it caters to really close up shots. This bothered Emily, who was already fairly uncomfortable being on camera. I tried to make it work, but there were some fairly awkward camera angles. Emily was also quite unsure about what she should be talking about, which was my fault for not explaining it properly, so some of her dialogue is a bit lack luster. We had made arrangements to do a more formal sit down style interview that I could use as voice over, but the time for that has passed. That being said, there was enough dialogue and sound for me to use to show the process and have her explain what she was doing. What I really liked about this scene was that it’s the only scene where we actually see the fruits of one’s labour! We get to see the loaf of bread Emily makes right at the end of the movie, so that is really satisfying (at least for me).

For the credits, I chose the easy route. Just overlay them on top of the final shot and call it a day. Nothing fancy.

Now that it’s over, I think that the final message of the film could be interpreted in a few ways. Originally, I had set out to make a movie about the kinds of knowledge needed to grow/harvest one’s own food, and there’s a lot of knowledge that went into each of these methods. The knowledge about deer, fish, growing, and baking are deep troves that deserve far more explication and exploration than I could possibly give in a 10min movie. What I really liked is how each character referred to one of the other characters present in the film. It’s a small portion of the movie, but that sense of community is definitely there and it is quite profound.

Another aspect of this film that I think deserves further exploration is the gendered element. It’s notable that Khoi and Tim were most interested in hunting and fishing, while Jess and Emily were more interested in gardening and baking. Watching the finished product I was reminded of older ethnographies about hunter/gatherer societies with rigid (and gendered) labour roles. I mean, this is an interesting topic to explore but it’s also important to remember that I am the person who asked these people to participate in the film and to illustrate what they know about each process. I don’t think that this specific film really says much or anything about gender, but I do think that the building blocks for a discussion about gender are definitely present in the film.

It’s going to be a long night.

I was able to complete the rest of the filming today and am going through the process of editing the footage now.

I’ve removed the narration. I couldn’t stand listening to myself talk, nor do I think the script ultimately helped me get the message across. The film will have to stand on its own or fall flat, but I’m confident that there is enough footage to suggest common themes throughout the locations and characters.

I feel good (mostly) about the film now that the end is finally in sight, and I can focus on putting it all together in a nice and hopefully succinct way.

As far as sound goes, I think I solved most of it. The scene at the river is still noisy but I managed to make it a bit more palatable.

Well, I hate listening to myself on camera. In this post I’ll talk about the difficulties I’m going through with this movie, and how I intend to address them.

As noted in my last post a few weeks ago, I intended to add in a narration to make the story clearer to the viewer, part of which I’ve now done. I finally got to use my lavalier mic, which was great, but frankly I think I got better sound from just the camera itself. It’s hard to tell.

I sat on my film for about a week without really doing anything because frankly, I got sick of watching it. That’s not to say I don’t like my own movie, but constantly watching the same 5 minutes of footage was mind-numbing and I needed a break. Taking a break though is a double-edged sword, because I’m facing a bunch of problems with the film, and quite frankly it’s nearly too late in the term to really do much about it. We’re kicking it into high gear for this last weekend.

Problem #1: The sound of the river

In the second draft that I posted, there is a long sequence about a minute long where Tim is showing me the bait he is using, and he’s talking. There are two problems with this sequence, one is that the sound of the river is overwhelmingly loud, and the second problem is that the camerawork is shoddy. I opted to take out this scene because it really fell flat for what I wanted it to convey.

My issue though is that the entire scene from start to finish has the sound of the river in it, and the river is very, very loud. I can’t go back and re-shoot it for a myriad of reasons, but chiefly because Tim is away for the weekend.

My answer to this problem is to use b-roll footage during phases where Tim finishes speaking. I can get shots of birds, of trees, of nature etc. and just cut those shots into the movie so that it breaks up the tedium of the river. I’m not entirely sure if it will work because it could just make the river sound more jarring.

Problem #2 There is still a lot left to film

I haven’t been able to set up a time with my gardening friends, and this is very lamentable. The sheer amount of work left to do for this film is actually insane, and because of my ‘break’, I feel like I really shot myself in the foot.

I’ve made a lot of progress since I last updated here, and have overcome a number of issues I was having previously, while also encountering new ones that need to be solved. In this post I’ll talk about the progress I’ve made through the narrative and technical issues I’ve solved and discovered, and where the next portion of the film will hopefully go.

Narrative Issues

In my last update I wrote how I was struggling to insert a narrative into the footage I had edited. After watching that footage, I realized that no one would know why I was showing this footage without directly knowing the characters or the motivations for why we were on that journey. I also never introduced the characters, so no one even knew who these people were and while Khoi gave a nice voice over for what we were doing, there was no explanation for why, and so the whole thing fell flat.

In this update, I added a third video track and used it to add text to a shot of Khoi riding in the back of the truck. I used this same video track with text later to add an introduction for Tim to enter on screen. I hope that the text gives the film some of the structure that it needs.

I added about two more minutes of footage that I shot this morning with my friend Tim who took me fishing on the Capilano river. This was a great opportunity to film because it was just the two of us, which gave me greater control of what kind of film I could get. It helped that Tim was incredibly enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge with me, because I got some amazing footage that I was able to put voice over.

I was fooling around a little bit with the kinds of shots I was taking. Tim was really eager to talk to me about his fishing knowledge and his equipment, so a lot of the footage I took included long recordings with shifting camera positions. Some of these shifting angles were fairly successful, others were not.

I do have a pretty significant regret though about this morning, which is that I left my lavallier microphone at home. A lavallier is a wired mic that transmits sound to a receiver attached to the camera. I bought one because I wanted to use it during this project, but of course I forgot it this morning.

The loss of the lavallier microphone basically meant that the camera was picking up the sound of the river the whole time. At first, I actually liked that. I’ve been using the sound of the river as a bridge to connect scenes. The only problem is that the river is super loud (obviously). The lavallier microphone would’ve narrowed in on Tim’s voice instead of picking up every sound in existence.

The footage is still good and usable, but using the lavallier would’ve been better so I’m kicking myself a little bit.

As for the question of why I chose to show this footage, and as to the why of the story; I’ve decided to add a narration at the beginning to give the story some context. I was discussing with Dr. Menzies the idea of using narrative “bookends” to frame the stories that are being shown on screen. One of the major issues I was facing in my last update was that I didn’t know how to tie all the stories in the film together in a way that would be visually and narratively satisfying. In this, you’ll notice that I used footage of rain on a highway to act as a bridge between the hunting and fishing trips which took place a few weekends apart.

This draft video doesn’t yet have the narrative bookends because adding these bookends presents some technical difficulties which brings to me to the next part of this reflection.

Technical Difficulties

Well you don’t know what you don’t know.

Right now my only working computer is a Google Chromebook, which I bought out of necessity for school, and which has been invaluable for my assignments.

The only issue with Chromebook is that it runs on a different operating system that is incompatible with software meant for Mac or Windows. This means that I don’t have access to Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere, or other programs which are the market standard for video editing.

As such, I’ve been using a subscription based program available to Google Chromebook called WeVideo, and up until now it has worked perfectly well! I’ve really enjoyed using it and found it really accessible.

The issue with WeVideo though, is that as your movie gets longer, the less the editing features function properly.

As a result, after importing the footage I took this morning to my original draft version, the video tracks got all messed up, the audio was out of sync, and the preview playback feature completely stopped working.

This meant that I had to restitch all the footage I had for the film back together from the beginning, undoing and then re-doing all the work I already done.

It turns out that WeVideo is mostly used for short company featurettes to be used in conferences and the like. It’s not exactly meant to be processing the amount of footage I’m trying to put together.

I did find a work around however! The work around is to restart my computer and delete the cache of files and cookies whenever the preview playback function starts to lag.

Nothing says “I know what I’m doing” like turning it off and back on again.

What happens from here

So far I think I’ve done a decent job of getting the footage I need to make a decent ethnographic film. Honestly at this point I could add the narration at the beginning, tie it all together at the end with a few shots of folks sitting around a campfire having a good time, and call it a day!

Really though I want to practice with more filming techniques, learn how to properly do sit-down interviews and frankly, I want to put that damn Lavallier microphone to use. I feel really good about where I am with the project overall given the constraints forced upon the class by Covid-19.

Going out for Dinner Draft 3 (Working Title)

For this video, I took the footage that I had already shot, my shot list, and my knowledge about the video editing program I’m using to create the first couple scenes of my film. This first portion isn’t finished (by a long shot) but it does illustrate the direction I’d like to take the rest of the film. I’ll go over how it relates to the central question of my treatment, the technical elements I used in the editing process, and what I think will happen next in the movie.

The central question of my film is: What kinds of knowledge do people need to produce their own food?

In the opening shots, you see the car going up the mountain, with a voice over by one of my main participants talking about how they’re on “a recon mission” to look for signs of animals. The scene shows the effort of getting to the location, and we enjoy some shots of people hiking, looking over the terrain, and examining some deer tracks, all while Khoi (the voice actor) is talking about the species composition as we climb higher up the mountain. I may need to have Khoi sit down for a more formal interview so that we can explore the kinds of knowledge needed more explicitly, but for now I think this is a good start.

I found that the technical elements of the editing process were really exciting. First I was able to figure out how to add a title to the shots, which was a breakthrough for me cause I had a hard time figuring it out. I definitely enjoyed that small victory. Then I had to figure out how to have the voice over work because when Khoi was talking to me, he was quite far away. I cranked up the volume on that recording to 500%, and reduced the volume of the shots being shown by varying degrees, but usually to about 30-50% of its initial volume. In the transition shot from the music to the car pulling the log I used a one second fade on the music just so that when the music ended it wasn’t an abrupt end.

I did have some trouble however with the program I was using. Some of the playback features weren’t working properly and I couldn’t figure out why the playback was using sound which I had cut out of the clips, and why it wasn’t displaying the overlain scenes in the way that I wanted. I’m still not sure what caused this issue, but I think that the program I’m using isn’t meant to be for larger file sizes, only for short videos. So this may be an issue I encounter in the future.

That being said, when I “finished” these scenes those issue were not present, and all the sound came through exactly as I had intended.

For the next scenes I think I need a couple things:

I need a sit down interview with Khoi so I can get him talking more explicitly about hunting, and the kinds of knowledge one needs to have in order to be successful at it. I also want to include some actual footage of deer (which I don’t have and will need to get).

One major issue I have is the length. Initially I thought that this film was going to be around 3 minutes in length, which is not very long. This section of film is already a minute long and we haven’t even explored the central question yet! Either I need to extend the length of the film (probably in the range of 5-10 minutes) or significantly cut back on these scenes.

From where I finished the video I want to transition to another form of food production like vegetable gardening, and get some footage of that process. Some of the same participants who were present in this portion of the film will make a reappearance in that section.

So that’s where I’m at with this project.

Here is the footage: Going out for Dinner: An Ethnographic Film Scene 1 Draft 1