City One Minutes

City One Minutes

We were shown a website called Cityoneminutes.com in a skills building seminar. The website contains one minute short films that give a taste of cities around the world over a period of twenty four hours. Myself and Luke were then set the task of creating our own one minute short film situated in cathedral square.

I feel it necessary to include this brief post on my blog as this was my first experience filming using sony Z1 cameras and editing using final cut pro. Before this task I had never filmed using manual settings or tape so this exercise provided a valuable learning experience. Because of our inexperience we found that a large proportion of our shots were overexposed and thus far too bright; a mistake that we have avoided whilst filming our experimental film thanks to the heightened level of knowledge we gleamed from shooting this short project. I also gained an improved level of insight into experimental film making, ignoring narrative and focusing on structure which has been extremely influential for my experimental film. 

We started editing by capturing our tape and importing it into final cut pro as raw footage. We then created three bins: assembly, rough cut and final cut. We found this three step method of editing very useful as it ensured that our work was organised sensibly. We then placed our footage into the rough cut bin in a logical order, we decided to group together the footage of trams and place it in the first half of the video, and place all our footage of the cathedral in the second half. After deciding the order of our shots we began placing them in the final cut bin and polishing them up; colour correcting and altering shot lengths to create a smooth edit. Finally when we were both happy with our film we exported the video directly to youtube from final cut.

This process helped hone our final cut skills as neither of us had any previous experience with the program. We implemented the three bins method in our experimental film after discovering it is a very effective, organised method of editing.