Just three weeks ago, we were assigned a project: to create a three-minute film about Star Carr for the Yorkshire Museum exhibit "After the Ice". We're nearing completion of our video - just a few tweaks to do this afternoon! Thank you to those of you who have followed us through our first filmmaking experience! Here it is: the story of our filming, editing, and overall film-creating process - and how our (nearly!) final product compares to our original vision.
Our lovely model, Jenna, helping Kelly and Emma
set up the indoor shot. Photograph by us.
We began filming on Friday. As we were meeting our interviewees in a natural location, we were able to take some nature photographs and landscape panning shots, which we planned to incorporate with the existing Star Carr archive footage. For silent scenes and images, the weather was not a problem; for outdoor interviews, the wind was a nightmare. We resigned ourselves to indoor shooting in a nearby cabin. Although we were disappointed that we couldn't have the natural surroundings in our shot, and we were afraid the brown background would be boring, we quickly realised that our sound quality was really good in our indoor location, and with a little bit of "doctoring up" the background it looked quite archaeological. After our initial sound-checks and preparing the camera's precarious positioning, we were ready to shoot!
We practised interviewing Tom Ratcliffe outside. Kelly
did the camera, Emma took care of the dictaphone, and
Adam asked the questions. Photograph by us.
Within three hours, we had interviewed four important people on the Star Carr Project - Dr. Chantal Conneller, Professor Nicky Milner, Chris Evans, and Becky Knight. Everyone was really open to being interviewed and quite relaxed, which made our first interviewing experiences much easier. Filming continued on Monday, when we had the amazing experience of interviewing David Lamplough, a self-described amateur archaeologist who had worked with John Moore (discoverer of Star Carr) when he was eight and Grahame Clark. Natalie McCaul (of the Yorkshire Museum) had told us about him, and Dr. Milner introduced us. We were thrilled to interview him for thirteen minutes, plus plenty of outside conversation before and after the official interview! We had loads of footage that we could have used - nearly 25 minutes of interviews alone for a three minute film! It was a shame to cut it down; we had so much footage that we really wanted to use - which is why we're sharing just a few outtakes with you below! (Note: These are outtakes; they were never edited for use in our film.)
Things changed quite a bit from our original vision. We didn't expect to get the fantastic personal experience and amazing interview from David, and of course we had to include that! We also had wanted to bookend our film with a reconstruction image of Star Carr, but due to copyright issues we couldn't use it at all. But we found much better footage for those gaps in our film: Gavin had some time-lapse footage of an excavation, which he kindly gave to us. It kept our pace up in what could have been a very slow, boring, typical historical film. To end our film, we reworked our original plans just to include a fantastic quote David had given us.
Kelly is quite proud of herself for snapping this excavation-
themed photograph of shovelling dirt into a wheelbarrow!
Photograph by us.
Technology was also a bit different from what we expected. While we found the camera easier to work with than expected, the battery life was terrible. We had to work quickly. Then, getting onto the computers for editing, we discovered the wonders (read: user-hostile and non-intuitive) of Windows Movie Maker. It's really good for what it was designed to be: a basic, introductory film-editing program that allows the creation of simple personal movies. But we had bigger and better plans in mind. We wanted to do all sorts of stuff we'd seen in professional productions - overlaying sounds on each other, controlling zooming on pictures, overlaying images from the archives on our interview footage, using complicated computer graphics - these all proved impossible for our level and technology. However, we adjusted and worked around the "Stupid Movie Maker!" moments, and we were thrilled with how well our very first production turned out. You want to see it?
Better come to the Yorkshire Museum exhibition "After the Ice" then! But if you can't make it, it will be on the museum's website. Here's a short teaser clip from our introduction:
Thanks again for following us on this journey and for all your support and advice. NOW COME SEE OUR FILM! :-D
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