I’m pants at taking pictures though thanks to Open University module T189 Digital Photography I’ve a better idea, and now know when my photos are pants and why.  Moving pictures?  They must be times and times harder!  Yet I’m persuaded to study T156 – Digital Film School.  I hoped to learn to edit effectively – I knew only how to top and tail the videos on my flip video camera – which is now out of date.  And I also want to take interesting videos in the first place so that I don’t need to edit.

To get going on this T156 module, I needed a whole lot of technical stuff because you have sort out your own editing software more or less or your own.  Software includes:

• movie editing software:  I’m using the Windows Movie Maker, didn’t buy any other software
• sound software: including Olympus software to download my sound recordings from my Olympus digital recorder, and Audacity in order to trim the sound to remove the preambles to the recordings, and Lame because otherwise I can’t convert my recordings into MP3 format. I’ve learned that I can voice over  to the WMM video software.

This video lark demands a lot of coordination of software to get my video clips off my Flip video camera, my Samsung camera… and btw, my iPad too.

 This is the most collaborative OU course I’ve ever done.  There’s a little writing (600 words) to produce a treatment.    I decided to start filming Jonas Jonasson‘s “The hundred-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared“, about this old criminal who scarpers from his 100th birthday party, nicks a suitcase full of stolen money made from drug dealing, and vanishes.  The fun bit is getting actors together if you plan  something with people in it, like a drama, which I did for the assignment.  I needed three actors.

1. I asked an octogenarian neighbour.  Wow!  He was acting before we could get the recorder out.  So I immediately got some takes, takes I hadn’t expected or planned.  I had imagined a bottom crawling out of a window but wasn’t sure how to get an amateur actor to do that nor what window to use, but our old neighbour looked round surreptitiously at my camera, then scuttled off down the garden and disappeared round the back of the shed, only coming back for more takes – cheerfully and willingly.  When a few days later, he and I went to the bus station to record, he improvised, for example grabbing and perusing a bus timetable, then dragging the suitcase onto a bus where he explained to the amused driver that I was filming them and that he was in the starring role.  He’s a brilliant actor.
2. The neighbours’ sons were immediately enthusiastic, one of them even donning make-up for the part.  Trouble is, they can’t get out of bed before midday at the weekend.  A  friend suggested some accents so I recorded his voice, and he knew how to act picking someone up by their ears, and practised on daughter! We went down to the bus station with a young actor on a Sunday afternoon, which is a quiet time.  Going down there for retakes on a Saturday afternoon got us some funny looks.
3. My third actor is the ‘voice of the OU’ and I’m darned lucky to have her in.  Most of her work is voice, and she’s a bit reticent to be on-screen – perfectly cast.

Then I needed to get the technical bits right, editing done and continuity sorted.  If you want to see any of my T156 films, go to Vimeo,  where you’ll find location recces, casting, rushes, the draft and the final film – only 2 minutes, along with a behind-the-scenes ‘how I done it’ video.

What did I learn:

• I learned to film from interesting angles and that wind blows in the microphone but there are ways to remove it, so I learned to see and hear better.
• I learned to direct inexperienced and natural actors, and to accept unexpected changes from original script when they’re good.  But that means planning in extra time for retakes.
• I learned that editing takes ages, often goes wrong, and is frustrating but creative.

This new practical knowledge  will greatly help my research on performance for JuxtaLearn.