- Helen Edgeworth
- Jun 2, 2020
- 0 min read
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- Helen Edgeworth
- Jun 1, 2020
- 1 min read
In making the channels look more authentic, I made the 'E4' Channel show re-runs of a made-up 70s sitcom I titled 'The Wilsons'. The reason I called it 'The Wilsons' is because it's a common American surname. I decided to research 1970s American sitcoms to see what fonts they used in their titles to make the made-up show seem more authentic.
I came across one called 'Three's A Company' which suited the wholesome Americana vibe I wished to create:
I found a font online which best replicated the above font called 'Tomato'. I then matched the colours by using a light beige and brown outer shadow. This also matched the earthy colour palette most 1970s programs had. This was the finished result:
I used The footage of the looping blue car. I feel this clip by itself is individually frustrating as you never see the car make it over the hill. To create further frustration I searched on freemusicarchive.com for a pop jingle to make the irritating theme tune majority of these 1970s sitcoms had. Then to give the audience the sense of the beginning of a program I crossfaded the footage of the car into a similar era driving PSA called 'The Party's Over'. Before cutting to the next clip abruptly.
- Helen Edgeworth
- May 10, 2020
- 2 min read
So for quite a while I wasn't really getting anywhere with the film, I didn't feel like the clips were mine and that what was being presented in the various drafts I kept producing and I was losing a lot of my motivation for the project.
Matt in our meeting then suggested to me instead of building the timeline, a new tact of evaluating each clip as if it was its own film. I found this process easier than trying to construe a narrative without any context as I had previously done. I then made a separate folder on the shared drive called "edited clips" where I asked my group to review them so we could still collaborate on the film while at a distance.
In one of our weekly discussions, as a group, we came to a new idea about to place the frustrating clips into a narrative structure. By looking back on our original ideas and the edit I made of Casablanca. We decided to start to group the clips together as if they were TV channels and to pace the edit as if someone was constantly clicking back and forth through TV channels. Presenting the audience with a barrage of never-ending stories.
Running with the television idea also opened up for discussion with my group on the visual language the television set produces such as being able to mute the sound of the film and put poor subtitles over or have multiple narrations we are constantly switching between as the channel hops, music can also make the clips appear more cinematic.
I decided to look at examples on Youtube in terms of pacing the edit:
Working from these I decided to use a simple short black transition instead of the glitching effect this was because I felt it was too gimmicky and wasn't something I'd experienced in my lifetime, so would be useless as the aim was to make a film representative of our group's lifetime.
I then decided to create the "rules' for each channel by grouping together certain footage. I created a 'History/Documentary' channel using all the black and white archive footage grouped together and then a 'Murder Channel' using all the home video clips of Lillie. And then cutting all these clips as I had been doing before they all reached a satisfying end.
I then created a separate area on the drive called "sequences". So my group could review my edits and inform me on how to improve them:
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