Yes, once again it’s time for Super 8. Last year I shot my first film at PCA (When The Cats Are Away) on the antiquated format. After that film suffered with massive focusing issues due to my rushing through shooting, I came into this film wiser, knowing to make sure the camera is set up properly before burning film.
And then I immediately filmed the first shot we took at the wrong frame rate. Oops.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The brief this time was the exact type of brief I’ve hated since they were the norm in my IT course back in school: one which is vague enough that it doesn’t spark any creative ideas in you while also constricting enough that you can’t go wild and do whatever you want.
The idea was for you to “explore a location”, keeping in mind the unique qualities and effects filming on Super 8 will have on the finished product.
I was working with Tommy, who you may remember was the subject of my Interview Project a month ago. He thought it would be a good idea to simply go out on the day and find a location, rather than set out with a specific location in mind.
By chance, we could not have picked a better day. Although it was an outdoor shoot in the autumn, and thus we lost light fast, when we had light it was perfect, sunny conditions.
I recalled a night a few years ago when I was walking home with some drunk friends, and they decided to deliberately walk the wrong way to “see what was up here”. After a few minutes’ walk, we had become hopelessly lost far from home in pitch dark woods at 1 in the morning. Although we eventually found our way home, I mentioned to Tommy that along our arduous trip we had come across a strange walled off area, and one of my friends who had a lighter poked his head through an iron gate to report back that the walled off area contained what appeared to be black beehives.
As a person who, while not believing it, is extremely interested in conspiracy theories and all things out of the ordinary, Tommy immediately loved the idea, and asked me to attempt to find my way back to the place so we could film it, filming other interesting locations on the way. In the end, not only could we not find the path all the way back, but we also ran out of film and the light meter was telling us that it was getting too dark to film anyway.
So, with the footage we had, and the film counter misleading us into thinking my mistake with the frame rate setting on the film had eaten up half the film cartridge, Tommy suggested an idea: we open with the long pan up of the idyllic, traditional idea of what a coastal path looks like (i.e. the shot we thought would be ungodly long). I then suggested we hard cut to the many urban locations we filmed, showing the difference between what we think of as a coastal path and what one actually looks like these days.
The sound was required by the brief to include mostly effects and ambiances recorded on location, thus the industrial shots were underscored by three recordings we took of general urban ambiance overlaid with each other, with a fourth of a car beeping its horn as it passed added briefly at one point.
For the rest of the sound, I suggested ‘Morning Mood’ from Peer Gynt by Grieg. A slightly stereotypical choice, but since we were trying to make the opening as stereotypically picturesque as possible, it fit perfectly. Tommy wanted the end credits to roll over ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, just to hammer home the ‘point’ of the film. Originally, he wanted a version of the song that sounded like something you would hear at a seaside resort (i.e. played on a Wurlitzer organ). After searching and not finding any suitable recordings in the public domain, I took a MIDI version I found on a website and altered the instruments in a program called ‘Synthesia’ to make it sound suitably tinny and organ-like. As a backup, not only did I bring in other similarly nice pieces as possible replacements for ‘Morning Mood’, but also a 1909 vocal performance of ‘Seaside’ just in case Tommy disliked the MIDI. At first, he was very hesitant to the idea of a vocal version of ‘Seaside’, but after hearing it, he fell in love with it, and that is the version that appears in the finished film.
Editing was a surprisingly quick and painless process. The telecine process (converting the film to a digital video file) ran without incident, we took turns to sit at the desk physically doing the editing while the other sat back and discussed ideas, and we only disagreed once, an unprecedented turnout seeing as any given film with any number of creative people behind it will inevitably lead to people wanting different things from the final product. However, the one time we disagreed was when Tommy wanted to use a recording we had taken when the wind had blown hard into the microphone and caused it to record distorted, awful noise that hit Final Cut Pro’s audio limiter constantly. I attempted to explain how it was not good sound mixing practice to do that, but he would hear none of it, wanting to do it anyway to drive home the suddenness of the transition to industrial areas.
Fortunately, by layering several other ambient recordings we took one over the other, we got the heavy droning Tommy desired while keeping me (and the audio limiters) happy.
I think we made something good here. Although we have yet to see the films our other colleagues have made, we think ours will be pretty unique, in that it has a genuine point to make that is delivered with sufficient comedic timing and juxtaposition to make it a strong one. Meanwhile, we are fully expecting our peers to say little more with their films than “ooh, look at this shiny thing”. I hope I’m proved wrong of course, but that was the general consensus in the editing room as we exported the finished file.
Here, then, is ‘Coastal Path’.
