Hello, I am Kaimana, a 2nd year Graphic Communication Design Student. I joined the moving image pathway because I thought it would suit my interests the most. After getting our brief I tried to make up a story around a pencil coming to life, but my idea didn’t seem interesting and I wanted to try to make a film about a subject I was interested in. So I thought about different issues to discuss and which collaborators I might need to make my film come to life. I ended up with the notion of comparing a child and an adult in their imagination. The idea was to interview them and then get an animation student to animate their ideas. The questions that would’ve been asked should spark their imagination but I didn’t really have an idea about what to ask in particular. I just thought about asking them about a recent dream they had or to tell me a story. By that time I already discussed the ideas with two girls from my course, so we formed a group but needed someone from the sound pathway. As we were talking to people we had an idea of merging two groups together because we wanted to collaborate with each other. The other groups idea was about parrots living in London, so we combined both ideas and ended up interviewing and adult and a child about why parrots came to live in London.
The first real challenge was to find people to interview and also to arrange a room. Meanwhile we also had to thing about what we wanted the film to look like, if we wanted to film in a green screen room or outside somewhere, what camera angles and so on. We ended up choosing the green screen room due to the animations and flexibility the green screen gives us and we shot on three different cameras. A side camera, a close up and a normal shot of the interviewees sitting on the chair.
After filming I took it upon me to edit most of the raw footage. I first did the child, we filmed for almost 40 minutes, so it was a lot of footage to go through. I ended up compiling an audio of Robyn (the child) answering the main questions. By that time I managed to cut it down to around 2 minutes.
After we shot the second interview I did the same for Stephen. Next I combined both audios so it would make more sense, they were answering the questions after each other. Now I needed to tackle the video footage. With the help of Dionne we managed to synchronise the audio with the videos from all the cameras which would make editing a lot more easier.
Because me and Adam are both responsible for editing the video we thought it would be best to edit one person each, so I was responsible for Robyns edit and he was for Stephen. So I did a very rough sample edit and tried to incorporate some of the animation to see what it would look like.
After discussing the editing with Adam again we decided to not split it like that. We decided for me to finish off the rough edit and then for him to add the animation while I do the title sequence. We all had to try to figure out how to use the green screen properly and how to add the animations, that was a very long process.
As off now (20th of December) I finished a very rough edit of the film and sent it to Adam for him to further edit. I started doing my research about title sequences and I will try to finish it as soon as possible. I think the biggest challenge will be to not make it too long because the video can only be 5 minutes long maximum.
London's Parrots: Imagining an Urban Legend 