You can now watch our film under the Documentary Film tag in the heading of this website. We had a great time working on this film. We learned so much about Ithaca’s history with silent film and we are excited that we were able to leave our mark in Ithaca’s history with the creation of this documentary.
We want to thank Terry Harbin, Diana Riesman and Scott Callan for all of their help and support in making this documentary. We learned so much from you, and your support means a lot to us.
After a successful screening of our second rough cut in class we received a lot of positive feedback, constructive criticism, and some helpful advice. We have been implementing these changes and are fine-tuning the documentary to make sure it looks the best that it possibly can for the final screening.
When the documentary is complete we will be making another post which will include a video link to Youtube.
On Tuesday, April 23 we met with Scott Callan at the History Center for a follow-up interview. We slightly changed our location and had much better results.
In the editing room we made a significant amount of progress this week and the finish line is in sight. The documentary is really coming together and just needs a few more fine touches. The screening of our second rough cut will be on Thursday in class and we are eagerly awaiting our colleagues’ comments and feedback.
Our production trailer is up. Please let us know what you think!
This week we continued to work on our rough cut, turning it more into a finished product. We added new b-roll and took out some of the effects we used on our photos. We think that the movie flows much better that way and the movement isn’t as disorienting. We’re going back through our footage to try to find good soundbites to add and help our story come full circle.
Tomorrow we are going back to the History Center to reshoot our Scott Callan interview. Hopefully we’ll get better lighting and get good information from him to add a different perspective and give our documentary more historical background.
We are still in the thick of editing process but, we are starting to make some serious progress. A story line has begun to form and we are starting to see the important message our documentary can deliver to an audience.
On Thursday we had a screening of our rough cut in class and received a lot of constructive feedback from our professor and colleagues. Having an outside perspective has helped us find the little mistakes we were missing and has provided us with plenty of helpful advice and suggestions.
Please be on the look out for a YouTube link to our rough cut video, a trailer to our documentary, and future updates over the next week.
Doc shoot, a set on Flickr.
Here are some photos from our shoot in Stewart Park and at gorges at Cornell. We can’t wait to show our footage in our documentary and we got some great B-roll.
This week we reviewed and cut down our interviews and have finalized most of what we want to put into our movie. We have a lot of interesting facts and interesting comments, what we have to do now is put them in an order that tells a cohesive and interesting story. We also began putting together our rough cut, which we hope to have done by Tuesday.
On Monday morning we are going out shooting one more time, to get extra b-roll. We are re-shooting at Stewart Park and we are also going down to the Gorges and to the Cornell gate. We hope that this can use this as a way to connect with viewers so our documentary will be more relatable and less like a textbook. If people know that when they go to Stewart Park, or down to the Gorges that they are stepping into a part of movie history and be interested in learning more.
Here are some photos that we are working with for our documentary. We are trying to create the Ken Burns effect by making the photos last longer on screen.
This is what the Wharton Studio used to look like in Stewart Park.
We used this image from Patria to work on creating the Ken Burns effect on Irene Castle. We will use actual footage from this film in our film.
Here’s a photograph from Beatrice Fairfax, a serial made in Ithaca, and we will use actual footage from this series in our documentary.
This week, we applied what we learned in class to start editing our interviews using Final Cut 7. We found the editing software to be easy to use and we are pleased with the footage that we are getting. One of our issues is color correcting some of the interviews because we did not use a backlight at the History Center, so it is a little dark. We plan to fix this problem with final cut once we finish going through the interviews.
Another important component in our production process is finding more materials for our b-roll since this is a historical documentary. We got a treasure trove of photos from Ithaca Made Movies last weekend and we can’t wait to decide which ones to use in our project. In class, we learned how to use the Ken Burns effect to make our pictures last longer on the screen. We also watched three different productions made in Ithaca that we hope to use in our documentary. Through watching these documentaries, we started to see some connections between our interviews and the movies. We’re excited to continue working on our post production next week!
Lights, Camera, Silence. 