Thinking about Styling and Roots

We shot the final of 3 parts for scene 10 this past Sunday. It had a strange set that included a scissor lift, a bed with satin sheets, and of course, a hard hat. Looking at the footage later, I could really tell that this movie is the child of another movie we did about 4 years back - Ladies and Gentlemen We Assume (you can find this on http://www.ancmovies.com/) . This was a short movie, about 16 minutes long, that we premiered at Movie Prom (an event we put together in Oct. 2005 - you can see about it here http://www.movieprom.com/). It was literally made as a stylistic test for what would become this movie. The content of this short has a different focus, the whole production value is much more raw and less professional, and the info is there, but not always built into the movie in a way that really allows the viewer to to take it all in. It is informationally cluttered. There are times when the visual and auditory aspects of the movie enhance and inform the information that is being presented, and then there were many times where the visual and auditory elements compete with the information being presented. We want to avoid that cluttering and competition in this movie. We actually learned a lot about how to handle this style of non-fiction movie effectively - mostly from seeing how we did it wrong. However, there was a certain strangeness to the style that I really wanted to carry into this movie.

So, back to looking at the footage. I had worried, as we were getting this footage, that it would cut together badly, that the look and the tone would not give me what I had hoped for. I was more than a little pleasantly surprised. The tone was exactly on, and that strangeness from the short we had made carried through to this scene in ways I had not expected. Unfortunately, though, a problem I was not as worried about in this scene popped up. There were a few places where the information presented to the viewer was cluttered and unfocused. I think this will be an ongoing issue that we must battle throughout this movie. I guess the important thing, though is that we're aware of it. However, with a few different cuts, some additional on-sreeen text, and some audio tweeking, we were able to unclutter it quite a bit, and I feel really good about it. Charlie should be getting some of the pics for this scene off his camera and on here very soon.
-Trisha