Episode Three: 52 - Next Episode and the Future

Although the third episode of Listen To The City Breathe took much longer than I had originally planned, it finally came out in a way that I was happy with. It was delayed by a month of inaction, but it was also delayed by my misunderstanding of what certain details would entail. After this experience, I have a much better understanding of elements of production that I had never included before, including animation, more specialized titles, and more specialized music. I also learned a lot more about cinematography, and color correction. I think that all of this will only help me become a better filmmaker in the future, and I look forward to taking these new skills with me into future projects, and future episodes of Listen To The City Breathe!



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Episode Three: 51 - Follow up shooting

The film was almost completed, but I knew that I wanted a few more shots of Toshi in the third episode of Listen To The City Breathe. He had just returned to New York City from a dance tour in Japan, and as busy as he is, I knew that I had to reach out to him in before I missed him again. So, following my own stand-ins (which I discussed before) of what I wanted on the screen, I still wanted several shots of Toshi. This included him dancing onto the subway train (as the finale for the whole film), me and Toshi talking, and him meditating.

One thing that I really liked about these shots is that they were the most recent shots for the whole film, and they were taken after I had learned a lot more about photography, and cinematography. I think these are the best shots of the whole film, and so I am happy that at the last minute, I decided to go and get some extra shots that I believed the film needed.

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Episode Three: 50 - Other Titles, ii

One way that I challenged myself (perhaps it was too much of a challenge) was to create my own stylized titles. This was because I wanted a lot more control over the textures of the text, and also the timing of the text, to better follow Toshi's speech. The big problem with this, however, was that it was all a bit more work than I initiated, but in the end it was worth it to have better looking titles.

The biggest challenge of all of this, however, was that I had to create all the titles and text in Photoshop, and then bring into Final Cut Pro each word individually, and time it and place it. This was tedious, but it gave me much more control over the titles than some of the built-in tools in Final Cut Pro would allow me to have.

One thing I had control over was the appearance of the text. I chose the font, but using Photoshop, then I was able to add not just color, but also a bit of texture to the color. Another factor of control I had was the layout, and size of the text. I really wanted to play with that in order to lend some notion of flavor to the titles, instead of just words on the screen.

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Episode Three: 49 - Other Titles, i

I had seen on some tv shows, and other documentaries that certain important phrases might be stressed by including additional, more energetic titles. So I decided to include such titles in this episode of Listen To The City Breathe. This served a two-fold purpose. The one I already stated was that I could emphasize important phrases that Toshi said.

The second purpose, however, was that it might help present Toshi's ideas more clearly. At some point in my life I learned that I have a certain talent for understanding people who have heavy non-American accents. (To be sure, sometimes, I still have challenges understanding some phrases.) That said, although I can understand Toshi reasonably well, I am aware that many people might not be able to understand him so clearly. In fact, there are plenty of shows (especially on news broadcasts) where people with heavy accents are subtitled, even though they are speaking English. I always found this practice offensive; but I have to try to understand the other perspective of those who can't so easily understand foreign accents. So while I decided against inluding English subtitles throughout, I felt like presenting certain phrases with extra titles might be a nice compromise. (To be honest, I have to admit that getting the viewer to understand Toshi was the most important goal, and so maybe I should have simply included English subtitles throughout. But I have a certain character flaw that sometimes I do what I want instead of what might be more important to the viewer. In any case, like I said, I think this solution was a nice compromise between my stubbornness, and viewer needs.)

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Episode Three: 48 - Subtitles

Because the subject of this episode of Listen To The City Breathe was Japanese, with a following in Japan, I hoped that including Japanese subtitles would help increase the viewership of this episode. Because I don't know Japanese very well at all, I transcribed the whole film of Toshi's dialogue, and sent it to him to translate into Japanese.

Perhaps there is an easier way to include subtitles in a film, but the only way I found to do this was by using one of Final Cut Pro's title-tools, and repeating the process every time for each line of subtitle. This was a bit more tedious than I supposed it should be, but I haven't found a better solution yet, so...

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Episode Three: 47 - Speaking of Audio

I had mentioned earlier that some of my interviews were conducted in less than ideal audio conditions (although I didn't realize this when I had originally conducted the interviews). During one interview we kept a fan blowing in the background, and another interview was conducted outside, very close to a busy street where lots of noise was happening. Because these interviews were done, and I had to work with what was there, I had to find a way to make the audio better. After fumbling about for a bit, I found out that Final Cut Pro actually had automated solutions for these kinds of issues. After clicking some audio button, I saw that there was a tool to decrease background noise. I don't believe that I did this perfectly, but that simple automation helped me a great deal, and made the final audio so much better than any manual tweaking I could have ever done. So finding that such tools were built into Final Cut Pro was an amazing revelation.

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Episode Three: 46 - Transitions, ii

However, in previous episodes of Listen To The City Breathe, I did not use many interesting transitions between shots. However, after working on the Christmas Fantasy music video, and watching tv and other documentaries more carefully since making the first episode, I learned that well placed transitions do contribute something special to a film. In this episode, I chose to use one specific kind of transition when we turned away from Toshi, and another specific kind of transition when we returned to him. After all, the transition needs to serve a purpose to tell the story, and I tried to maintain that idea when using transitions, and when choosing which transition to use.

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