The brief for this project was quite simple. To create a 3-4 minute edit, including some good soundbites, cutting between angles but no jump cuts.  Basically taking the interesting subject matter with the straight shots and make the edit “lively and fun”.

In the footage, Adam from no pork pies discusses helping companies improve their online visibility by using social media.  My job was to help communicate his message with the edit.

This is what I did to make it look pretty…

Chroma Key

After looking through the footage it occurred to me that it might be possible to key out the background.  Having only ever keyed out blue and green and knowing the shot hadn’t been lit with that in mind I didn’t even know if it would be possible. I gave it a try and it worked beautifully.

Background choice

I wanted to make sure that I was keeping a consistent style with The No Pork Pies corporate identity, so I visited their website and made use of the background colour and illustration elements.

Additional Footage

Listening to the dialogue carefully, I started to gather logos and clips from other online resources to help visually illustrate the discussion.  I also added some footage of live of internet activity which I captured by using  ‘Debut’ software.

And this is a snippet of the final edit:

If you have a similar project you would like me to help you with please get in contact.

A few years ago I was asked by Titan books to go along with a colleague of mine, Nick Jones, to catalog the illustrations and memorabilia that Dave Gibbons had collected and kept since the creation of Watchmen. This was to be compiled into a book which would be entitled ‘Watching the Watchmen’. Nick was just leaving Titan at the time, so this would be one of his last tasks for the company and what a nice thing to be asked to do in your final week.

Nick and I met at the station and drove towards Dave Gibbon’s studio in a quiet part of a small town. When we arrived Dave greeted us and offered us drinks. My first impression of him was how very down to earth and nice he was. As we sorted through the carefully kept and rather coveted trinkets of roughs, awards and finished art, Dave narrated stories attached to the various collections and I started to get an idea that this would make a wonderful series of videos. I was sure his fans would want to hear all the great details he was conveying to us.

I suggested to Dave that I could maybe come back at a later date and film him talking about the different elements of the book. He agreed that it was definitely something that would be of interest, but we had to run it by Titan first.

By now the book had been published and the film based on the book was on general release. I got the call to confirm they would like me to shoot a number of short interviews with Dave Gibbons. I was delighted. I returned on my own this time and was again greeted by a very hospitable Dave Gibbons at the door. I have never since filmed an interview with such ease. Dave Gibbons knew the subject matter so well and was so relaxed that we breezed through the shoots. There are professional actors that would need more takes than this guy!

We filmed eleven short interviews in total, covering such subjects  as Rorschach’s mask, cameo characters, how to get from a script to the finished comic, and views on the film made from the original story. I’ve posted four in my portfolio page http://www.angiethomas.co.uk/portfolio . If you are interested in watching more there are additional videos uploaded to  my Vimeo channel: http://vimeo.com/channels/wedoideas

We wrapped up and Dave insisted on signing a copy of the then recently released Watching the watchmen book, published by Titan, which was a nice bonus and surprise. We had started the filming at around nine and I had in my mind that I needed to post a letter before I left, when I mentioned this upon leaving and asked Dave where the nearest post box was, he offered to walk it there himself. Like I said at the top of this blog, what a genuinely nice person! I remember meeting Dave Gibbons to be a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable experience from the very beginning to the end.

You can buy the book on the Forbidden Planet or Titan Books website, just follow this link: http://titanbooks.com/watching-the-watchmen-3966/

I was asked to create a showreel with the purpose of being screened on loop at a launch party in the Basement Bar in Brighton.

The brief was quite open with a few specifics: there would be ten artists displaying kitsch / fifties work, 2 DJ’s playing and a Lindy Hop teacher hoping to be tutoring Brighton’s biggest class and finally the title of the evening was ‘Phwoar’. The video work should be in keeping with these elements and no less than two to three minutes long.

I saw it as a great opportunity to be involved with something fun, that stretched my skills and would unquestionably make me approach the software I had been using in a completely different way.

I went straight to the library to look for books on fifties: kitsch, architecture, décor, fashion, and films. Whilst I was looking through shelves a little square book about signs and symbols caught my eye. It was a book full of simple black fill characters and objects, and seemed to perfectly fit the imagery I had imagined when I wrote the proposal. Even though it wasn’t fifties related it would turn out to be a valuable part of the edit.

The next day I started the arduous task of digitising the images I had gathered the previous day. It hadn’t been the most modest lending of books, and I had left with a whole armful of potential material. As you might imagine, this part isn’t terribly interesting to read about and consisted of, ‘turn the page, choose the image, scan the image, save, repeat’. A process much punctuated with tea, it took me a full three days. At one point I had discussed with my flat mate what I was working on, and she proudly and rather generously produced another three books, to which my heart sank, as I knew I couldn’t resist the urge to leaf through them…just in case. They were, of course, fantastic and I added them to the pile.

The scanning over with, I felt that a few hundred found images, when put together, might seem a tad two dimensional, in the descriptive sense, so I started to look else where for treats. The Internet seemed the next obvious place to route around in and I added a few more hundred images and footage from old films to my already diligently sub divided and titled folders.

At this stage my head was buzzing with ideas and full of ways to approach the edit. I was ridiculously keen to get started, having spent so much time preparing the material.

My first day was by no means a waste of time but I didn’t achieve much more than putting every single idea I had into the timeline. It looked like an utter muddle, but it was a starting point at least. Among the ideas that didn’t make it were using footage I created. I had fresh in my mind the ‘Sledge Hammer, Peter Gabrielle video’ and thought a talking animated head might look quite cool. It didn’t quite fit with everything else I had gathered and it was cut early on. Other ditched ideas consisted of a free-floating pair of sunglasses to wander across the screen, and elaborations on certain ideas, that when simplified, worked way better.

I knew I wanted to create something that constantly moved and entertained the viewer, even perhaps make them laugh, so I started to go though the images one by one and discounted any that didn’t fit that criteria. I quickly realised that purely by accident I had quite a few images that could be run sequentially and perhaps even lend themselves to an animated style.

I had really started to enjoy the edit and everything was just falling into place, which is a real blessing for us creative types, as we do tend to get disheartened and indeed blocked when an obstacle presents itself. Much like a writer trying to achieve a certain amount of words for an essay, after a full day I decided to look and see how many minutes I’d managed to fill. I was, to put it mildly, rather shocked when I discovered I’d edited a whole 35 seconds. Big sigh followed!

Still I was enjoying what I was working on and that’s a major plus for me. So often I work on an edit with tight constraints and I have no creative freedom, or the subject matter is so dull it could send you to sleep on five red bulls. This edit, on the other hand was actually keeping me from sleeping through the night with ideas and drive, I hadn’t felt this excited by a project for a while.

Four days later I had a finished a 2 minute and 30 second piece of work I was proud of. I still changed tiny details for the next three days of course, but finally managed to let it go and sent it to my client.