From Footage to Film

The last few days have been quite busy, as we are now only a week away from installing our video at the Yorkshire Museum. We still have work to do, but we are really starting to see our film taking shape.

On Thursday we spent the morning reshooting one of our interviews. When we listened to the interviews after the first day of shooting, it became clear that the background noise was a bit too distracting in one of them, and we decided to re-do it. The rest of the day we were back at King's Manor editing our film, and we are really starting to understand how much time it takes to edit sound and video, compared to the actual time spent filming.

Lizzie has continued with the drawings and animations, which are close to finished. We have now experienced some of the challenges technology brings, as some of the files containing the drawings were corrupted, and now unusable. As these included Lizzie's favourite overview drawing of Star Carr this was really frustrating, but the new ones she has made are in Astrid's opinion just as good. Lizzie has also added ambient sounds to the animations, which makes them seem more alive, and sets the scene for what the voice-over will be talking about. This includes the sound of flint knapping, and the sound of a piece of flint being thrown into the lake. Next on the list is to include the voice-over in this, and make sure that the effects and the talking do not out-do each other.

The drawing so far that will illustrate the flint knapping scene

This voice-over is what Astrid has been working on lately. During the interviews we ended up with a lot of really good footage, and the challenge was to extract the bits that best would fit our story. All the archaeologists we talked to are very knowledgeable about Star Carr and the Mesolithic, and our main goal was to try to bring their enthusiasm and passion for the topic into our film. Flint is not necessarily something everyone appreciates or even knows about, so to have people who are truly enthusiastic about it narrate the video, is something we see as very valuable.

We are starting to see the end product of the film, but we will have to continue working during the weekend, to produce a first draft that we can distribute to get some feedback. There is no doubt there is a lot of work involved in film making, but we truly enjoy it, and we really look forward to seeing the final product. If you have any opinions on what we have done so far, feel free to comment, and we will be back early next week, hopefully with a first draft to show you.

The Heritage Team