When deciding what to actually produce as part of my new wave film, my contextual study of the American new wave was a big influence on me especially Easy Rider with it's use of jump cuts and drug use.
The Graduate and Midnight cowboy also inspired me to include transportation within my new wave film as they both use buses to show that the characters are moving on with their lives, because of this I decided to use footage on a bus journey at the start of my film, about half way through and at the very end. I decided these journey's such happen at different times of the day and as such the footage from the start of the film was shot in the morning, the footage from the middle of the film was shot in the afternoon and the footage used at the end of the film was shot at night.
My final piece produced was a statement on the idea that the majority of the youth in today's society is more interested in what they know and not particularly expanding their horizons. The idea from this came about from the general feeling of Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, he does not know what he wants to do with his future but he doesn't just want to rush into it and as such spends the majority of the film doing absolutely nothing just as the subjects do in my film. The idea behind layering images of art galleries and other established locations over the top of my main footage was to get across the idea that even though the subjects do not particularly want to progress with their lives there is this overwhelming sense that they must do something important with their lives. I felt like art galleries and museums were the perfect locations for this due to the fact they are literally monuments to people's life work. I have also included a few images that are visible for a few frames that include phrases such as 'random movement', 'little things mean a lot' and 'do not open' The idea behind this is that they are passing thoughts of the youth today, or at least myself. The film is very much a reflection of my life and the general feelings felt by the 1960's youth of America, they wanted their future to be different but didn't know how to go about this. The film attempts to depict my outlook on life in that as much as I want myself to be known to the world, symbolised by the art galleries, I am unsure of how to do this, as shown by the words 'random movement' I feel as if anything I do with my life will be a random stab in the dark.
Having done my initial camera and lighting tests I had better knowledge of ISO, aperture and shutter speed, I tried to incorporate this into my new wave film as much as possible but I intended for the majority of my filming to be done with natural lighting and so the majority of the time I only needed to adjust my aperture slightly each time just to make sure the footage produced was neither over or under exposed. The majority of filming done used a hand held camera, this is a common technique used within new wave films and I also felt that it would work well within established locations, it is meant to symbolise the idea that to become a well-known person I would have to take a much more hands on approach. This is opposed by the shots within the bedroom, the majority of the filming here was done by a static camera and I tended to just set up the camera and let it record, this was to symbolise the laissez-faire approach I have to life in general. The editing is jumpy and erratic as early new wave films were but it also has somewhat of a deeper meaning. The film is really a reflection of what's going on in my head, I can never really focus on one thing and my mind is constantly switching between ideas, I constantly worry that I will make nothing of my life but at the same time take no action against this.
Editing for my new wave film was very sporadic and every cut used was a jump cut, the jump cuts enable a quick change of scenery, something the french new wave films were renowned for when they first arrived on the scene. At other times, I used jump cuts to show the same scene but characters in slightly different positions to show that although these people have lives and do activities from time to time, they aren't exactly very exciting and not really worthing of watching, a jump cut was used to fast forward through this group of people's lives. Due to the fact that I filmed a lot of footage for my new wave film when it came to editing I had a lot to sort through so I found sorting them at first into relevant folders as I had captured a lot of video as well as photography really helped.
After sorting through the file types, I then went through my footage and named them small signifier as to what happened in each shot, for example 'Book Band Practice' is footage of two of the people discussing their band and how band practice needs to rebooked, these titles made it far easier to edit my clips as just having a few words describing each shot was all I needed to know what i had filmed.
When filming my main challenge was that I felt I did not film at enough different established locations, I tried to overcome this by getting a lot of filming done at the locations I could visit such as the Manchester Art Gallery and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. I ended up having about 3 hours of footage for me to edit together to produce my final piece. this however was another one of the challenges I faced, I ended up filming far too much and didn't allow myself enough time to sift through the hours of footage to find specific shots that I wanted to use. If I was to improve upon my new wave film I would definitely plan my filming a lot better and shoot at more locations as I only used about 6 locations for filming. Also if I organised myself better and had better planning I would have had more time to watch through the footage and select key clips from my footage to use. As with all my work my organisation skills are what let me down and as such if I were to re-do my new wave film I would plan ahead in much more detail and I feel this would have allowed me to produce a much better film.
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