ARD 604 Creative Futures. Ffresh Film Festival 2013

Creative Futures

Ffresh - The student moving image festival of Wales

      This year Glyndwr University in Wrexham was lucky enough to host the annual Ffresh Film Festival. The festival is a three day event showcasing new Welsh talent in the student sector from Universities all across Wales. I was very excited about the upcoming talks and master classes that I would be able to attend over the three days as the majority of them link directly with my future career prospects and are a good insight to the inner workings of how companies are ran and also how productions are completed.

Designing the sound for The gospel of us

      The talk on the Wednesday was hosted By Dai Shell and Eleanor Russell who are industry leading sound producers. This talk was of great interest to me due to the content that was to be discussed in the hour. I have a life long interest in sound, not only from the film side but also due to my interest in music production.

      Dai started his career in the music industry as a sound engineer and recorded with bands such as Catatonia and the Super Furry Animals in the studio that he owned.  Later he progressed into television and film. Initially, Dai Shell was a sound mixer for television productions concentrating on audio levels and the overall sound of the programmes that he was involved with. He also helped develop a process called auto conforming which helped the sound that he had recorded to get back to the original audio quality. This was done because of the terrible television sound that hindered many productions through his early career. Amy Russell studied photography at university and is now a sound editor dealing with sound effects and the treatment of voices in the television and film sectors.

      We were then shown a short extract from the film that was the topic of the talk. The Gospel of us is a film version of the National Theatre of Wales production called The Passion, and was one of the most ambitious productions ever staged in the U.. The film, The gospel of us was shot over three days in Port Talbot and was directed by Dave McKean, who started his career as an illustrator, and stared Michael Sheen as the main actor. 

It was very interesting to hear how the film was made. Along with thirteen cameras filming the action there was also eight sound recordists whose job it was to gather the audio for the film. There were many problems that the sound crew had to deal with and overcome in the making, the main problem being the echo that the P.A system produced which made a lot of the audio unusable in the final production. Dai Shell then had the time consuming task of having to re voice the actors. I learned that there are many problems to re voicing parts including getting the actor into the studio in the first place. Many actors finish a job and then move directly to a different production, usually on the other side of the world. The actor Michael Sheen only had a couple of hours spare until he was to leave the country for his next job and Dai Shell was very relieved that he re voiced the needed parts quickly and professionally. Dai Shell explained that to re create the feel and tone of the original it takes a very professional actor. 

      I learned a lot about other aspects of television and film audio production including the importance of the Foley artist. A Foley artist is someone who creates sound effects for the use in productions. These can be anything from the noise of a squeaky chair and the flapping of a birds wings to the crunching of snow and any other sound that is required by the director. A lot of sound is added later and this makes the job of a Foley artist very important.

Dai Shell also talked about how the quality of audio in television programmes is very different to that of a cinema production. A jumbo jet taking off has a noise level of about 150 db, the dynamic range of audio in the cinema is about 105db. When you compare this to televisions dynamic range of around 24 db then there is countless problems that you can encounter whilst editing audio for television. The process has to looked at in an entirely different way to make what the viewer hears to be believable and there are considerably more time constraints on television work too. Most programmes had a lead time of only a matter of weeks compared to sometimes up to a number of years for a full length feature film.

      A few tips that Dai Shell and Amy Russell shared with us were I found very important. 

• never say that you will fix it in post production
• make sure that your equipment works
• employ someone you know can do the job professionally
• it is good to employ someone on reputation
• location of recording equipment is key
• sensitivity of microphones 
• be aware of noises around you
• background noise of water, wind and cars are hard to edit out 

      Overall I found this talk very interesting and informative and was happy that I attended this particular one. There are many aspects of sound recording and editing that I had never considered before in my own personal work that I have produced. Moving forward with my career I now know that thanks to this talk I will approach the sound aspect of my productions in a completely different way. I now feel that sound is just as important, if not more so than the images that are shown on the screen. 

Michael Sheen

 Dai Shell

Promotional poster

The Mill Masterclass

      I was excited when I heard that The Mill would be attending Glyndwr University's Ffresh Film Festival and hosting a master class for the students. The Mill master class was hosted by Suraj Harrington Odedra or Sid for short. Sid started at the mill doing small jobs and then worked his way up the ladder to his current position. This seems to be a running trend within this particular type of industry. I think I am still waiting to hear of someone who instantly procures employment in the position that they want. You have to start at the bottom before you can move up to a different position within any company it seems.

      After a brief introduction from Sid he showed The Mill's show reel and I was very surprised about the amount of work that the company has produced and also how many of the productions that I had already seen. The show reel consisted mainly of adverts that are shown on the television. These ranged from Guinness adverts to car adverts. The Mills work is mainly based around three dimensional compositing digital work, using programs such as Auto desk Maya, Flame, Houdini and Nuke. They are also using a closed beta program called Arnold which they used on a car advert for Audi where they had to animate hummingbirds. I had seen this commercial on television but was unaware of the the work and complexity that such an advert contains. One of the statistics from the talk was interesting, this was that the seventeen out of twenty of the biggest films of last year were heavy in digital special effects and three of those films were entirely computer animated.
This shows that digital effects are a more sort after requirement in the ever progressing industry of animation. 
      Being primarily a photographer, towards the end of the talk I did start to feel a bit lost with all the technical talk about three dimensional compositing but the talker kept my attention throughout and I found the talk very interesting and enlightening.

The Insiders. How to get ahead in T.V

      One of the talks that I attended on the last day of the Ffresh Film Festival was called The Insiders, how to get ahead in T.V. This talk was hosted by Glyndwr University's Steve Davies. Steve is a lecturer on one of the film and T.V degree courses and has a host of experience from working for the BBC and also as a script writer. 

      The talk was set up in an interview style with a number of people from within the industry. One of the panel was Errol Phillips, who started his career as an actor and then moved on to directing for theatre. Later in his career he moved into editing but now is a director. The next panellist was Laura Cotton. Laura went to University and gained a degree in film and broadcasting and after university got a job as a runner and then worked her way up to production secretary. Laura's current job is a script editor for the BBC and her latest job was the script editor for the BBC show Being Human.

The third speaker for the day was Nick Godding, the Producer from the Sky 1 show Trollied, a show about the exploits of the staff from a supermarket. Again in this industry, Nick had worked his way up from the bottom being a stage manager to a second assistant director  to a production manager then to his current position of Producer. All three of the talkers stated that there was not a traditional route with regards to career progression through the industry and its more about who you know over what you know and being in the right place at the right time. One of the other messages that I got is that you just need enthusiasm coupled with hard work and a bit of luck to succeed. Networking also was a major factor of the talk, web sites such as crewfinder.com and Linkedin.com was mentioned on a number of occasions and since then I have set up my own profile on the internet to connect with people with similar career aspirations to myself.

      Nick Godding stated that going to University was a brilliant start to a career because you get to use the equipment that you wouldn't have been able to otherwise in any other sector. One major point was that you get to play and more importantly fail in a safe environment without ant major impact on your career. I found this talk very helpful and it was good to hear opinions which would help progress my future career options.

The Wrexham Film and Photography Collective

      I would have liked to visit more talks from the week of the Ffresh Film festival but as an active member of The Wrexham film and photography Collective we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to man a stall in the foyer at the main campus of Glyndwr University during the festival. Over the three days of the festival we were able to spread the word of the existence of The Collective and even managed to get a couple of jobs and met lots of new contacts.