I am in a perpetual state of what feels like indecision. Decisions i do make seem to inspire little confidence. Having returned to the constituent parts of the film, i managed to position myself in a no win situation by dismembering the piece and therefore making it unrecognisable. After many attempts at new structures for the edits, i realised that what i had at the beginning was the “sketch” to work from. As this original version harboured a few bogey-men, i concentrated my efforts on the audio. This i wanted to make into a soundtrack. I believed this would be the route most likely to lead to a strong visual and linear narrative. I could feed the visuals off the audio and hopefully lead to my being more able to be selective in the approach to which clips were best to use.
After several days on this tack i was pleased to find that what i thought was possible became very real. i believe i have that in the bag. From then on i had a storyboard of sorts, timeline with a beginning and an end. I had always wanted the time that my piece ran for had a link with the subject matter. Time had become, and still retains a huge importance in the boxing, and i wanted to acknowledge that in the film. The soundtrack was perfect in that it runs for 8 minutes, which is the exact length of an amateur or White-collar bout; 3x 2 minute rounds with 2 x 1minute breaks in between.
After creating a general order for the clips, similar to the original, i began to extract and crop-out the chaff and generally make the piece more lean. This allowed the soundtrack to breathe and not get muddied. The images following the pieces now flowing crescendo.
On completing this stage i took astep back and viewed the piece as a whole (a difficult task!) and felt 90% of the way, and quite pleased. This version i passed around a few people and the feed back was positive but also underlined a weak area. This was not easy to pinpoint until one comment received suggested the need for some quicker movement in the imagery. I hadn’t realised how much of the footage was slowed and to what extent. This made me feel that i needed to get back to what a boxing bout is also about, speed and strength. I had enjoyed until this point the fact that the only visible violence in the film was of the cornerman slapping his boxer. After slipping in some real-time (cropped) footage of the fighters and I knew I had the missing link. Muscle and hitting.
I am sitting on the piece now until i am able to view it on a big screen (dont get me started).
Written work to hand in…..
