Technical resources
Shooting video
I recommend you shoot videos for this course on a smartphone, because the quality of most smartphones is good, you’re probably comfortable using it, and it’s the camera that you will have on you most of the time.
File storage
You will need plenty of storage for this course - you’ll be shooting one short film per day for several months. If your phone has limited memory, there are several ways to deal with this:
- Clear all of the stuff you don’t need off your phone. This sounds obvious, but sometimes there are apps or films or photos or other things on phones that take up a lot of space.
- Use a cloud provider to store your photos and videos remotely (meaning you can delete them from your phone). Services like Google Drive/Photos and Dropbox offer a free tier which enable you to store photos and videos online to download later.
- If you are happy for your videos to become part of a collective resource, and publicly accessible for use by anyone, upload them to the Google Drive link provided here XXX.
- Google Photos can offload the photos and videos on your phone, so that you’re able to view and download them later. It’s free, and works well; the price, however, is privacy, as Google will scan every photo and video to infer things about your life.
- Filmic Pro
app for iOS / Android (paid), offers highly controlled shooting filmicpro.com - Hyperlapse from Instagram
app for iOS (free), allows shooting of stabilised time-lapses https://hyperlapse.instagram.com - Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile
app for Android (free), allows shooting of stabilised time-lapses play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.hyperlapsemobile&hl=en - iMovie
app for iOS/Mac (free), allows video editing apple.com/imovie - DaVinci Resolve
Mac/Windows/Linux (free), professional-grade video editing suite blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve - FFmpeg
All computer platforms (free). A Swiss Army knife for formatting, splicing, converting video and audio files. Works via the command-line interface (e.g. Terminal on Mac) but is incredibly powerful. Want to split audio and video? Make a long video from lots of short videos? Extract all of the frames from a film? Use FFmpeg. ffmpeg.org - V2Art
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobile.bizo.videofilters&hl=en&gl=US / ios: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/v2art-video-effects/id1473002904
Editing audio
Recording audio
- Guide to producing audio - has lots of tips about equipment, recording, editing
- Free audio resources - a list of 40 free audio resources to help you record, edit and mix. Some of the links are podcast-specific, but many are for general audio production.
Editing, post-production
- Auphonic - this is a tool you can use to balance sound, and remove hums and hisses and so on. You can upload files, clean them up and then download them again very easily, and by creating an account you can clean up 2hrs of audio per month. I’d recommend using this tool for cleaning up all spoken audio, as it does all of the crucial ‘normalising’ (making sure that the sound is at the right level, and won’t be too loud or quiet) for you too.
- Audacity is a free tool for editing audio. It’s open source and works across platforms.
- Ffmpeg is a command-line tool for converting audio and video between formats, joining files together, splicing, extracting audio from video, etc. You can translate between any formats – you have to master the command line, but it’s free and anything you want to do is only a Google away.
- GarageBand is free if you have a Mac, and is pretty good for audio production. It’s more fully featured than you might think.
- Adobe Audition is included in many peoples’ Creative Cloud bundles. It’s a very powerful audio production platform.
Bibliography / useful references
- Oulipo Compendium
Harry Mathews, Alastair Brotchie, and Raymond Queneau, eds. Array. London / Los Angeles: Atlas Press; Make Now Press, 2005. - Oulipo: Freeing Literature by Tightening Its Rules. Andrew Gallix. Newspaper. The Guardian: Books (blog), 12 July 2013.
- Video sketch series
Johannes Langkamp, 2011 - *The Five Obstructions * dir. Lars Von Trier, 2005.
- Oblique Strategies
Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt - The Thing from the Future
Stuart Candy & James Watson (Situation Lab) - The Work of Director Michel Gondry (2003)
- The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (2003)
- The work of Van Niestat (director)
- Ten Bullets film series Tom Sachs, dir. Van Niestat
- Seven Levels of Tension Jaques Le Coq - describing intensity of scenes
- Tim Clare’s Couch to 80k Bootcamp A great set of exercises to start creative writing, also useful for artists and designers. They only take 20 minutes per day!