Hip-hop Montage - Practice

As practice for my coursework, I decided to experiment with different ways of filming. Following my post on montages, I thought it would be an interesting idea to create a hip-hop montage, as it's something I've been considering in my final piece. You can watch it here:

It took me around 30 minutes to film, and two lessons to edit. To get the sound effects, I downloaded a clip from Youtube, which contained a few of the montages from the film. I then put it into Audacity, and edited and saved each specific sound, until I had one for each action.

I think my finished product was fairly successful - I feel I replicated the style quite well, and adding the sound effects was especially effective, as it made it seem a lot closer to the original film. I found it relatively easy to film and edit, as Requiem for a Dream is one of my favourite films, and so I was fairly familiar with the shot lengths in terms of both speed and focal length. I also think the repeated shots made it a lot more interesting - they don't do it in the film to the extent I did in mine, but I think it looked quite good as it added a twist to it that wasn't necessarily expected.

If I did it again, I would probably rethink some of the shots. Doing one shot in a number of ways allows for a lot more ease in editing, as if one doesn't look right then I have a lot to choose from. Also, I need to be more careful with continuity within shots - sometimes, the background is repeated when it shouldn't be - e.g. the spoon goes off to the right side of the screen, while the coffee machine is on the left, but when I zoomed in and put it on the table, it was on the left side infront of the coffee machine. This isn't hugely noticable in the final piece, as it moves so quickly and it's not the main focus of the shot, however you can still notice it and so next time, I need to make sure something like that doesn't happen.

After creating this, I have decided I would definitely consider doing it in my coursework - I think it's a really good way to start off a scene, and it's great for showing a lot of action/movement in a little bit of time. However, I don't think I would do it to the extent I did here - since the cap in my final piece of coursework is around 2 minutes, I'd rather more of it be content the audience has time to focus on, so I would maybe only do it for 10 seconds or so.