Full Sail Documentary

J

jonwolf

Active member
I'm not sure if everyone has heard of Full Sail. It's a college in Orlando, Florida. Anyways. I went there and attended the film program in 2003-2004. I made a documentary called, RELAPSE. Its' a short documentary about the students and the school. Take a gander.http://www.jonwolf.org/videos/jonwolf-relapse.mov


It was all filmed with a dvx100.

For all your Godard fans. see if you can tell what film the intro song is from.
 
Hey Jon,

Took me a while to get to this but it was a very rewarding watch...I really enjoyed it. Might I suggest you post it in the Clips/Screengrabs section? It would get a lot of views and comments there. Awesome. I'm gonna hold onto it and watch it from time to time.

WTF was that about when the one guy wanted to get a master while everything was set up but couldn't because it wasnt on tha damn schedule? Why not just get it then?
 
that was just a testament to show how ****ed up some things were with that crew.... thats all.. i saw this on the big screen at unverisal studios movie theater, and the dvx100 looked good blow up onto a big screen
 
So who was that guy who was saying no because it wasn't on the schedule...was he an instructor or ust another student? And was that his one and only reason, because it wasnt writen on a piece of paper?

Awesome that the DVX looked good on the bigscreen, I have yet to see one projected (that I know of).
 
Hey, just watched you short Documentary. It was pretty good, editing/framing was great! I went to Full Sail 2002-2003 and it was nice that someone put something like this together. Do you have any future Documentaries planned? I'm currently filming a WWII Documentary on the Bataan Death March. I'm almost done, going to the Philippines on March 30th to finish up production.

Keep up the good work!

Chris
 
As a future (August) Full Sail student, its good to get the ups and downs of everything. As I work my ass off to become a successful camera operator, hopefully Full Sail will aid me in getting to the higher level of work and send me on a bright path.
 
hello.

i watched a little bit of your doc, and from what i saw it looks good.

what do you think about full sail?

the teachers, the environment, the projects, social life, and so on?

im thinking about going there, or SCAD, but im not too sure.

thanks.
 
In general I thought it was pretty cool... some tips.... dont cut off peoples chins, that always looks weird, you can cut off the top of their head but not their chin, a subliminal need of the viewer to see the full mouth moving. Also, the cheap fisheye just was distracting. One last thing, watch eye-lines, people seemed to wander from off camers to in camera...


ash =o)
 
I did a little week long shoot for a resort promo, and ended up working with like 5 former FS students, one of which was a female. Decent group of kids overall.
 
nice doc man, one little comment though, when you are framing someone up for a haircut (CU) you might want to get a little more chin in there. I always find it a little wierd when you can't see someones chin, especially on larger people, it's very unflattering.
 
I wished I had known about Full Sail when I came out of college although they just recently came out with a program that offers a Masters Degree for folks like me that have a BA degree. My brother went there in 2003-2004 for Audio Engineering. A couple days before he graduated I came down there and he gave me a tour of the campus. Looks like a really cool school. The Final Cut Pro editing suite was nuts! Must have been about 20 or more Mac G5's in there.

The scheduling of classes was hard to get used to for my brother. He would have classes at odd times like 2am or a 4am along with normal hours for classes. He says they structure classes like that because in the real world you could be on a set, or in the studio working on some music etc, at odd times of the night and I guess the school prepares your mind for that experience.
 
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Just finished watching the documentary. Several things I noticed: Its okay to shoot close ups and extreme close ups of "soundbytes" but I would have liked to see some variations - wide, medium, tight, rack focused into a soundbyte. All of your soundbytes or interviews were all shot the same way. Did you not have a lavalier mic? If so, I would have framed them in such a way that you would see a film camera in the background or a light head or something just to give the shot something interesting to see.

I wanted to see more behind the scenes type footage. You should have covered a lot of those soundbytes with b-roll. We don't need to see their faces everytime they pop up on the screen. Show us the first or second time then cover them and then bring them back up towards the end so we see them again or mix it up throughout the piece.

I would have used some music when you faded to black and put up the text on the screen. I think either music or perhaps some nat sound from on set would have worked there. Dead silence was kinda jarring to me and you kept it like that all the way through.

I would have liked to see more of the school, shoots on location, more shots of the equipment, campus life etc. Just seemed like everything was shot indoors except for one soundbyte which was outside.

A nice montage of video clips in the begining to draw the viewer in would have been nice. If doing a montage, I would make the edits tight. Quick short edits and keep up the pacing. You can always slow the pacing down once the piece begins.

I have produced a few documentaries. I recently won a 2006 Telly Award for a project I shot and edited. There is a short version of it on my Myspace page (video player with baseball field) Also did another one called Thee Phantom which is also on that profile as well.
 
Very nice film,
I mostly agree with the last posting, I thought at first 'what are they talking about, the CU interviews look fine' , but not for an entire film. the chin cutting did get a little odd after a while.
Also I think if you're not using the 'filmmaking' B-roll to tell a specific narrative, why not overlap more of the interview audio since the audio is less essential to those scenes? the interviews sound clear enough, and it would shorten the whole thing and move it along into more of a concise piece about the school. My rule for my self is that if it feels fine and I like it, it's too long, it's got to hurt a little if it's something you shot yourself.
the fisheye was a bit distracting, too, but fun, I'm sure.
I loved it otherwise.
I like the title screens, the interviews are great, pacing is nice (if a bit long, generally) and the arty b-roll where exposure favors light pouring in looks great, too. Congrats.
I gotta say, it doesn't make me want to go there, but its a great film. you probably didn't intend it as a promotion, anyway, right? Lack of women, there, does mean more starry eyed Speilburg fans, and thats a big turn off. Are there really that many people there over 25? didn't seem like it, based on those interviews, that would kill me after a while.
 
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