Umer is a musician, artist, and entrepreneur from Pakistan, who is currently doing his Masters in Integrated Design at Hochschule Anhalt. Having heard him playing in music jams, as well as talking to him about the music he makes, I realized that his journey to make music could be an interesting one to tell. 

He has also moved countries recently, and spends his days balancing between his masters degree, working on his start-up, and making music. The idea of the film was to capture how these events affect the music he makes.

Camera and Lens:

• Sony a6500

• Sony 35mm f1.4

Sound:

• iphone

The filming took place over two days.

Day 1:

I accompanied Umer to the city jam happening at Kiez. This would serve as Act 2 of the interview. I then spent the night filming Umer playing the drums and guitar using multiple angles. I also captured footage of the ambience, as well as other musicians. Sound was recorder using a phone microphone. 

Day 2:

I asked Umer to accompany me to a nearby park. There, we first shot multiple takes of two songs that he has composed recently. Afterwards, I sat together with him and completed one part of his verbal interview.

We then went back to our apartment, where I set up the scene. I then completed the second part of his verbal interview.

Once the filming was done, I imported all the clips into Davinci Resolve. I then went through all the clips to trim them to the most usable parts. Audio was also synchronized at this point. Once I had the longer interview clips, I cut the clips to „dialogue chunks“, and color coded them according to what act I think they fit best. 

Once I had all the clips cut and color coded, then it was a matter of finding the story, and assembling a rough cut. This was then embellished with B-Roll, and synchronized with the music. 

Finally, all the clips were converted from S-Log2 and Cine4 to Rec709. Then I did basic color corrections, and applied a LUT to bring it all together.

I think the biggest issue I had was with audio. Since we were catpuring audio on two different phones, the audio quality did not match. It was also hard to mitigate outside noise, and make sure it was audible over music. I think given more time, audio levels could be adjusted and noise removed to have a better listening experience.

Another issue was time. I had captured a lot of footage, and there were a lot of interview questions that could have told a better story. However, due to other projects, I found I had little time during editing. Due to this, I had to make the tough choice of cutting the entirety of the third act. Had I had more time, the story could have been rounded off in a much less abrupt manner.