Juno Judo

My next film Juno Judo was a real big step for me as it was when I made the jump from using one camera to directing two cameras. I found this quite challenging, but it was also very rewarding and I was quite pleased with the end product. Now my opinion has changed and whilst I still am pleased with it I do feel that there is still a lot I could do to improve it.



Originally this was intended as a music video but I don't think that the video really did the music enough justice. (The music is a track called Conga Fury by Juno Reactor.)

I still quite like the first 2:15 because all of this was choreographed. The fight was choreographed by myself and the two fighters, whilst the camera work was choreographed by myself. It was all very much like a big ballet of some sorts. (Although a rather ugly ballet!) However, from 2:15 the fight is all improvised up until when one of the fighters loses, which was what we knew before we started that we wanted to end with.And whilst the camera movements weren't choreographed from 2:15 I still gave instructions to the other camera man.

Sadly you can hear some of my instructions in the video. The idea was that I would cut out all the diegetic sound when it came to edit, but it just didn't work when they were thrown and there was no bang. Although when I came to edit it I did think that I had managed to get rid of all the talking in the background. Tip for the future, if you know you've captured some sound of the crew talking even by accident then listen back to your video with some good headphones because they make such a difference and are so much better than crappy speakers.

I'm still quite fond of the first couple of minutes of this video, but it is a shame the rest of it is rather shit. I think that a completely choreographed fight would have looked better, but I always knew that 8 minutes of fight footage would be hard to keep going with the limited fight knowledge that I have. I probably would have been better shortening the track that I used.