Miyako Kure Documentary

(English closed captioning available)

MIYAKO KURE

Client:

School Project, Miyako Kure

Tools:

Adobe Premiere, Aegissub, Audacity

My Responsibilities:

Cinematography, Editing, Sound Design, Subtitles timing

With "Trust" as the theme of the school project, my team of 3 created a documentary featuring Miyako Kure, a hairstylist in RIchmond, BC. In the documentary Mikyako Kure talks about how she started becoming a hairstylist and the trust that she builds with her clients.

My team and I brainstormed potential individuals that we could interview for the documentary. The original theme for the video was "Why I Design" so we decided to choose a Japanese hairstylist because they are commonly interpreted as the ones who set hairstyle trends.

For the storyboard, we used online photos to give us a sense of the camera angles and overall color tone of the video. I wrote down the description of each shot and selected placeholder images that reflects the subject matter. Team members then reviewed the images and changed some of them to better represent the video's intended look.

Luckily, a team member knew a hairstylist named Miyako Kure and we got her permission to interview her and film her. Since the lighting at the location was already pretty decent (and the fact that all lighting equipment at the school library was booked), I decided to borrow a reflector for the fill light.

I created a bunch of questions in advance and after preparing the audio recorder and mounting the camera on a tripod, we gave Miyako the questions and began to film the interview.

She wanted to respond in Mandarin and we said it was fine.Although I can't understand Mandarin, the other group members are fluent so we felt confident that we could add accurate subtitles. We then recorded Miyako curling a group member's hair.

At first, a different group member was responsible for editing the first draft but didn't find out until the day of draft presentation that editing was outside his area of comfort. Moving forward, we decided that I would take the lead role in editing.

During the 2nd filming session, we focused on Miyako cutting the hair of a friend.My gorup members and I took turns recording footage and one of the major challenges was that the reflector will sometimes get in the way of the haircut process. This resulted a lot of footage which required color correction in Adobe Premiere.

Another challenge was that the footage occasionally recorded the reflection of the camera person, other group members, and reflector. This caused some footage to be excluded from the final video despite having decent composition.

In Adobe Premiere, I went through all the footage that we had and trimmed the footage to so that it only contained usable footage. Then, I added a description to each video and started the editing process.

Due to time constraints and being unable to hold another interview session, I decided that the original interview pacing was good and edited on top of that.

Although there were no issues in syncing the interview footage with the interview audio, the background music length did not match the interview length at all. In this case, I used Audacity and repeated certain wavelengths of the audio so that the music extended to the appropriate length while matching the other audio waves seamlessly.

Afterwards, I was given the translation of the entire interview without the time stamps. In this case, I asked a family member who spoke mandarin to help me match the timing of what Miyako says with the translation. When the subtitles were completed, I exported the subtitles and uploaded to Vimeo.