Project 2: Part Four

The editing process I found to be the most stressful. There was a lot of footage for the team to go through and by the time we had chosen the shots we wanted the full film was close to 10 minutes. We found that a lot of the transition shots could be cut as well as sped up. I found this helped our film to keep the audience interested by not dragging scenes on for too long. Some of the footage that we wanted to extend was also cut due to filming errors such as team members getting in the shot or the camera becoming to shaky etc.

The flipbook I found to be harder to make than first planned. I originally was going to use a flash animation but found that would not look realistic enough in our film to be a flipbook so instead I found it easier to just take a few photos of blank paper and photoshop a robot drawing in. This did not take long and gave the more realistic look I was after.

The special effects audio was all produced from us using our own voices and material we had, and a website called freesound.org. The songs came from soundcloud.com. We found the audio to be the most crucial part in our film and provided the emotional catch with the audience. If the audio wasn't in sync with the video then it would distract the audience from following what was happening. We always had to review our film to make sure that the audio was still in sync after small changes when editing.

We came across a big problem just before making the special effects. Emile's computer received a bug causing his computer to process information slower than normal. We had to avert this problem by transferring the movie onto my laptop to continue with the editing. Luckily we still had a lot of time left to transfer the film and complete the editing. The visual special effects were done from research into how to perceive a more glowing effect for the dream sequences. We found a tutorial on dailymotion.com here to help us with a lot with creating this effect.

 Our film can be found here

Project 2: Part Three

For our production we had most of our scenes to be filmed at one of the members house. To save time and money we spent two full days there filming. We started with the stop motion and set our camera on a tripod, we had 2-3 people move the objects while someone took the photos. We wanted to show that our character 'Karl' had given life to the objects and that this life could be passed on between the objects. This was the most difficult part of the filming since it took a lot of patience and strength to keep the objects very still, it also meant we had to be very careful with what was in the shot and to make sure the objects looked consistent with each frame.

Once the stop motion was done we moved onto the rest of the bedroom scenes. We found that our costume was not very active when lying down so we chose to keep 'Karl' in an upright position when he needed to move in a shot. We closed all curtains to keep out any unwanted light and used lamps to keep a consistent light for time of day.

When it came to our fourth day of shooting we felt that we were vastly running out of time so I made a shooting schedule for the remaining scenes we had left to keep us on track. This was a more organised way of filming and I believe helped with the completion of production. We also gave each other assigned roles and were more open and directive with scenes that could only be filmed once within our time frame.

For the public scenes we wanted to get a sense of surprise from the pedestrians, this was difficult due to most people ignoring 'Karl' when inside his costume. We later found that the best way to cause a reaction is for the pedestrians was to get there first reaction to 'Karl' and not have time to adjust. So we set out on keeping the robot costume as hidden as possible until it was time to start filming, also keeping the cameras hidden helped with keeping pedestrians focused on 'Karl' instead of the cameras.

Project 2: Part Two

We developed our idea of 'a boy who dreams' into a more complex story by first gathering where we were going to take the story, we found that if we did not have a susceptible ending then it would be difficult to show development and progression in our story and character. This was found to be more difficult then presumed as it was also our main link to the short story 'The Emperors New Suit' and we wanted to show it in an elusive way. Once we had our ending we could work back from there and see how other scenes were going to lead up to it. I found that to make our story as in depth as possible we would need to review each scene constantly and ask every question possible.

Researching one our scenes in pre production

We knew we wanted a recurring element to come across in different scenes to which we found could be done using camera shots and lighting effects. For this we set out to research our scenes and what camera shots we could use by going to the locations for our film and studying what would work well, we found that using multiple cameras would cut down time constraints as well as give us more variety to show our story. The other big concern for our story was the time of day, since our film takes place over two set days then we would have to plan our filming accordingly.

Something we knew would detract from our film was the dialogue, we wanted to show what our character was feeling without it coming across as unreal and found it was not necessary for him to speak for our film. With him not speaking, it also revealed more of his personality as well.  The minor characters came into our story to help show how our main character saw the outside world and to help connect the audience with our main character.

The biggest constraint against our film would be the special effects. Since our film was to have a lot of unreal elements we needed to decide how we were going to be make the special effects within a short amount of time while having the audience believe and understand what was happening. This is why we wanted to start production as soon as possible, and get the difficult part out of the way, stop motion. All our other special effects would be in post production but would still be time consuming to get the right effects.

For our props we decided to give it a budget look to show a more amusing and childish side to the characters imagination. Also giving the character a costume showed he preferred his a different life in his dreams rather than the one he had in reality. The materials used in making the costume was not a difficult task and did not take long to create, once we found some free cardboard boxes we taped tinfoil on to give it a more robotic look and added LEDs and plastic bottles for buttons and eyes.

Project 2: Part One

Week 4.

We are now onto our second project called 'Reverse Cinema'. On Tuesday we were given an exercise to make a short narrative video. This was to consist of audio and video already created but from different contexts that had little to no relation to each other. We were able to use Final Cut Pro to edit and create our video.

I found this task to be quite enjoyable because I could experiment with the software and capture scenes into a way that made them relevant to the video. The audio was more difficult because the audio tracks we were given were very long and to make them fit well with the video I had to cut out bits. For this transition to not be noticeable I had to find a similar part of the audio to tune in at the same time as the start of the audio track.

 

The second exercise was a lot more time consuming. We now had to use a full feature length movie to create a 3-5 minute movie with a random genre. The movie did not seem to work on Final Cut Pro on my computer so I used Premiere instead which I was glad I did as I found it a lot quicker to use. I decided the fastest and most efficient way of creating a story overnight was by finding the audio I wanted for the story and work the video that was relevant around that. This proved to be most effective in providing a story to do with the genre I was given as well as have it in on time for tomorrow. Unfortunately I had not yet tested exporting the video yet which came as a hassle on the day.

On Thursday we formed into our groups for the second project. Like the second exercise we have to create a 4-6 minute movie with a chosen genre, but this time we have to chose from 5 different short stories as one to be the basic structure of our movie. We will also be shooting all our own footage and using original audio. 

 http://blog.thefoundationstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/emperors-new-clothes.jpg

We started this project by reading through the plot of the short stories and finding the key ideas behind them. We then sought out how our genre (Science Fiction) has been used in other movies. It showed us that Science Fiction is a very broad genre and has been used in a lot of famous movies ranging from superheroes, to zombies, to futuristic aliens. With the short stories in mind we began producing ideas that could work with the Sci Fi genre. Once we came up with 3 solid ideas we wanted to develop them further with more detail and see how strong we could make the stories behind the idea. We then chose which idea to use by deciding which best relates to a short story and which we found would be the best to work on.