Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Final Production Evaluations (With teaser uploaded (fixed))

After the research I started playing with ideas. Since I was able to semi-produce an initial idea, I could refine more precisely my desires for my final film. From these refinements I came up with two ideas.
 
Discarded Idea: A door appears in a girl’s house out of nowhere and when she opens it and walks through she finds it’s just a blank empty space. She enters the room and tries finding any sort of wall or light, even with a torch it’s clearly just a blank space. I’m not quite sure how to end it at present.



 I didn't do this idea because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, it’s a nice concept and if I worked it right it would make a good art piece or a nice little story, but that would require a crazy amount of time to figure out and actually accomplish,

Final Idea: A girl has a regular life, she wakes up, goes to college, comes home, does her work, watches TV, and goes to sleep. But on the way home one evening her headphones start bugging up and she hears a voice saying ‘It all seems a bit familiar, doesn’t it?’ She’s confused and then the world starts to look glitchey, breaks apart and she wakes up back in bed. All seems fairly normal apart from the fact she wakes up in her clothes. She goes through the door and the leads to another room. This will continue for a couple minutes, she will try escape each room, face its hardships and the demon who lead her here. He will manifest in multiple forms, some audio, some visual, and some in full 3d which turn out to be her. There is lots of confrontation and somehow (I will figure out) she will defeat the demon. Eventually she wakes up one last time in her bed once more, she opens the door and its out in to her house it seems normal, but when she shuts her door, leaving her rooms, the demon is revealed again, but hiding and waiting. The film ends here.


My final idea ended up being a mash up of my initial idea and what the discarded idea began as. Where the initial idea began as opening a door to a land without time and how the character would explore that land, to the discarded ideas beginning of a character who would fall into a different land and be forced to explore in order to survive. This also incorporated the idea I began producing because it features a side character who acts as a tour guide (although one appeared more evil than the other). But overall I’m happy with this idea, I think it makes a good arty story as appose to a more linear storyline. I also liked the possibility for it to be a fast paced and visually striking piece, I wanted to make a more visual developed piece as my last one didn’t have any sort of effects or colour edits which I think would have made it look much better and much more polished.

Communicating with my DOP
After I got the basic synopsis I wrote the script. Writing the script was pretty easy, having the synopsis down as a base helped incredibly so it was even easier to mould what I envisioned into a feasible script. Shortly after, I drew up a storyboard, again this was very simple with the script as a guide and a clear vision on what I wanted. Then I planned my actors, and this is the only part of the planning I had initial trouble with. As I had planned to act in this myself, I had to get a camera operator and Director of Photography; Luckily, photography student and close friend Lauren Robertshaw agreed to working with me on this film. I'm glad I got a photography student on board as I knew the experience in composition, lighting, and framing would help make this the visually superior piece to my previous films. Then, with her on board, I was able to schedule the shoot and prepare for filming. Also, to help organise the schedules for locations, I created a colour coded script detailing where and when each shot would take place to help my form a proper schedule.
The colour coded script



The animated test shot.
As a side note, I did begin animating this piece initially, even having a work in progress of one of the shots and getting a few voice actors in; But I scrapped this idea as I didn't like the look as much as a filmed piece so I returned to the original plan and began filming my piece.

However this is where my problems arose. The first day I was meant to film I ended up having to go to hospital after a seizure and I lost the day to film and so did my DOP, with no one else available to help me film I had to reschedule. However Lauren was only available on select days of the week, so losing one day of filming ended up setting me back 2 weeks to get all my filming done as well as the voice acting clips required for the final edit. Apart from this however, I did pick up all the shots I planned for, even if they weren't as I had originally planned.

With all my shots filmed, I began to edit. However due to  the film schedule overrunning its original length, this left my terrifyingly small amount of time in which to edit my film, consequently it was swiftly edited into a teaser trailer and I only ended up editing the introductory paragraph of the script.


Editing in Sony Vegas 13
Editing in Audacity
Editing was done in Sony Vegas Pro 13, I imported all the video and audio clips into the media gallery and began finding, and editing other audio clips that would be used such as: Music clips edited to sound as if they are being played out of headphones, and gathering sounds from an online site that provides free sound clips for films. After all clips were prepared it was only a matter of cutting them together and adding in the sound clips. Some shots required copying and pasting background noise from others to replace any unwanted audio clips, and some required finding new audio clips entirely to replace badly shot sound, but this was the only problem I had to overcome. The only shot that proved particularly  troublesome was the one with the main character having her headphones break up and reveal the voice of VOICE before it cuts out to static. I had to edit the clip, work out the timings, then edit the sound in a separate program (Audacity) using the timings as guide to form the final shot. I used a song which I edited, then a mix of about 9 different layers from spate clips or edits of the song to make the final audio mix. Then I imported the sound into the final edit to use as a base to edit the video alongside to compose the final shot. To finish off the edit I added a block colour, and a pink blue gradient on separate layers above everything else and setting them to overlay, and screen and reducing the opacity to add a nice subtle colour and brighten up the shots. In the end I ended up creating, compositing, or editing over 80 different clips to create my final teaser.


Looking for free sound sites
In the end, although I at least got to create a teaser, I am very disappointed with myself this time around. Or at the very least annoyed that I couldn't film quicker and get the film out as I had planned it. I wanted it to be well written, visually striking, well edited, and memorable; and it turned out looking, or at least feeling, rushed and badly executed. The planning was how I wanted it and every seem to come together fine, but in the end the timing just fell apart which is incredibly upsetting as I looked forward to having a finished and final piece I could be proud of. But I shall use these short comings as footholds to become more organised, and better prepared for a shoot in the future.

And here is the Final Teaser:
 

 

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