Youtube Link to Final Project

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79F4DMcP4lo

Last Day - STRESS OVERLOAD - Project 2

At this point things are really not looking good, Kallum turned up with the scenes 1 and 2 finished... in 720p rather than 1080 which was what we were supposed to be handing it in as, all our posters and dvd was designed and printed but we had no way of burning the disc at that stage and we still didnt have the film at the resolution we needed, our storyboard then needed to be put into a PDF file and our script was in 2 pieces still needing to be collaberated. We had a hell of a lot of work to do over the weekend and once again distribution of those tasks was a hassle as apparently not many people had burning software, or had to much other work to do. Jim was set the task of making a playable dvd menu in Encore, I was tasked with rendering the footage up to 1080p and compiling the script, Kallum was rendering the other half of the footage into 1080p and Edrian had to scan all of his storyboard imaging into a PDF file. All of this had to be done by monday as well as all the extra analysis work of our film so really im trying to make this last blog entry quick. Will let you know how things turn out!
Fingers Crossed

Lost Days

Throughout the second week i found it quite hard to work as a group when Kallum who was editing our first 2 scenes spent his time editing at home from tuesday right up until thursday, which made things particularly hard for Jim who wasnt sure what sounds were needed for his edit, and with Edrian still working on the 3rd fight scene it once again left him with very little to do. I was really quite lucky as i had everything i needed to start adding in the effects to the footage for the 3rd fight scene and tried to show Jim how to do a couple of things on after effects, to try and keep him occupied so he didnt feel he was wasting his time. I had a total of 11 shots that i needed to add effects to so i sort of had my work cut out for me for the next few days. Though i was still getting work done, without Kallum being around i still had no idea as to what our film was really going to be looking like so i was starting to feel a little lost about just how things were going to turn out. This didnt really affect the way i worked on my effects but it must have been quite hard for Edrian while editing his part as there was nothing around for him to match his edit to, so for all we knew what he was working on could come out completely different to the rest of the film. This was slightly worrying as that sort of thing can really affect the final product of the film and i imagine that sort of thing will have quite an effect on the marks we would get overall.

Day 9 - Problems - Project 2

At this stage pretty much most of the roles we set at the beginning were sorta of cast aside, Kallum was now ediitng the first 2 fight scenes, Edrian was working on editing the 3rd fight scene, i was left to do effects and Ke and Jim were more or less left without a job. At this point we were all starting to stress a little about whether or not we were going to make it in time, particularly made obvious when Kallum exploded in my face when we had problems with getting him to make it to the filming day on the previous saturday. To be honest i have already decided that i will not be working with him again as we really do not work well together as we often have conflicting ideas and oppinions but he is never really prepared to compromise, this often frustrated me and i found him an extremely hard person to work with. He was really the only person at this stage that i have really had trouble working with so a lot of the time i was prepared to bite the bullet and just accept things werent going to be compromised in order for us all to move forward as a group. I have to say i felt a little bad for Jim again as he was once again left without a job to do to contribute to the group, so i got him to try and find some audio effects and music to add into our edits, as well as giving Ke the task to create a poster and dvd case for our film. Today was really a wake up call for us all that we still had a lot of work to do in order to be able to hand anything in and the stress at this point is really starting to get to me.

Day 7 - Saturday Morning - Project 2

After organising with Ke and Edrian to film at my place for saturday morning, i had organised a friend of mine to come round and bring a few extra guns, as well as act as a couple of characters in the scene.This allowed Edrian to remain in control of the camera while i acted and directed the scene. I found that filming went a whole lot smoother when we had less numbers and starting in the early morning gave us time to wake up a bit while waiting for the sun to rise, allowing everyone to really switch on and work effectively and efficiently to get the scene done. We started filming from about 7 o clock as we needed a fair amount of light in the scene while it also remained dark enough to show it was morning. We shot the quickest parts of the scene first and we flew through them in about an hour allowing ourselves time to think and plan out things to suit the environment along the way, We tried to avoid any overly complex shots of intense action but relied mostly on suspense to build up intensity in the scene which in my oppinion gave a more Rambo or Commando feel to the gun fight rather than an overly crowded war zone around my house. I was really quite amazed at the amount and quality of the footage we managed to get within a really short time and i felt we had a really succesful morning. We finished up filming around 10:30 and we had managed to film everything we needed to a quality we were happy with, in half the time it had taken with the previous two nights and to me that was a pretty big accomplishment.

Rest Day

Finally had a chance to relax a little bit today just spent most of today practicing a few of the effects that i had learnt the day before, of which I just refined a little more, but also learnt about rotoscoping.which is basically a more complex way of adding layers to footage to add in effects behind objects or within a certain area. I figured this would be quite useful and found a tutorial online which showed me how to do it.  Apart from that i caught up on a bit of sleep and organised to shoot the gun fight scene at my house which was a location that the majority of the group could easily get to. Will check with everyone tomorrow about filming dates and times but at this stage i decided a morning shoot would not only make sense for the plot line but also allowed us a fairly decent amount of time without missing out on to much sleep.

Day 4 - Film Night 2 - Project 2

Got back in at 5.30 this morning and slept until 9. I really wish i was able to get more sleep but just myself awake and that was how it stayed. I figured i had some time so i decided to put it to use by getting a head start with some effects tutorials i found on youtube. i found out about a website called video co-pilot (www.videocopilot.net) that has loads of  Adobe after effects tutorials as well as access to a whole bunch of effects used in action films suitably named Actions Essentials 2 which basically consists of a bunch of premade blood, gunfire, atmospherics, explosions etc which you can add straight in over existing footage. I managed to get hold of a copy of these effects and found out a whole bunch of usefull things you can do with them. The day moved pretty quickly from that point as alot of the effects were a little time consuming, of course learning these things for the first time probably extended that a little bit more as well but before i knew it i was meeting Jim and Edrian and heading off to the shore again. In the car ride there we discussed how we thought the filming was going and none of us were really happy with the way things were going at this stage but we aimed to get far more done this time round to avoid having to make another expensive trip out to the shore. When we got to Kallums at 8 we laid down some pretty basic rules, we said that we were going to shoot the rest of this fight scene as quickly as possible and get onto the next fight scene so that we could get as much of that filmed as possible tonight as we didnt have the time to muck around making everything perfect. Kallum basically at that point decided to hand over directing to me after we finished the kung fu scene because apparently he found it to hard to film with my input as well so things then fell down to me. So we started filming at about 9 o clock and finished up just before 1. Again that was still a serious amount of time filming the equivalent of 30 seconds worth of footage.. but now directing was handed over to me so we headed to our next location. At this stage i planned to  film as much of the next fight as efficiently as possible without losing any quality of the footage. We arrived at the location and i immediately made adjustments to my ideas and the script to match our environment and got to filming straight away. We set up lights and things outside and filmed Ke walking towards the house from atop of a car that was set to roll down a slight hill (another makeshift tracking shot) and got him inside the house as quickly as possible as we knew that was where the real filming was going to start. I knew already that Jim had experience in swordplay and that Ke was pretty confident in his ability to strike without injuring Jim so i allowed them a bit of freedom as far as the swordplay went but gave them a set path to follow. I was amazed at the convenience we had at the location including a huge reference to our wolf character as he stands in front of a painting of a pack of wolves at one point before the fighting starts. To me this scene was all about atmosphere so i decided to make most things quite dramatic and the build up to be quite slow and ominous.  We used a bit of camera magic by making our area change to suit us and had this dramatic fight in front of a pool where i really wanted a sort of Kill Bill feel to the fighting. We finished up in a way that sort of left the audience guessing as to what happened to the 2nd Pig but enough to know that the last strike effectively finishes him off before a sharp cut to black as the swords strike. I finished up what i needed to film so that we finished at about 4.15 but Kallum at this point he wanted to add an identical scene from another movie into ours for another edit so in the end we ended up leaving around 5 o clock again... Hopefully this time i might get a little more sleep.

Day 3 - Film Night - Project 2

We turned up today at 9 oclock again to find that Kallum had gone home and created a new script of what we were going to film tonight, most of which conflicted with the previous ideas so we talked about it and managed to compromise things again to make things easy to shoot so we wouldnt have to spend the entire night shooting. The day was pretty much spent working out what it was that we needed to have for shooting, organising props and costume and such and figuring out location.  We all left about 2 and i went off to work and organised to get a lift with Jim when we were all going to meet at 10 o clock. Apparently they went early to start filming at 8 but didnt actually get any filming or anything done so Jim came back to pick me up before heading back again, so at that stage he seemed a little annoyed about the amount of petrol it was going to be costing him going from West Auckland to the shore and back for filming so i offered to help him with the costs, also Edrian and Ke ended up gettting a lift there as well so we all chipped in on the petrol costs. When we got to Kallums place it took us a while to get going but we started filming the first scene. We started off quite well me and Edrian got to work with how we could frame the shots in the new environment using a whole bunch of everyday objects to use for tracking shots like skateboards and desk chairs we had 2 cameras and 2 tripods to use but for the majority of the filming we used Edrians DSLR as he was more familiar with it and we could pull off some really cool shots with some pull focus using the manual adjustments on his camera which proved really usefull when making some of our scenes more dramatic. The first bit of the intro only took about 5 minutes to shoot but once it got into actually doing the fighting scene things really slowed right down. Kallum insisted on choreographing each single movement and running through the movements about 10 times before actually getting a final shot. This not only meant risking the natural look to the fight but also made a  scene we otherwise could have shot in maybe one or two hours, take us until 5 oclock in the morning and still not be finished. We kept trying to make things move slightly faster but Kallum insisted that this was the best way to do things and we slowly inched our way through the scene, i think by the end of it Kallum got a bit sick of me trying to input ideas because he was shutting more and more ideas down without really considering things. When it got to about 5 we decided we had to call it a night and chose to start slightly earlier on in the evening so we might be able to get to sleep slightly earlier. Overall i wasnt entirely pleased with how much we got done but hopefully things might take a change for tommorow.

Day 2 - Story Boarding and Script Writing - Project 2

Today we all decided upon a bunch of Roles that everyone would be given, these were how it turned out.

Me: Assistant Director, Cinematography, Editing
Jim: Storyboarding and Scriptwriting, Stunt Choreographer, Editing
Edrian: Cameraman and Cinematography, Editing
Ke: Stunt Choreographer, Actor, Editing
Kallum: Director, Effects Coordinator, Editing

These were not definate roles and were likely to change along the way as we filmed. These roles were based on the strengths of each individual in the group and meant that alot of input was required from everyone. We tried to share out the jobs equally but in hindsight i know now that this really didnt happen as when it came down to it we had all sorts of issues preventing people from being able to work on things at home and time just wouldnt allow for us to get everything done that we needed. Anyway we started to all work on how we thought the story would roll out and Jim began to write out the script actively as we discussed the ideas as a group. Edrian at this stage started to draw out the storyboard in an attempt to share the workload to get as much done as quickly as possible (not to mention he has some serious drawing skills). Me and Kallum apparently had two very different ideas on how the film was going to turn out but we established very early that whoever was to be in charge of directing would have to listen to the ideas of the group when it came down to making the film so that it wasnt just one persons input controlling the entire film. This is the main reason i hate naming someone as Director so early on because more often than not it generally leads to problems. Personally i felt that Kallum became quite controlling very quickly and often shot down ideas in order to keep his own personal ones and only showed a little bit of compromise when it came to our main film. The majority of the group was under the impression that our film was going to be quite a serious, badass action movie but Kallum wanted to create something quite different. I often found myself disagreeing with alot of the decisions he made and often put across my oppinions when it came to making a final decision in order to get something we were all happy with. We made plans to film the next night so we left at that point and made sure to get a good nights sleep before the late night filming we knew was coming.

Day 1 - Concept and Planning - Project 2

Today we started our second project, a fairly daunting task of creating a short film within 2 weeks. To be honest after taking part in the 48 hour film festival last year i actually thought the idea was entirely achievable and gave a bit of leeway to try some new things i hadnt done before. I joined back up with Jim again and Edrian who i worked with in the previous project and also with 2 new people Ke and Kallum, whom i hadnt worked with before. I had spoken to Ke a couple of times previously and new he was somewhat of an expert when it came to kung fu. When we found out that we had action movie as our genre i found this doubly usefull and we immediately put Ke in charge of choreographing a kung fu fight scene. We had to base our Film off of a fairytale from a list of stories and we decided to go with a modern take of the 3 little pigs, of course with a few minor adjustments to the story to match our genre and appeal to not only ourselves as the creators of the film but to appeal to people that were expecting a fair bit from us as we were expecting to have quite an effects heavy film filled with gunshots, lots of blood and heavily rely upon the post production to make our film look really good. Because we had 3 pigs to play with as characters we thought of ways that we could show them as pigs whilst remaining human so we decided to make them all ex-cops and have references to pigs in every introduction to the scene. For example we planned to have our first pig character cooking bacon before the fight took place, we used a bunch of pork bones in the second location sitting abandoned on the bench and our third character would be eating some ham. We also decided we would have 3 different styles of action within our film from Kung Fu to Sword Fighting and then a Gun fight taking what we thought were the best bits from action films and mashing them up into one super film. At this point i had a really cool idea of how the film would turn out and was trying to bring in some Tarantino references as well as try and have a sort of Rambo style to the gun fight.