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.