Richard's Big Fat Multimedia Blog.: February 2011

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Today's Lecture....

Today, we had something rather different. It wasn't a lecture, as such, it was more of a discussion.
Three groups were in the Lecture Theatre: Multimedia, Design for Film and Television and Costume Design. We were all mixed up into groups of four or five and we had to discuss our current projects; What we did, what was good and bad and if we got stuck at all.
In my group there were two Multimedia students, two Costume Design students and one Design for Film and Televsion student. It was really interesting to see what other Design students were doing, it was strange how similar the courses were! Their work and projects were quite interesting though, one for DfF+TV was titled 'Dreamland' where they had to design a set along that theme in the biggest set they'd ever had to deal with - Set 5 in Carlton Studios.
It was nice to meet some new people, too, it was a fun session!

Herds - The Final Edit!

Here it is! The final! A lot of work went in to this, I'm rather proud of it as it's my first proper film.

Again, embed codes hate me.

http://vimeo.com/19984348

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Film Interpretation Project – Self Evaluation

For my group’s Interpretation, we got the script named ‘Herds’. It was about a slightly odd guy who invites himself into people’s houses, eats their food, ignores the homeowner before getting thrown out. He then moves on to the next house before the film ends.

Each person in the group got a role assigned to them. I got the role of Editor. The editing was done in conjunction with the Director as we thought this was best as there was a lot of footage and a lot of different takes. Overall, it went quite well. The only problem we had was the quality of the film as the Sound and Lighting guys didn’t check the White Balance on the cameras properly, so the footage from one camera was a warm temperature and the other camera was a cold, blue temperature. This made the cuts look very misplaced and unprofessional. We had to adjust the colours of the footage accordingly to make them look a similar temperature. The lighting was also quite uneven in some areas, giving harsh shadows, but in some places it couldn’t be helped, as the location was quite small.

In editing, we cut the film very quickly to give it some life and to exaggerate the strangeness of the intruder. As a result, the edited film did as we intended it to and it exceeded my expectations as it looked a lot more professional than I thought it was going be. It’s quick, snappy and the intruder really does look like a mad, effervescent individual because of the fast cuts.

Filming went quite well on the day, but we did have one major problem. The two actors we had hired didn’t turn up. This left us having to act ourselves, so I volunteered to be the homeowner, and the producer volunteered to be the intruder (this worked quite well as he is quite a lively guy anyway, and he has mad hair!). It look us 7 hours to film all the footage as it was only in one location (the Director’s Student Accommodation), so it was quite easy to get all the shots in without having to travel or scout out locations. We all agreed at the end of filming that it all went quite smoothly considering the actor setback. We also agreed that getting the characters across to the new actors would be quite hard as we as a team had discussed what the characters should be like beforehand, quite extensively. As a result, this saved us time and we got the characters just right. The homeowner was a shy, quite scared and reclusive individual and the intruder was ‘in your face’ and not afraid to help himself to your belongings.

To conclude, I think our film went quite well. We had a few problems to address, but we soon sorted them as we all worked well as a team. We all had similar ideas as to where it should be filmed and what the characters should be like, as well as the film angles and lighting. We got a film that we are all happy with.

The final edit will be posted when it's finished :)