Richard's Big Fat Multimedia Blog.

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 :)

Friday, 21 January 2011

Sounds Design - An Insight.

So, I'm currently doing the film section of second term. It's dead interesting, we have a script to work to but we have to interpret it to how we'd see it. No limits! I have the role of the editor. But I was wandering around the internet and I came across the guy who did all the sound effects for Star Wars, Indiana Jones And Wall-E - Ben Burtt. What a guy. What an imgination. Watching these videos gives you a small insight into what goes into sound design and how novel you have to be! For example, getting a wind sound by dragging a punchbag along carpet.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSf8Er2gV_Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eySh8FOUphM&feature=related

Thursday, 16 December 2010

Making the invisible visible....

Found this through a friend, it's to raise awareness of a prisoner who's been on Death Row for 19 years, even though the system is unsure of his conviction.

Such a great idea, works well, too. I'd love to have a go at something like this.

http://vimeo.com/17296374

P.S. Embed codes hate me, so I'm sticking with the faithful Hyperlink to get me by!

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

My One Shot edit

Here is my finished One Shot edit. I went for an eerie theme to go with the strange concept. It works well, the music really adds atmosphere. The guy walking 'forwards' sometimes gets lost in the shadows though, I think I may have got a little trigger happy with the brightness and contrast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66abiBg1AKQ

Embedding doesn't work with me, for some reason.

Friday, 19 November 2010

Monday, 8 November 2010

Urghh.

Not been on in a long time, again. Two jobs and Uni = me being tired and taken all the time.
Anyway, here are some shots from last weeks filming doody. We went for a silent film, based on CCTV footage. It was just a simple film, consisting of two guys (Me and Mark) exchanging money for drugs while an innocent bystander (Najhet) looked on, trying not to get seen/get involved. Here are some pictures of the day, mainly me looking for suitable points for the camera to go. Also got a couple of the others standing around the camera looking busy :)