Some more filming with Shauna

Today we filmed some more pick-ups with Shauna. I decided that I needed to have her in the scene where the character ‘Jake’ runs into a room and has a shot conversation with ‘Kev’. So to do this I re filmed my coverage of the conversation adding in Shauna. The first taker of this was me sitting on top of Shauna hand cuffing her. After watching this back I saw that the shot looked very messy and we were not framed correctly, so to corrects this I re filmed it no with a gun to Shauna’s head and ‘Kev’ (me) standing behind her holding the gun. This added greater diversity to the type of shots and also created longer comedy suspense.

The Blood Bath (Risking my life for media)

On Tuesday the 29th of November I shot all of my coverage of the Blood Bath scene. As this section of the scene was shot a month after we shot Shauna’s part, it meant that I needed to really focus on continuity of where the candles were in the bathroom. This meant that I had to refer to the video and picture that were taken when filming so that I knew where they needed to go. After placing these I had to set up the bath.
I had to fill that bath full of water first, but as the door and window to the bathroom would be shut whilst filming, I could not have the water hot, as condensation would effects the lens of the camera. This meant that the water that I would be lying in for half an hour had to be cold water!!
After the bath was full of water I had to make it red. To get the right colour to give the illusion that it was blood I had to use a while bottle of red food colouring, which was extremely irritating when was on my skin (I was in this water for half an hour!!!!!).
The scene then needed to be shot. This meant that I had to stay under the water until the camera got up the where the bath tub was. I had to hold my breath slide under the water and wait till I thought that the camera had got there. However I could not hear anything under the water so I had no clue when the camera got to its mark. This cause me to have to do several takes which really does take it out of you when u have to hold your breath for as long as you can and try to ignore all the water flooding up your nose.
Altogether it was a very successful shoot and the sequence turned out very well.

"What's in the bag?" "Ninja Stuff"

The props that we were using on the 17th on November were a pair of 'Sai'. (These are sharp, ninja sh*t). And we had to walk to our location which was about 15-20 minutes walk away. We weren’t feeling nervous about carrying dangerous weapons down a busy street until we saw a police man walking towards us. Luckily all the Ninja stuff was in a bag and they didn’t seem to care about a couple of shifty teenagers walking down the street with a thin bag that could only be used for weapons.

Your taxes at work people.

Filming on the 17th of November

On the 17th of November I went out and filmed a few more sequences for my trailer. As the other actors involved in the film had prior commitment they were unable to film on this date, so I decided to film more of the ‘Kev’ character. This involved him running away from and unseen threat and a short smoking sequence.

When doing this sequence we were shooting at about 3pm. This meant that the sun was going down and effected the direction in which we could film in. when setting up the shot we had to make sure that the shadow of the cameraman could not be seen. Another problem that we ran into as the amount of takes and variations that we had/wanted to do in the smoking scene, this meant that the cigarette was burning too quickly when we were waiting to set up the different shots, so we had to use about 4 or 5 full cigarettes in a very short space of time.

My lungs felt like they had gone through a cheese grater.

changing the titles

I needed to change the title in my film trailer as the font was boring and didn’t have an impact. When doing this I went through a lot of the fonts and pick one that looked the most interesting and after changing the comments from reviews I came to the title of the film in which I found a new font to really make it stand out and improve my film trailer.

Editing Cont.

In editing my second cut I found that there are a lot of shots that are much too long, causing the production to become too long for a film trailer. I need to film a few more shots so that I can inter-cut some more shots so that it breaks up the sequence to make it seem more like a teaser trailer and not a 'pay off trailer'.

First cut feed back

This is the first cut of my film trailer. The feedback that got the first cut was very positive. Everybody seemed to like the trailer and all said that it work to show enough to seem like a trailer and not a short film. They also said that with the humour and props used it reaches my demographic.
The things that need to be changed and improved to help this trailer gain a higher grade is the dialogue. It’s seemed to be too quiet and sometimes hard to hear. To solve this problem I will A.D.R most if not all the dialogue, this will help the audience be able to hear all of the line clearly.
Another thing that needed to be changed was the titles that are put throughout the trailer. This is because they were all in the same font and when the title of the Film comes up it needed more impact so I have to change the font of the writing.
An overall comment given was “you’ve handled the combination of horror to comedy quite successfully. Pity the dialogue is not clear. Don’t hold back, you can be quite outrageous in a trailer.”

Learning about Premiere Pro

As I had nothing to edit until I filmed more I took this time to search around Premiere Pro and learn what everything does. When doing this I found various different video transitions and effects that would really make my production come alive. Now when I come to edit next I will apply these to my video.

Music cont.

The second song that I have used in my trailer is the parody song of 'Kasha's' 'Tick Tock' by 'The Midnight Beast'. This is a very funny song and talks about being bad and going against what people say which I thought was very appropriate to put into the trailer as it will lighten the mood of the film and show the audience that it ill be a very funny film.

Things to change

After viewing what I have edited, I found that I needed to change some of the shots.

The first section of the trailer when 'Jake' comes into the room needs to have more to it and needs to build up even more to create a truly interesting and funny trailer.

The second bit that needs to be added is when the voice over says "there are three", there needs to be three quick shots of the characters, so that the audience do know that it is talking about them and the film focuses around these three characters.

Music

After looking at a lot of different trailers for both comedy and horror films I came to the decision that the trailer needs to create the illusion that it is a horror at first then slip into a comedy. I also found that a lot of comedy horror films like 'Shaun of the dead' and 'Zombieland', use music that sounds like its from an action film and this helps create the comedy aspects of the film because it makes the film seem very serious but with a comic side with the sequence of scene that are shown over the top of the music.

To get this feeling from the trailer i needed to get the right type of music. i searched around for a while then one day when watching 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' I heard the right song. the main theme music for this film had a very eerie beginning, then breaks into a fast action style song. This is why I decided to use this song.

The song was conducted and produced by Howard Shore.

Zombie Time!

[Looking at the now fully make-up covered Zombie]

Note to self: I need more practice.

We tried various different tries at getting the make up right. We had to make a young blond girl look old, dirty, grey and dead. to do this we sprayed her hair gray and painted her face in white make-up with black eyes, however this made her look like and old panda. So we had to mix white and black to create a very dull grey colour which got darker and daraker towards her eyes. It took a while but we got there in the end.

Let there be light!

On the second day of shooting we did the 'blood bath' scene but only 'Hannah's' coverage. This scene needed to show the horror aspect of the film so we needed to create a very eerie and chilling light in the room. To do this we lit a lot of candles and tea lights and placed them throughout the bathroom. I thought that we would be able to light the candles with no trouble... apparently not. After almost burning our clothes, hair and the rest of our bodies we finally set up the camera and was ready to go.

We still have to shoot 'Kev's' coverage. Fingers crossed we don't burn down the house.

The truth behind the cider

In one of the shots of the film trailer the character of ‘Kev’ is drinking from a 7 litres bottle of cider. As I did not want to use real cider seeing as it could have taking a long time to film and I didn’t want to be drunk when filming I had to make a substitute.

How to make great FAKE cider:

Two litres of apple juice


Five litres of water

And 500ml of lemonade to make it fizz!!!!

Editing #2

The second day of editing took a lot longer. This was due to the amount of footage that I had to edit. I has various different shots of the characters in different locations all saying different dialogue. This meant that they had to be carefully edited as it would destroy the sense of flow if the shots were set up in a bad order. When doing the editing I came to realise that some of the shots could have been set up in better, creating a more striking and interesting shot. This meant that I will be going back and re-shooting. Also I found that to get a better sense of flow I need to add more shots of the characters on their own.

Editting #1

The first day of editing. I started by editing the montage of the characters getting weapons together for my first editing session. this took a while as I needed to get the right sounds in the section of footage. I used different sounds effects and when editing these I had to mix and cut a lot of them so that I could, used the sounds that I recorded live on set mixed with the sounds that I found online so that it would create and realistic and bevlievable sound. The section with the BBQ fork was very difficult, as I could live action sound of the fork swooping through the air, so I had to get it online. However the only sound I found was one that one swoop and not several which is what I required. This meant that I had to use the same sound several different times so that it would flow correctly.

2nd day of filming

The actors have arrived! On Saturday I started filming with the other actors. the first actor i used was Ben Rutter. The scene that were shot ran seamlessly, due to Ben being an professional actor, it only took one or two takes to get the perfect shot. The second actor used on that day was Shauna Buckely. The scenes filmed with were the candle lit bath room and then more of the montage.

Sounds!

The collection of the diegetic sounds that I got were all from the same website.
http://www.soundbible.com/
They have a huge collection of different sound effects including guns, swords and screams.
I have used various different sounds in my film trailer, it took me a while to decide on the right scream and gun sounds, this is because they need to be realistic and believable.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Right so its the first day of filming. Due to the time I have I could only needed one actor. Myself. The scene that was being filmed was the montage where the actors are getting weapons together to defend themselves against the un-dead. I chose the various different types of weapons so that it looked as if the actors could find these lying around their house but also ones that they could have stolen and were easy to get hold of.

The cast!

Production Plan

Animatic.

At the moment there is no sound apart from the scream. However I know what music and dialogue I will be using.

Pitch for Film Trailer. the chronicles of Kev

Film pitch

View more presentations from callison1318.

filming locations

The outdoor locations. epping forest

The Script: For The Trailer.

[Scream]
Jake: What?!
Kev: I’m out of weed.


[Hannah and Jake enter a room to find Kev lying on the floor with a huge bottle of cider in his hands. He is very drunk]
Hannah: Ke…oh god!
Kev: I’m not even down to the label and I’m off my tits!
Hannah: what is wrong with that boy?!


[Kev comes running out of the wood into a field screaming]
Kev: Ahhh! Shot them! Shot them in the face!


[Kev and Jake see a zombie walking down the street]
Kev: dam I’d roman facemask her all night long.
Jake: You’re sick. She’s dead!
Kev: any holes a goal. Pulse optional.

Advanced Production: The Idea

The idea for my production grew over time. It started out being short five minute film, and then the script got longer and longer until it became a full screenplay. So after this I decided to do the trailer for the film instead of a full complete film. This would enable me to make a visually interesting and better quality production. This is because I would not be trying to fit in a whole story into five minutes, and could just focus on the most interesting and powerful images of the whole film and create a great trailer.

Skills Update

Blog entry skills update. June- July 2011
Doc. Techniques. Vox pops. – framing – looking left and right- editing-
Doc analysis- bowling for C – own doc.
Music vid- lips sync practice- green screen
Film noir- editing- setting up the lighting and props etc.
Editing of dance vid



The last five weeks of year 12 we have been preparation for our A2 practical work. Firstly we focused of documentaries. We started by looking at the famous documentary ‘Bowling for columbine’ by Michael More. We analysed this carefully picking out the most dramatic and powerful parts of the documentary, one of which was when he went to ‘Charlton Heston’ and confronted him about appearing in a NRA seminar a few days after the attack in the school where a little girl died. After view this we looked at a very common part of documentaries called Vox Pops. We went pout a created our own version of these Vox Pops. We needed to make sure that the interviewee was framed correctly and either standing slightly to the left or the right of the camera. When editing this video we had to put in a title which was the question so that you did not hear the interviewer saying the question and then we cut together the answers making sure you swapped from left to right.

I also experimented with different film styles. In one lesson we tried out making our film noir sequence. One of the other students and I created the script for the short sequence and after that was finished we went out and filmed. We knew that all film noirs had the same aspects of camera and lighting in them, as this helps create the right mood of the piece. We used a lot of different lights to create back lighting, used to give a sense of secrets and makes the character look menacing. We also used, chiaroscuro lighting to give the fell that the character is hiding something about them selves. When it came to editing this short sequence we discovered that we did not have enough reaction shots to break up the action and we needed tighter editing as the actor had glance at the script so their eye line moved away from the other character to the script, to hide this we tried to fill it with reaction shot but we didn’t have enough to make the sequence flow.

The second part of the cause is to create a music video. We had the task of getting what was considered a ‘summer song’ so that we could create a summer music video. Before we set out filming we had to see if we could do successful lip syncing. We found out that to get this to work we needed to play the song aloud so that who ever was ‘singing’ the song could hear it and get the right tempo of the song. We then cut this all together. When doing the lip sync we also used the green screen. We found that when doing the green screen the cloth needs to be completely flat and lit correctly so that there are no shadows causing there to be different shades of green. This is because when you come to edit the film you need to tell the computer to take out all the green and replace it with a different image that you put into the timeline, however you can only tell the computer replace one colour. This is why we decided not to use the green screen and just used various different locations when we went shooting at Knebworth.

Advanced Production:Film Trailer

Animatic for film opening

My inspiration

After watching the film the craft I decide that I wanted to do a film opening based in the occult, also there was a sequence at the start of the film that I wanted to use which would be exactly what I was going for. so instead of copying it, I decide to use it as a basis of my film opening, which ended up being a perfect way of give the audience enough of the context without characters just standing there talking about it.

Behind the secret to the best fake blood

First of all you need to get hole of some golden syrup and red food colouring and all that is need is for you put spoon the golden syrup into a bowl and add a few drops of the colouring, mix these together until all the syrup is red then add a small amount of water to get the right consistency and you have the best horror look. AND IT’S EADABLE!!!!