Minute Vids Evaluation

The One Minute brief. I'd say this is the brief I've enjoyed the most so far. Video's always been my strongest interest, and after doing several briefs that were less relevant to what I want to do, I was losing interest in general, and this brief got me going again. It was great working on something like this with Szymon and Rob. Being able to work with people you get on with, who have a desire to do something good, and who have complimentary skills is a treat. We worked well together, it was good having several projects on the go between the group, being able to ask for opinions and share knowledge, and it kept things fresher than just concentrating the one collaborative effort. The idea for our one minute film Slug Sumo stemmed from an old idea I'd had knocking around about a shady underground insect racing circuit, that evolved during our idea generating discussions into the final video. I took care of storyboarding out the film, but we didn't make an animatic as the full script for the commentary hadn't been finalised, so we didn't know exactly where we'd be cutting between shots. With this being the case we shot more footage of each shot than we'd need, in order to have flexibility when editing to the audio.

I took care of the main part of the filming, and I gotta say, I'm pretty pleased with the footage I got. I'd wanted to work on depth of field, and got a nice shallow depth of field on a few shots by opening the aperture wide and using the ND filters to stop the shots being over exposed. Szymon took care of secondary camera work, and Rob took care of lighting. The lighting was a little tricky, as the red heads were a bit too powerful for the small space we were working in, but using diffusers helped bring the levels down a bit. We didn't have any major props or sets to worry about, just the time old issue of working with animals (slugs). Rob took care of recording the audio for the commentary, and Szymon worked the audio editing, while I provided the faux cockney voice. The actual editing of the footage was done together as a group, everybody had a bit of input and made adjustments until it flowed properly in the 60 seconds.

I think our individual efforts all benefited from each others feedback and second opinions. It's a good thing having people with different approaches and ideas around, it can help stop you from getting in a rut or getting too caught up in your own idea.
My film is a misleading build up to an unexpected conclusion. It's mainly comprised of close up shots of two men's faces. Originally there was going to be audio of the mens internal monologues, but this was substituted for the sounds of skipping and a punchbag being hit. Both were intended to give the impression of the men preparing to fight each other in a boxing match. The shot then reveals them sitting in a cardboard box, then riding down a flight of stairs, completely changing from the expected course of events. I'd like to improve on the final two shots, I think they could be refined, and the final sound could be improved on. Was fairly pleased with the lighting on the close ups on this though.

All in all, a really good project, I'm looking forward to concentrating on working with video in the second year.

Complementary Areas

There are quite a few areas of video practice that are complementary to my other areas of interest. Outside of video my main area of interest is animation, and there's a whole lot of stuff that's equally useful in both. Lighting is an area that is incredibly important in video work, and the same is true for animation. Whether you're physically lighting stop motion animation as you would a video shoot, or creating virtual lighting set ups in maya or AE, the same fundamentals and principles apply. I also have an interest in photography, and naturally lighting well is essential to get the right results. Lighting in general is an area I intend to learn a lot more about, as it makes such a massive effect on the look and mood of whatever you're working on.

Storyboarding and idea development process for video is also exactly the same as the process I use for planning out animation, albeit without the character development. Storyboarding is essential for both video and animation to ensure you know how shots in a scene are going to flow together, and so you know exactly how you want things to look when you actually shoot/compose a scene.

The general level of organisation and planning needed to sucessfully shoot a scene in a video can and should be applied to all other areas of work. The organisation of equipment, people, locations etc and the planning of lighting set-ups, camera tests, shooting schedules etc are really important to a good outcome, and spending that ammount of time preparing for any kind of work will help acheive a better end result.

Colour Grading

Colour grading. Oh what fun. Now, colour grading is definately something I should've been doing on previous videos I've worked on, but this is the first time I've actually gotten down to it. Having footage shot on two different days inevitably meant the white balance and exposures of the footage would be different. I've got to say, the first days footage was pretty much perfect, but this just highlighted how much worse the second days was. The shots had a yellow tint and were a little on the dull side, so they had to be adjusted to match up with the day 1 footy. This meant playing around with the levels in the colour correction setting on AE until the cootage matched up more closely. Fun fun fun. But necessary.