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.

One Minutes

Right, it's about time I put something up about the progress of the second part of the video module. Exciting brief this one, working in a team of 3 (myself, Rob and Szymon) making a 1 minute film. Started this one out spending a lot of time watching the winners and entries for various minute film festivals from the last few years (well, as much time as you can spend watching 60 second films). Standards varied considerably, there were several on The One Minutes that were really quite poor. Nearly everything on the filminute site was really good though, and it showed the variety of ways you can make something really interesting and engaging in just a minute. As we were all quite into this brief, we decided to make several films, making one each on a more individual basis, with input and help from each other as it was needed, and to make one film as a proper collaborative team effort. After getting together a few times, in various states of sobriety, we came up with a pretty big selection of ideas to work from, in terms of both content and style. Collectively we worked on a documentary (mockumentary really) about the new blood sport of slug sumo. My individual effort is a misleading, anti-climatic drama.

We made a lot of effort on this one to ensure the production quality was high, getting the lighting, white balance, exposure, focus etc as dead on as possible. The things that could have really done with improving on mine and Katherine's video for the first part of this module were the white balance being a bit off and the focus being a bit soft, so I was keen to try to improve on those areas for this part.

My ideas went through several different stages of evolution before coming to their final versions. Steven D. Katz, in his book Film Directing Shot By Shot, writes 'As I understand it, the imagination does not guide the hand, but is led by the hand when we have forgotten ourselves in the application of some craft. Once each stage of invention is committed to some substantial form, it is like a mirror revealing the imagination to itself. Suddenly, things we did not see before become clear, or new possibilities emerge, and there is new material to work with.' This is probably the truest statement I've come across personally, in terms of getting an initial idea to fruition. More often than not, my ideas remain as just that, ideas. The times I do actually get pencil to paper, ideas usually open up in completely different ways to how I first saw them, and develop into something much better than the original thought. Same goes for when you're not sure where somethings going to go after a certain point, just get it down in some form, and a solution is that much closer. Going off on one a bit there, but it's just something I'm really realising the importance of, and I'm going to try to stick to it and hopefully generally be more productive, rather than having ideas knocking around without anything to actually show for them. Deep lesson right there.

Shooting and Cutting

Filming ran fairly smoothly, with the exception of rain stopping play on the outside shots. This meant we had to split the shoot over 2 days, leading to possible issues with continuity. We avoided any inconsistencies by watching back the scenes from the previous days shoot immediately before filming to ensure the clothes being worn, the way the bag was being held, positions of elements in the background etc. were accurate. As predicted, several additional shots were used, while sticking to the basic flow of the storyboard.

Having captured the footage and made a rough edit, we found we were a minute over the briefs 2 minute limit. Being unable to trim enough from the clips to meet the limit, and not wanting to loose any shots, we elected to speed up some of the shots which didn't contain essential action to reduce the overall running time. Although this brought us within the time constraint, the visual effect of cutting from regular speed to 400% speed wasn't pleasing. To explain the change between speeds, and make the effect less sudden, we overlaid graphics of video controls over the footage to pause and fast forward the action. We also added a video filter to the speeded up sections to give it a slightly distorted quality.This eased these sections into the rest of the film in a much smoother fashion. The overall effect on the video is not detrimental, and in fact adds an interesting visual element.

How to... create a how to animatic.

This is the first animatic for our 'How to..... empty a bin' instructional video. My partner Katherine did all the hand drawing of the storyboard, as her technical abilities in this area are stronger than mine. We then scanned the images, and I added colour to the frames in photoshop before taking them into Final Cut and adding sound effects to create the animatic. Overall I think it gives a fairly decent feel for the flow of how the final video should look. I'm pretty sure we'll end up needing a few additional shots when we start filming, or find some shots will have to be modified to fit with the physical restraints of the final filming location, but as an overall guide it works well. None of the shots should present too much of an issue when filming, there is very little to be shot outside so the elements and natural light aren't going to present a problem. We just need to achieve the correct lighting in a dingy kitchen. The animatic runs to 1 minute 13 seconds, which gives us plenty of room to add additional material if needs be, without running over the 2 minute limit.