threesixty.002

So here's the final outcome. I'm very thankful to Alex who helped me a lot during the editing with reassurance and helpful suggestions!

The quality of the video online doesn't seem great at all, but I suppose that's all I could expect having exported it as 4096x2048 - as I couldn't export it in any higher quality without the export itself taking a whole day and a half. 

Other than that, it was very rewarding and I'm definitely gonna do this more! Here's the last screenshot and a thumbnail I made whilst waiting for the export!

threesixty.001

The idea to portray an indoors vs outdoors environment was very much Chloe's idea and I thought it would be interesting to use 360 to place the person in two completely opposite places, from a comfortable, cosy home scene to a littered, dirty outdoors - an exaggerated or possibly a very true and unarguable statement - so it was then my idea to perhaps allow the person to be in both places at the same time! 

We decided on two locations - my flat, and a spot in Farnham Park with swings that is usually very littered. The decision was to then use half sphere of each place and put them together, so that if a person looks through a VR, in front of them is the flat, but when they look behind them - it's the park. Chloe took upon the role of Producer, I was to film and Junaid was to edit. 

We got Dean to help us out with acting. On the day of our shoot, it happened to be the Advanced Photography hand-in, so both Junaid and Dean had to be in to submit their work. Dean was able to help us in the morning, but then had to go in during the afternoon for a few hours. We decided that Junaid could focus on Photography if he was to edit the films together. The morning went smoothly - we filmed in my flat, and the footage was exactly what we wanted. We then had to wait until about 3:30 for Dean to submit work and head to Farnham Park.

And that's where most of the issues started. Chloe had to leave at 5, but we only got there at about 4:30. And then, out of nowhere, the camera would only record 20 or 30 seconds of footage at a time. I thought perhaps I was walking too far away (as we obviously had to hide), so I left my phone below the camera. It ran past 20 seconds, so I left and told Dean to start moving. Three minutes later, I checked my phone... and nothing. At this point Chloe had already left and I was really confused as to what the issue could be - the settings were fine, nothing had changed since the flat. My phone would occasionally show a location error - so I figured perhaps there was something interrupting the signal. So then, on my own and both stressed and confused, I decided to let Dean go and went home to see what's happening. 

As soon as I was indoors, the camera did another 20 second cut but the next time I pressed record, it was once again working fine. Knowing we only had the one day to finish this work, I called Junaid to come help me film in a different spot in Farnham Park - a more open area. The camera acted up three times, but fourth time was the charm and it worked. Sadly, this meant we went against the original idea of having the same person on both sides of the sphere.. but it had to be done!

Junaid put the footage on his drive, and eventually transferred it to me on Friday. I exported both 3 minute clips from the Insta 360 Studio Software - it took about 3 hours in total on my laptop. Then on Saturday, I went to the library from about 12 until 6 - Junaid joined midway through. Our goal for the day was to clear the footage in After Effects and export it.

(Here's a photo from when I was in the library on Sunday, having a little panic when I realised I had messed up the first export!)

Clearing the footage indoors proved to be the most difficult, because I couldn't make the light on the carpet as gradient as it would be naturally. I think I cleared it about 4 different times and Junaid attempted to clear it 4 more times - until we were finally happy. 

The one outdoors was way easier - although I made the awful mistake of not watching the entire footage through before rendering it! For about 5 seconds, a piece of paper that flew too close to the tripod got cloned and repeated itself until wind blew it slightly to the side. So I had to export that one again on Sunday.

But back on Saturday, Junaid and I were trying to figure out what the best way to export this footage would be. Whilst waiting for Jeremiah to respond, we looked up H.265 and decided to test the 5760x2880 size - but the computers estimated the rendering time to be about 13.5 hours for each video and we simply couldn't do that. I took the project back home with me, and decided to use H.264 but my laptop offered to keep the 5760x2880 size even on H.264 so I got very excited and attempted this. Sadly it still estimated to be about 8 hours each and I didn't think that would be possible - my laptop started freezing up just 4 minutes into the export.

So I settled for changing it to H.264 and 4096x2048, as this would only take 2.5 hours to export (each) and I left it exporting over night. We really did want to export it in the highest possible quality, but the issue was we would need to export our project multiple times - as we cleared it in After Effects, but then needed to rotate sphere and crop into half-spheres in Premiere (there was simply no good Crop effect in After Effects that would work as well). We thought we might need to then put it back in After Effects to create a round line across the cut edge, however as I'm writing this we've decided to instead use edge feathering and make it so that the outdoors slowly fades onto the indoors, and symbolically as Dean takes care of his plants and the outdoors reaches indoors, Junaid's littering also falls onto the floor inside. Once I did this, I realised it looked much more intriguing and in fact said more about our rationale then just two unmoving half-spheres.

With only Monday left, my job is to quickly add the sounds (ambient atmospherics) I recorded on a Zoom whilst filming to the Premiere Pro project, and then export the file tomorrow so I could also upload it on Vimeo in time for the hand-in!

It's been a very confusing and strange week - I think I mostly felt anxious because I didn't know how to resolve any of the issues because I was still really unfamiliar with most aspects of the process. Hopefully it turns out as good as it looked to Junaid and I today - or perhaps we were just too exhausted to know any better. Despite all that, it was still so very fun and definitely something I'll do again - hopefully with more time than two weeks.

vfx.002

Somewhere between the first post and this I became really overwhelmed by what I wanted to do. I didn't know if I wanted to make something incredibly complex or simple but effective. The first tests I did were inspired by the A24 ident - my favourite. I wasn't sure what I was doing it for so I just used the word 'Juno'.

I had to create the letters as separate layers in Illustrator, then import them and craft their paths from one position to another. This individual comp was then imported into the following RGB comp where I set the individual channels, adjusted the size of each comp by 0.5 (as well as keyframe their length) and delayed each one by 1 frame to have the following effects.

So here's how that ended up looking:

And that's where the struggle started because I couldn't think of a way to get this to work with a credits sequence. I've always been a fan of simple, minimalist credits... so I sort of just went with what I personally wanted to do & knew would make nice opening credits.

I went through a bunch of films, looked at the atmosphere they established and ended up settling on Lady Bird. What followed was an hour of cutting out vintage lady birds from old postcards and books in Photoshop.

And then a lot of text alignment, optics, some blur, some noise, a bit of masking for an effect of glow with the use of decreasing exposure. At one point I used Motion Tile to add Wiggle effect to the text, and then ended up doing that to everyone single one of the lady birds as well. They all got keyframed to crawl across the screen.

So here's all that:

And then eventually, when everything seemed good to go, I decided to cut the credits with some scenes from Lady Bird ft. a lovely song by Junodream that I felt captured the feeling of the film really well.

dance?

 I realised today that it was exactly a month ago, on February 7th, that Chloe & I met up for a coffee and she told me about her idea and I got so excited I pretty much jumped at the opportunity of being the producer (and I'm really! not! that! good! at! producing!). 

 We've been so incredibly busy developing and perfecting the idea that I haven't had any time to sit back and write a post, so this might be more of an overlook than a detailed look into every aspect of the development. As soon as Chloe told me her idea of 'almost touches', I thought of this beautiful music video and then & there decided I wanted to be a part of it because I straight-up felt really passionately about the theme & thoughts behind the project. I listened to Andrea Gibson speak the 'Orlando' poem and I think it was such a strong starting point for a film.

 Dancers: 

We had a few little meet-ups before study week but I wouldn't say we really started working on it until Chloe wrote up the first Synopsis & Treatment. From that, I submitted multiple ads for female dancers on various platforms that Rachel had suggested. Arts Jobs was possibly the easiest one and we heard back within a week, although the dancer was from Kent & after calculating the travel expenses we realised we couldn't afford it. I had a lot of difficulty posting on LondonDance as they wouldn't let you manually submit an ad - instead you have to email the editor. However, I never heard back (not once, from my four emails!), so I'm not sure what happened.

We got a bit desperate at this point so I put out an ad on Farnham Freshers and a lovely person forwarded it to someone they knew at London Contemporary Dance School. I also posted it on the University of Surrey page (as they have a specific Theatre & Dance section) but had no response. I made a little poster and forwarded it to Nina (as she said she had dancer contacts), Victor (because he's lovely and offered to help) and people Rachel's friend Jo suggested. Victor actually managed to find someone, just as we heard back from one of the people Jo suggested.

As this is an LGBTQ+ dance film, Chloe felt very passionately about getting actual gay dancers to perform so even though we still haven't made a decision, it's likely we might go for a dancer named Rachel & a partner of her choice as they would both have a similar dance style and both be part of the LGBTQ+ community. I'm currently waiting for more details from Rachel, but prior to this I made an online poll just to get expense details whilst also giving any possible applicants a choice to tell us their sexuality if they felt comfortable (as from the start we wanted a mostly LGBT crew).

Crew & Production: 

I don't quite know how it happened but we managed to recruit students from all three years of our course! Anne suggested Chloe ask two first years and they both agreed to help out in 2nd Camera Assistant/Continuity and Production Assistant roles. I asked Emily, Jack, Grace and Alice for help with Camera, Sound and Light and they were all happy to assist, and later on Alex got on board as Gaffer assistant. So that's a crew of nine people which Chloe & I are so excited about!

At the same time I've been trying my best to keep up with everyone's details and fill out our production pack. We've got two Risk Assessments, one for two days of B32 and one for a day at the weekend shooting bedroom shots within a house (with less crew than studio!). Actually, we might need to update the Risk Assessment as after our induction with David today he suggested we book an EasyRig and use mirrors for our 'flashing lights' so now there's extra cautions we might need to take if we end up using this equipment. 

Overall I did most of the paperwork but Chloe added a detailed camera shot-list to the Call Sheet and a rough moodboard + storyboard which came in handy when talking to David. I think we've also realised that a lot of the time on the first day needs to be spent figuring out the final choreography because we need to see what the dancers bring to the shoot.

Oh look, everything's so tidy!

 Funding: 

 This has been a journey. I thought second year would be a good time to see how fundraising works + we wanted to make this dance film as good as possible. So we've done so much! 

 We made a video & published an Indiegogo page. This was a massive step outside of our comfort zone. We had to write up an actual script and somehow looking at camera is a VERY stressful experience. 

 (Thanks to those who actually donated, it made our days! There's still five days left as of today.) 

 I made endless illustrations & animations. I included two in the Indiegogo video, but here's the still illustrations I made on Adobe. 

Oh, and then I thought it was a good idea to get people's attention by making a little moving image piece which was INSANE, I spent half a day staring at my screen trying to doodle an actually good image (which is so hard without a tablet), only to have to paint it in, save it, redraw it, repaint it, save it, redraw it, repaint it and save it, put it together and export it as a shot video. Yes, it only had three frames but honestly I overestimated how long it would take me before my eyes started drying up.

And then we're baking this Sunday and doing a bake sale on Monday to hopefully raise some more money (we really want to be able to pay the dancers as they're most likely going to come from London & spend two long days in the studio). 

 I think that's probably it so far, but I have most definitely forgotten to mention something. 

 I'm super excited for the actual shoot because hearing Chloe talk about her vision has been really wonderful and I hope that with the crew & some funds available she can make it as amazing as she wants to. I hope I can take part in the actual shoot too, as now that Pre-Production is almost done & we have a Production Assistant, I'd like to explore some of the camera skills I've been too busy to focus on this year. (and maybe I can even catch up with some Fields & Frames work in April... hopefully...)

And to finish off, here's a collection of really interesting dance videos I watched whilst in pre-production:

avid.001

After the long break away from AVID, I felt rather unfamiliar with the software. Surprisingly, as soon as we all got our workspaces and passwords, it all started coming back naturally. 

On the very first day, I looked through the 'Meat Bag' footage, sorted it into bins, made a basic rough cut and left it at that. I felt very conflicted about the footage as there were large jumps in the flow of the story and it made me feel anxious when viewing it. I thought, if I have to edit together a film and I'm already feeling stressed just reviewing the rough cut, I won't be able to make it to my usual standard, or enjoy the process. 

I left it at that and the following week, after a chat with Kathryn, I decided to import the footage from 'Basement' (which I re-titled Rouge) and start from scratch. Perhaps due to the fact I hadn't seen this footage before, I felt excited and intrigued, and within one day I had made a rough cut, a second rough cut and a diegetic soundtrack. 

Following that, I saw that the weather forecast was suggesting there might be snow, so I went decided to spend my free Thursday afternoon editing until the closing time at 8pm. By this time, I had a cut I was pleased with, audio was 90% synced and I was able to do some colour retouching. 

As predicted, campus was shut on Friday due to snowfall.

The week after that, I made use of the AVID rooms after 4pm which was when the MAs left.

I added a crop because I felt it gave a more TV-like feeling, and I thought it would be interesting to add sound to the TV. I used that of an old, short trailer and it matched perfectly with the feel I was going for. During the edit, I decided I wanted it to imply that the lives of the characters were also almost TV-like. I also got some ambient and atmospheric soundtracks, to increase the feeling of suspense and oddness, with some strange noises increasing when the Boyfriend enters the basement. 

Most of my time was spent keyframing audio and retouching the highlights (as in some shots the settings looked completely different!) so that on its own took about a day and a half. Other than that, I found it very easy to keep everything tidy within each Bin, all the AVID tools felt easy and understandable to use by the end of the editing process, and I handed in my final edit on February 7th.

Here's what that almost Final Cut looked like, with all the keyframes, titles, audio, cuts and the coloured overlay at the end to make it look like a light-leak (although the implied message was it starts again!)

vfx.001

I've become so used to Illustrator that I no longer remember how different After Effects is, as you can probably tell by the text I used to experiment today...

 Anyhow, I spent today just familiarising myself with all the bits and bobs again, and made this little title sequence using Motion Blur, Wave Warp, Colour Keyframes & a quick Wiggle through Motion Tile.

I really want to make use of either Super Retro M54 or Benguiat fonts as pictured below.

Other than that, I'm not too sure of what I want to do quite yet - but I did find the Title Sequence below to be really interesting.

studio shoot evaluation

Final Evaluation

previous posts here x and here x

As a follow-up to my Production Designer and First Evaluation posts, I decided to write up a new, final Evaluation as I feel like I can now look back and be more reflective about the time leading up to the shoot. The other two posts are more specific to researching my role and the way pre-production went, whilst this is more of an overlook. My role was very much pre-production based, working with the Producer and DOP to create the set, gather props and get everything ready so that the Camera Team could get to work without any issues. 

Our group had a very slow start in October, due to the fact we had issues meeting up at one certain time. Because of this we went back and forth with our ideas for a while, and at one point the Art Department and the Director came together to brainstorm and create a presentation that would portray our idea because there was still too much uncertainty. I made an Art Direction powerpoint, Anike wrote a quick script draft and Emily helped gather our ideas together. I think this was an issue because nobody wanted to step up as ‘the leader’, therefore there wasn’t anyone making the final decision, hence why Emily, Anike and I temporarily stepped up to clear it up. 

From early on I knew our DOP Lois and Director Emily wanted an eerie, dark atmosphere, so I looked into films by David Lynch, such as Blue Velvet and Rabbits, as well as found that Babadook (by Jennifer Kent), Hannibal (by David Slade) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (by Dan Trachtenberg) also had a similar odd look that we were interested in. I wrote these down as visual influences and started to work on a Set Design whilst communicating to our Producer, Director and DOP. There were some issues with getting the script finalised, so I had to start working on visuals before being able to read the actual script, hence why instead of envisioning the look from what I read, I had to come up with it by creating a thorough list of emotions we wanted to achieve. 

We wanted it to be dark, old and empty looking yet with colourful memories attached due to the presence of a child in pre-film timeline. I also suggested we use balloons instead of meat bags due to cutting down on the ‘gruesome’ and instead focusing on the ‘eerie and ambiguous’.  

After this the pre-production went quite quickly. Pip was wonderful within her role, and clearly assigned specific paperwork to everyone. I made a Studio Design sketch and a Budget list for furniture, smaller props and make-up, whilst also doing my best to source them for free so that we wouldn’t spend too much on anything. With Pip’s help, we decided to gather money from our group so we could purchase the props as neither of us could afford to spend it individually. This also went quite quickly, and soon Pip, myself, Brodie and Jen found ourselves in Homebase purchasing paint, rollers, other build-related necessities. The build itself was quite fun and we did it very quickly and without any major issues. Pip, Anike and I also purchased the wardrobe for the actors as Grace wasn’t around for most of the time, so possibly missed the fact we needed to get the costume muddy/slightly coloured as when she brought in her wardrobe the Friday before shoot, she told us we couldn’t make it dirty. 

At the same time, however, we needed to order helium because we were advised to have it on-set so we would be able to inflate the balloons if anything went wrong. The balloons supplied by Emily turned out to be too small when we inflated them, so we had to quickly order some bigger ones. This is where one of our main issues came from – the bigger balloons needed more helium, but when they came on Friday before the shoot, we thought the helium cannister would be enough to fill one up for the shoot. However, when I got there on Monday morning, the helium canister had been tampered with as half of the helium had escaped it, thereby not being enough to keep the balloon up. I quickly found the closest party shop, and with the help of Emily’s car, Pip, Emily and I were on our way to Aldershot. This pushed our filming schedule back by about an hour, although during the day we managed to catch up at one point. 

I felt very disappointed in myself as I still believe this is my fault, although I still don’t understand what could’ve happened to the helium as it had been properly closed as per instructions after the test balloon. 

Despite this setback, everything else went according to plan. I worked very closely with Pip and there weren’t any issues with getting the set up and dressing it as we successfully sourced everything we wanted. I enjoyed my role thoroughly as it was exactly what I wanted to do, and except for the accidental helium problem, everything went smoothly. Because my role was very much pre-production based, I was able to use the rest of the time to watch the camera team, actors and sound recording, so I feel like despite not participating in the actual shooting of the script, I learned more about the value of every role and importance of team work (because if one person doesn’t do what they say they will, everything crumbles like dominoes!) It was very valuable, as well as stressful, but it definitely taught me more about the skillset and mindset a person needs to make a shoot work from beginning till end!