This  is a behind the scenes video I made about the desicion to use Rhyming narration in my short film.

Behind the Scenes – Its like Poetry from Sandy Jones on Vimeo.

This  is a short Blooper Reel I made for my final project.

Blooper Reel from Sandy Jones on Vimeo.

This is the trailer I made for my short film, I tried to mimic how trailers for blockbusters are made, being over dramatic and lots of out-of-context dialogue snippets, plus a dramatic finish to my trailer followed by the title and date of release.

Trailer (final version) from Sandy Jones on Vimeo.

Here is a ‘behind the scenes’ video for my final project.

Behind the Scenes – Headsplosion, from concept to reality from Sandy Jones on Vimeo.

I wanted to emulate the style found on DVD extras, where a director talks the audiance through an important or technically challanging sequence of the film, giving a broader understanding of how films are made to the public.

I dressed like that because I could.

This was the final week of classes for “On the Frame”, and it was probably the best week because we got to watch

I love this film, its my favourite film to come out in years, and will likely hold a spot on my personal list of films I will rewatch endlessly for a VERY long time. I adore everyting about this movie, and after seeing it more times than I’d like to admit (six?, seven maybe) the sound of the engine starting up as the Warner Brothers logo appears gets me pumped everytime.

The rest of this blog post will be me typographly shouting things I loved about the movie.

THE ACTION, ALL OF IT. ITS ALL SO GOOD!!!!!! The Buzzard’s attacking the war rig, the the cayon chase, the Pole Cats. I LOVE IT ALL.

THE CHARACTER AND WORLD DESIGN, AAAAARG ITS BEUTIFUL. Immortan Joe’s cancer’y, torso, the lumps and bumps that are all over the War Boys, the People Eater driving a bastardised limo to fit with his Business-man attire and penny-counting attitude, the little notch on the War Rig’s steering wheel for Furiosa’s prosthetic hand to grip on, AND THE COMA DOOF WARRIOR, everything about him.

THE LORE AND ALL THAT IT IMPLIES! “half-life War Boys” are all sick from radiation, trained and conditioned to die gloriously in battle because otherwise they would die from cancererous lumps anyway. “Shiny and Chrome” they worship vechilles, and the best vechiles are shiny and chrome, so they huff Chrome Paint before dying to prepare them selves for Valhalla, also “Chroming” is an actual thing where people huff paint to get high, which would make it easier to suicide bomb for the glory of the Immortan. “SING BROTHER KOCH” when the Bullet Farmer gets blinded and goes (even morso) insane he yells for his brothers to SIIIIIIIIING, including a ‘brother Koch” which is a reference to Heckler and Koch a company that made the guns he was using at the time, and would have had the name written on the side.

And litteraly everything else about this movie, I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

Then on thursday we briefly talked about the movie, then went to the pub, which was a fantastic end to a fantastic semester of classes.

Thanks Dan.

On the 1st of October I was absent from class, but I was however working very hard on my Final Project for the semester.

The previous evening I caught the train back to my hometown of Yackandandah in North East Victoria, the following morning I began shooting my short film. The process was rather rushed and unproffesional, but it all worked out in the end. Two of my actors were only avalible for one day (Nathan who played the President was only avalible for about 2-3 hours), this meant that everything had to be done as fast as possible, I had Kaddy (my other friend, who was avalible for one day only) assisting with filming, as well as recording “behind the scenes” footage on my phone. Nathan’s sister Emma even helped, and had a cameo role as Doloros, the secretary.

Before the day of filming I wasnt exactly sure how many people I would have to work with, although my “script” allowed for this, so many of the lines and especially costumes and sets were created as we were working. Filming was done on my dads digital camera which was of quite reasonable quality, the morning was dedicated to all the scenes Nathan was involved in, which happened to be a scene at the beginning, middle and end of the film. They were relativly simple scenes, but I was delibratly choosing shots and movements which I would be able to manipulate in editing for stylistic effect, including frame-rate alterations, freeze-frames and rapid quick cuts with a “WHOOSH” sound effect.

After saying goodbye to Nathan and wishing him a happy overseas trip (as I said, we had to get this done quick), I began to start work on the rest of the film. We were joined by my cousin Josh, who with me and Kaddy was playing one of the three main cast. After ruffling through my wardrobe to find a suitible costume (a purple shirt, eye-patch and mini top hat) we were ready to film. At first it was some very simple shots of characters silently listening to a phonecall (which was already recorded), we then headed of to the bush.

It was here where some more shots were done that I planned this entire film (and frame-rating experimenting) around: the driving scene.

Each character was going to be given a freeze-frame introduction, and Kaddy’s character “Black Hat” was always seen with his car, which made it the perfect time to get mutliple shots of moving vechiles. Inspired by Drive, Mad Max (both Road Warrior and Fury Road) I wanted 3 different types of shots.

The first being a shot from inside the car, watching it move forwards (the type of shot that was very common in Drive). Due to it being a very small area, and not exactly being stunt-men, we could only drive very slowly. However this worked to the advantage of my project, as I wanted to speed it up artifically in editing, and see how far I could push it before it looked terrible. I was inspired by The Road Warrior which used this exact technique for the same reasons, and Fury Road, which used similar manipulation more for stylistic effect.

The second type of shot I wanted was of the driver’s (Black Hat AKA Kaddy) face while driving, which proved to be difficult to shoot, since driving with a camera pointed at your face is rather challanging. This shot is where the freeze-frame and character intro was going to be, so I needed a good shot of his face and costume. I also wanted to continue the speed editing, to make it seem like he was driving more than 10km/h.

The final car shot I wanted to get was a stationary camera looking at a moving vechile, which established the location more-so than the limited view the previous shots gave. Again I wanted to experiment with just how far I could speed it up, without it looking terrible.

For my initial test footage for my Final Project, I wanted to see if my idea for using a Water balloon for a substitute for an exploding head would work.

This video is my first ever test of using an iPhones slow-mo camera to shoot the explosion of water.

I was very happy with how it turned out, and I saw that I would be able to make it look very good.

In this week’s classes we continued planning the End of Semester presentation about the studio, and corrolating all our answers into a Google Doc, so that the speakers can give answers that represent the whole class and not just themselves. Having a look at other peoples answers, something statements are very common and appear again and again only worded slightly differently. Common recurring themes were the freedom of choice in the final assignment, as well as appricating the massive variety in films we watched and different ways of analysing the frame.

On thursday’s class we all had to give an update on how our major project is going, and show some footage if we had it avalible. It was interesting to see so many people’s projects change direction since the proposal presentations. Most people had some kind of footage to show, and it was very interesting seeing how peoples ideas were coming to frutition.

My “update” came in the form of reassuring the class that everything was going more-or-less to plan, and that I had completed all my filming on schedule over the long weekend. I showed two sections of footage, the first was a compolation of all my “Slo-Motion Exploding Balloons” which I filmed many, MANY times experimenting with different techniques and trying to perfectly replicate a cheesy “Head-splosion” effect.

My second segment was something, that in retro-spect was probably a waste of time but it was fun anyway, was a approx 1 minute “trailer” for my film. I wanted to make something tounge-in-cheek and make it look like my film was serious and important. It was harder than I though, and i probably spent at least 2-3 hours putting it together. I wanted to make it as “Hollywood” as possible, with dramatic phrases over the top of unrelated footage (as in stuff from another part of the film), I found some cheesy “Duh DUN” sound effects to puncuate my  cuts to classic trailer phrases such as “This October…..”. Im also pretty proud of the ending to my trailer, which has the segment preceeding the Exploding head, including pulling a gun up to someones forehead and pulling the trigger. Instead of showing the explosion, i just played as gunshot sound-effect and cut to black for 4 seconds, which was fairly “proffesional” looking, if I do say so myself.

Again, it was probably a waste of time, but It was fun.

In this weeks class we talked about how we are going to deal with the final 8 minute studio presentation, we quickly agreed that it would be best to only have a few people speak as to not clutter everything up and go massivly overtime, so everyone in the studio has to be a part of writing the things that these designated speakers will say.

To get a start on this we all answered 3 questions.

What is the Studio investigating/exploring. How is it doing this.

The studio looked at the Frame, and all the various aspects of how it influences cinema as well as other mediums. One of the first things we did was the “gallery ramble” in which we looked at various paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria and identified aspects such as colour, size, shape etc… as well as thier actual physical frames and where they were placed in the gallery, and how all of this affects our viewing of the artwork, which was a precursor to applying these thoughts to film.

Throughout the semester we watched many films, from across many genres and decades, each looking at different ways film-makers have used the frame to produce thier work. We looked at French new wave, Noir, High Concept, mobile cinema as well as a plethora of readings by various film theorists on how the many ways film can be read and made.

What did YOU discover in terms of your current/future proffesional practice.

Througout this semester I discovered lots about film production and theory that will, and already has, help my potential film making career. I learned lots about practical methods of doing filmmaking, such as 180 degree rule, shot-reverse-shot, using colour, movement and other visual aspects to aid in creating the narrative (these were all concepts I knew of, but the studio greatly enhanced by knowledge and understanding).

The final project, in which I directed a 5 minute film, was a great practical experience that both put all the theory into reality but also was a foray into other challanges of filmaming. Things like managing conflicting schedules (one of my actors who was in the beginning, middle and ending only had 4 hours of avalibility over the weekend of filming befoore leaving for Europe), as well as putting concepts into reality with a very limited budget, many concessions from my original storyboards had to be abandonned because I didnt have the equipment, manpower or time.

All of this is just as, if not more, valuable to real-life professional filmmaking than any theory.

What about the Studio would you recommend to potential future students?

I would suggest this studio to students who want to both learn and study film as well as engage in practical work, if they want to do nothing but learn how to and participate in making film another studio is probably better for them. However this studio was great in studying film and looking intensly at how and why other people did certain things when making films, as well as different techniques and methods which came about over the history of film.

I would recommend this studio to students who love film and want to learn more about it, and with assignments that are very open-ended to suit basically any appraoch.

In this weeks class we continued our discussion about Inception. Firstly we broke into groups of 4 and made a mind map about Inception, writing down anything that came to mind about the film. Such as aspects of the Mise-en-Scene, interesting shots, ideas about the themes or plot, basically anything that came to mind about the film

Here is a (rather poor) photo of our finsished mind map.

As a group we talked about many aspects of the film, pointing out what we liked and disliked it, as well as examining elements of stylistic choice and trying to disern why Nolan may have implemented them. Some things we discussed was the abundance of exposition, and how its internal mythology was all very conviniant for making a blockbuster film, EG “militarised subconscious” allowed for faceless goons to be a threat and give them film action scenes.

After that the next activity was a set of questions, and we had to positon our selves across the room depending on how strongly we agreed or disagreed, with the door to the hallway being Agree 100% and the window being Disagree 100% and everything in between being a sliding scale.

The questions were not easy, and it seemed like no-one was entirely sure of thier answers. This is because they were un-answerable, such as “Is Inception an accurate representation of the human subconscious”, considering no-one really knows what a representation of the human subconcsous looks like (or if its even possible to represent) its entirely a subjective answer. I moderatly disagreed, primarily for the aformentioned reasons of all the conviances that suited the human subconscious for making a Hollywood film, but I didnt fully disagree because honestly: who knows?

There was several more questions, all of equal hardness to answer, including the triumphant return of “Can film think”. The final question however was not about metaphysical representations or film theory, but rather our interpretation of the plot.

Was Kobb dreaming the whole time?

For this question I instantly knew my responce: stand in the dead centre of the room right on the “I dont know” line (a thought shared by almost all the class). This is because the questioning was intentional, and gives the ending its emotional reaction, no definitive conclusion could ever replicate the feelings of questioning and doubt which stay with you after the credits roll and are destined to be discussed and argued about for years to come.