test of storyboard

IMG_1889 2 IMG_1850 IMG_1852 IMG_1855 2 IMG_1864 2Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 1.14.23 pmIMG_1881 IMG_1725

Since I only was with one person when I did these storyboard tests I was focusing more on the lighting and framing rather than the action so that is why I didn’t do one of the storyboard frames. When I was actually doing these shots, I was really considering not going through with filming my final scene. But now that I’ve seen them on a screen and put them in order, I’m still not that happy with them because they are just rough, but I’m looking forward to actually filming the scene. I think at this point, I need to put aside my need for everything to be perfect, because it has always effected the process in which I am making something, so I just need to accept that sometimes I won’t like everything I do at some stages, but I just have to believe that what I’m making will turn out alright.

rOUGH storyboard

As I have now figured out the action that I want to happen in the scene, I have drawn up a pretty rough storyboard with the type of shots I want. Because it is quite a short scene that is focusing on lighting and sound, not many different shots are needed, most will be about 5 seconds long, if not longer.

Because of my average drawing skills, I’m going to walk through each shot and explain what’s going on.

Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.17.04 pm
For the first shot, I’ve decided to show the attackers face, so I can use different lighting techniques to light his face in a dehumanising way. Even though the scene starts with a black screen with the car engine stopping, the first shot seen is this.

Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.17.32 pm
Opening car door, stepping out, closing door. Walk out of frame to rear of car.
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.17.46 pm
Open boot of car, hear sobs of girl and yelling.
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.17.55 pm
He pulls her out of the boot and drags her to the front of the car, the dragging is not seen but is communicated by the sound design.
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.18.09 pm
Leaves girl at the front of the car, she is still sobbing. He walks to side of car, opens back door, grabs shovel, closes back door.
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.18.16 pm
Drags shovel along ground, starts to dig, gives up.
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.18.26 pm

He strikes girl on head with shovel.

CUT TO BLACK.

Scene deconstruction

Spoiler warning******
This scene is towards the end of the film, so if you haven’t seen it, don’t go any further.

Sound:
-There is no music in the first half of the scene, gives each sound importance especially the creaking floorboard from within the house that can be heard from outside
-The lack of music also gives the scene a realistic feel, which is quite disturbing for an audience considering the nature of the events
-The dogs barking and cars in the distance are apart of the suburban atmosphere sounds, which is important to the narrative of the film to remind the audience of the location and the possibility of these events happening in real life close to home
-Music only starts after Loki’s realisation, creates added tension
-The organ from the soundtrack give a heavy vibe, almost like making the audience dread what is coming

Lighting:
-Since the lighting is from available sources, the lighting is quite yellow, which effects the colouring of the whole scene
-Soft lighting

Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 4.59.20 pm
-The lighting used in this scene is available lighting within the frame, for example in this shot the only light sources are from within the house, the front porch light, and the taillights from the car

Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 5.06.53 pm
-The flashlight has been used as the backlighting for this shot, which gives the dehumanising silhouette used in many horror and thriller movies to indicate that a character is bad or evil
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 5.05.47 pm
-The flashlight then changes from the backlight to the key lighting in this shot, which gives a large shadow cast on the back wall. This large shadow that is shown can be tied to childhood fears like the boogeyman
Screen Shot 2015-10-11 at 5.01.34 pm
What I would take note of for my project is the use of strong silhouettes, which can either work in juxtaposition to a character, or to develop the character further. It is also great to see an example of available lighting used in such a stylised way, showing me that you can create meaning out of everyday light sources

Camera:
-Several of the shots look like the camera is mounted on a tripod but in the shots with movement it appears as if it is handheld.
-Long establishing shot of location
-Most movement and walking is shown in handheld medium shots

project Collaboration

Today I met with Ella after class to discuss some possible ideas on collaborating with our projects. We both have pretty similar ideas for this project so I think it is a good fit, us working together. We both are interesting in exploring night-time shooting, and since Ella is going to be working with sound design, and me working with lighting, we decided it would be a great idea to work on each other’s whilst working on what we want to investigate on. With Ella’s shoot, she wants to focus on sound design and soundscapes, so I can help with the visuals both with lighting and shooting. Before I saw Ella’s presentation, I didn’t really consider focusing on sound design in my project, but since meeting with her a few times I am really interested in her helping with audio on my project.

I decided that the scene I wanted to focus on was the car headlights/disposing of body concept. Ella had a really great idea of actually setting it near a river, as this could add some elements to the soundscape. The story is starting to look like it is going to be a man taking a girl to the river to dispose of her, but as he tries to dig, the group is too hard so he knocks her out with his shovel and throws her in the water.

Action:
Car stops
Door opens
Steps out of car
Door closes
Walks to boot
Opens boot
Girl sobbing and yelling
Drags her out
Drags her to front of car
Leaves her to go back to boot
Returns with shovel
Tries to dig
Gets angry and frustrated
Turns to girl
She screams
Strikes her
Girl dragged
Splash as he hits water

Not all of the action will be shown in frame, so it is great to have Ella help with sound. For example, I won’t have someone actually thrown in water, so this could possibly just be heard with a black screen.

Work Placement

So I am at the end of my second week of my cadetship at the ABC, and I have already learnt so much. Since I’m based at the Elsternwick centre there aren’t many productions happening at the moment, because shows like The Weekly and Dirty Laundry Live have just finished. Although, this may be a blessing in disguise. I have always thought that I want to work in production, whether it be camera operator or DOP or even a sound mixer, but because of the lack of major productions at the moment, I have been working alongside people in roles I wouldn’t have even thought of. I spent a few days working with / shadowing the sound editor and sound mixer at the ABC, and it surprised me that I actually really enjoyed it. I always thought I didn’t really enjoy editing of vision and sound but now that I’m seeing it and engaging in it in a professional setting it really looks like an interesting role.

The only ongoing show at the moment is ABC3’s Studio 3, which is quite interesting to work on. The shoots are varied so they can either be in a studio with a set (selfie below), in front of a green screen, or on location. Last week was my first location shoot and it really solidified the fact that I want to work in the film industry. It was just great to see such great content being made and was interesting to see a professional production team work together.

12025575_10153326143219748_771368969_n

Car Headlights shot

IMG_1720 IMG_1723

If I were to choose only one concept from the previous shots I presented in my project pitch, it would be with these two with the idea that it could work with an assailant who is digging in a hole in front of the car with sobbing in the background from another person. With this concept, there doesn’t need to much dialogue.

Sounds: (not in order)
Footsteps on gravel
Door/boot opening and plosing
Atmos (Eg Crickets, wind)
Shovel dragging on gravel
Shovel digging
Breaths/moans of digger (deep inhales and exhales)
Tires on gravel
Car engine turning off

In my previous investigations with lighting, I used red gels to create a violent/aggressive mood, but if I went with this concept, instead of using red gels, I could just use the “available” light from the taillights of a car, perhaps maybe shown if the victim is in the boot and/or taken out of the boot.

IMG_1717

Another thing i have been thinking about is that it will probably be quite difficult to legally find a place to dig a hole, so perhaps a way around this dilemma is the digger could notice that the ground is too hard and it unable to dig. He could get angry get angry and start to approach the victim who is sobbing and yelling right before he knocks her out with the shovel (good for sound effect).

Project Planning

Today’s class consisted of finishing off presentations and figuring out how to plan for the rest of the semester. I was quite nervous about the whole helping people and getting people to help you stage because it isn’t really a casual thing to go about. Although, I am less intimidated because I’ve already started talking about some possibilities with this project with Ella. We both are really intrigued by each other’s presentations and ideas so I’m looking forward to planning some stuff together and to see what sort of things we can come up with.

But for now, what I’ve started thinking about is how many shoots I want to do and what sort of stuff I’ll need help with. So I want to do about 5 or 6 shoots, preferably each being for a different scene/idea.

I will initially be doing solo shoots with my Canon 6D with actors but just testing different techniques regarding framing and iso etc. Even though a DSLR isn’t ideal for shooting video, it will be a good starting tool to figure out the sort of visuals I am hoping to achieve by the end of this project.

Proposal Reflection

After everyone’s pitches in todays class, I feel really excited to get going with this project. Everyone had some really great ideas and I would honestly work with anyone on their projects. Before presenting today, I felt quite nervous and was doubting myself because I felt like I was underprepared and didn’t have a clear vision for where I was heading, but after actually showing people my test shots and voicing my ideas, I felt a lot more confident in my project. The feedback I got was very helpful, in that they supported the ideas and gave advice on how to go about it. One of the main responses I got from Robin, was to ditch the litepanels and flood lights and only use available lighting. As most of my tests only included available lighting, it won’t be difficult to narrow my light sources. Next I need to choose which of the test shots I believe have the most potential and work with that.

Project 3 proposal

Over the past week I have started to plan some shots that focus a lot on lighting and I have taken a few tests of these ideas. After these shoots I’m pretty excited to create a series of 20-30 second scenes or moments similar to the expertise exercise we did in class a few weeks ago. My aim for weeks 8-12 is to create a short scene every 3-4 days. These scenes can either be tied together in a film about lighting, or I can write a short film that would include all of these scenes.

I want to see how far I can take this idea of storytelling via lighting and see if it actually can translate to an audience. Because I am sort of drawn to crime and stuff it’ll probably show through some of the content. It is also quite prominent that I want to focus on different sources of light and how they can be used to light a subject and location. I don’t just want to use floodlights and lights we have here at school, but experiment with sources of light that are available to me.

(The order of the photographs I presented are the same as here)

Shot 1) This was my first attempt at backlighting, just using the street light as the light source. For a first attempt I think this is quite an interesting shot, and I believe it embodies a sense of mystery could really work in a short exercise.

Shot 2&3) These were my second attempts at backlighting, as I wanted to try it with a different source of lighting, in this case being the headlights of a car. This worked out quite well because I wanted to see a clear silhouette. For a short scene I was thinking I could maybe have someone just digging a hole. There doesn’t need to be any dialogue because people can just assume what’s happening.

Shot 4) For now, I don’t really want to work with natural lighting, because I am more interested in learning and exploring techniques with artificial lighting. I want to learn more about the gels because for these tests I just used cellophane so it would be good to look at a more professional way of doing this.

Shot 5) I always find this bus stop near my house really creepy at night because it seems so isolated but I thought it would be interesting to see how this fluorescent light worked on a subject. I don’t know if I’d make a scene on this shot, it didn’t really stand out to me.

Shot 6,7&8) I was thinking for a shot of this colouring, I could use it not in a realistic way but to add another element to a story eg like I could do a short scene on two people having an aggressive verbal fight.

Shot 9) I want to work with both actuality and then more dream/nightmarish sort of stuff. Like if I were to use the coloured gels then there’s probably only a handful of ways I could make this realistic, so I could use this lighting option for a more “other-worldly” sort of scene.

Shot 10) A few weeks ago when we did the first writing exercise, I started thinking about moments that reoccur in my life and I realized that sometimes when I get home at night I park in the street and I usually just stay in the car for a few minutes because I just get this bad feeling and I just get scared of leaving my car and like sometimes I’m there for like an hour. I didn’t even mean for them to kind of relate to this but in the two shots I recently of the girl sitting in the car from front on and from the side, they kind of remind me of this situation I’m always in, but like from the other side so I think these two shots could be used to help create this moment.

Shot 11) I kind of just wanted to see if this sort of lighting worked and I think it does so I could just have a scene of someone watching an old home movie or something.

consults

So after seeing Paul today, I’d like to think that I’ve got my head in the right place now. It may have only been a short meeting but I really got a lot out of it. After I took some test shots, I decided that I definitely wanted to focus on lighting and different light sources, so Paul suggested that instead of 1 minute scenes, I make a series of 20-30 second scenes, “because 1 minute can seem like an eternity”. It is important to set an aim for this project, so my aim is to make an exercise/test/investigation every 3 or 4 days.

Before Friday’s presentations, I need to start to think of some concepts for the shots I took last week. Paul suggested that I could argue that the concepts could determine many things including the lighting. So rather than just think of a concept that would suit a shot, I need to think about the scenes realistically and use the sources of light in a believable way, and make it look like I haven’t just used sources of light for the sake of just trying to use as many different sources as possible.

I have 2 possible ways of going about this project, I could either write something, with all features of the test shots and make the scenes work together to create a short film, or I could just have a film called “scenes about lighting” so they don’t have to make sense together.

Even though we the option to use actors from the casting call, I would still choose to use friends. I have only just started to think why this is, and I realized that I am quite influenced and inspired by my friends. Whenever I start to come up with an idea for a possible project, I can either see a friend playing a character or I just unintentionally add elements of them to a character. It is quite hard not to be so influenced by people I basically see every day. Also, whenever I am pursing a project, my friends are always interesting in helping and being involved.