Ted, (2012) directed by Seth MacFarlane

If anyone has seen Ted the movie, they would know this still image was taken off the scene from the film where Lori wants to reconcile her relationship with John (the guy in this picture) after receiving a prep talk from Ted.

Although the film is as silly as it sounds, a grown man with a talking teddy bear going through life, this scene stood out to me from the entire film. It runs for barely five minutes, but I get the feeling that this is the turning point of the film. Two former lovers coming together in a diner engaging in awkward small talks. It’s not like it is bad acting, but we could tell that both of them are playing a charade in front of each other. Personally, I have not much experience directing and no experience at all acting, but I get the sense that it must’ve been pretty hard to play out this scene, particularly for John, played by Mark Wahlberg. Emotions that I would presume was going through John would be surprise, to see Lori appear in the diner, depressed,  due to their relationship situation, and some anger, as he messed up badly this time. As an actor, that’s quite a handful to emote. But is it necessary to show all at once?

This still was “screen grabbed” just as he glances at the door of the diner to find Lori standing there. And his expression just exhibits those 3 emotions that I described in the above. And I strongly believe it is not purely from Mark Wahlberg’s acting, but how the filmmaker composed this shot. The emptiness of the scene with the isolation of John from the other patrons, the absence of a cook or a waitress, the use of contrasty look between blown out whites, and the deep blacks. You could almost feel the grime of a dodgy burger joint, smell the grease of overcooked patties on the grill, and charred coffee from the coffee pot that’s been sitting on the burner for ages.

The scene carries on with a simple 2 shots, over the shoulder of Lori and over the shoulder of John. And of course it was cut to whoever was talking, with some reaction shots of the person listening, especially on Lori, as she had a different agenda coming down to the diner. However, after listening to what John had to say, she had some conflicting emotions, and was just left in the diner to reflect, and the scene ends of with John saying “Thanks for coming by.”.

This might be an idea worth experimenting my use of colour and letterbox. Maybe not in terms of the location, but the whole situation of one party willing to reconcile a relationship, but the other is more or less over it. The location of where this takes place is crucial though, as there are definitely places that might be off limits, for example, maybe a shopping mall? Or a circus? But then again, it would be interesting juxtaposing the location with the situation, so that’s worth having a look at and considering the options. It’ll be an interesting shoot.

The first workshop of the week, we had a mini consultation with Paul in groups of 5 to express our ideas that we would like to explore for our final assignment.

To be brutally honest, I came out of the discussion with more questions in my head than going in. Which may not be a bad thing actually? I went in with this idea on working with the letterbox and how it functions in making something look cinematic. However, I didn’t have much of an idea on how am I going to experiment with the uses of a letterbox other than shooting something cinematic and slapping on the letterbox and see how it goes. (Obviously, that’s how it works…)

I’m thinking of exploring the other factors that makes an image cinematic, and I would use the letterbox as a platform or an aid.  The previous exercise, made me realised the use of colour could cue various settings, mood, environment, and so on. For example, the colours yellow or orange, could be related to warmth, happy, peaceful, or accomplished and the colours blue, or green, could be related to being cold, hostile, eerie, or sick. And striking a balance of HSL (Hue, Saturation, and Lightness), is definitely something not to be taken lightly in the cinema world, or in any video production. Hence, I would attempt to explore using colour and the letterbox in a cinematic image to see how they function as a whole, and also as individual elements of an image. At this very moment, I’m still struggling to come up with an idea of what I am going to shoot, or how am I going to shoot, but I would like to employ some basic lighting techniques to achieve a properly exposed image, to allow more headroom for colour grading, instead of just adjusting the contrast to the right exposure.

In my last post, I’ve uploaded a short edit of what we shot on Tuesday with the uses of water, reflection, and shadows. Upon editing and doing a bit of grading, I’ve had the chance to watch those shots over and over again, and reflect on what could have been done differently or what turned out better than expected.

Firstly, the reflection shot of the gentleman talking and smoking. The idea came from a fellow group mate, and she thought it would have been cool to see his smoke appear on the reflection of the surface of the water. However, I was worried that the reflection might not turn out as clear and crisp, let alone the smoke coming out from the gentleman’s mouth from smoking the cigarette. Furthermore, getting the right exposure for the shot was rather tricky as you wanted the ground to be correctly exposed, as well as the reflection on the water. What I would have done differently though would have talking towards the water instead of at an angle the way it was shot. Obviously, this was done on improvise, and it was not intend at all. So hopefully we could “remake” the whole scene again and playing around with the orientation of the subject’s reflection on the water.

Second, was the shot of the shadow smoking. Unlike the reflection shot off the water, I knew this would turn out great even before bringing it into post. Just the idea of using sunlight to project an image, ie. the shadow, on a wall presents such an artistic feel to the sequence. Although this was not part of a narrative exercise, and the shot has no relations to the other shots in the video, I felt it was a significant one in the edit. What I think this shot would function as really well, would be a crime or even horror shot, where the “murderer” or “ghost” is not revealed but you could somewhat see a figure to represent it. How I would direct this would to have my subject smoking while being on the phone, and we could hear her voice, but not see her fully, and only her shadow. And that’s when the murderer or ghost might attack. And because it only shows the shadow of my subject, the murderer or ghost would not have been revealed.

The third and last shot, that I thought worked really well, would be the shot of the little “dance” in the water. Although it turned out really beautiful as a stand alone shot. I found it a challenge to fit such a sequence into a narrative script or storyboard, unless if it was a musical or a music video. I decided to intercut the whole dance with some point-of-view shots for extra texture and to give the viewer a feel of being mobile instead static. The feel of making the audience getting involved, is, I believe, crucial in bringing out feelings or emotions in a particular film.

After going through this exercise, I realised the need for colour grading, especially for cameras that are build for video, ie. Sony EX3. Although the white balance have been set before our shoot, the colours tend to be dull straight out of the camera, and there seem to be a “grey” hue over everything. I understand that this is done, as it would be easier to bring out certain colours during the stages of colour grading. Also, I was setting the contrast of the different shots, and that alone brought out so much colour, hence, this “dull-grey-ish” looking footage straight out of the camera look is really just a blank canvas for colourists to have more headroom to balance, grade, and/or correct during post.

The letterbox was used back in the days to “convert” (and I use this word quite loosely) from widescreen format to 4:3 in order for the programme to be broadcasted and be presented on CRT television sets.

Before the use of the letterbox, filmmakers used this technique called “pan and scan” to “convert” their feature films, that were shot in a widescreen format, to a “TV friendly” aspect ratio which is most often, 4:3. This however, crops the frame by a fair bit and in a very selective fashion, shows what is most important in the frame. (Ie. the action that is taking place in the frame.) This method of crop frames means a lot of negative space and information have to be left out. Viewers do not get the whole picture, quite literally, and might not experience the full effect of the filmmaker’s use of spatial manipulation, camera movement, and the mise-en-scene.

These days, the letterbox is just added on to achieve a cinematic look more often then not. Photographers use it on their stills to give their work the effect like it’s been taken a screen grab off a feature film. However, not many people understand the uses of it these days and the struggles past filmmakers had to go through to convert their widescreen format films to something that can be shown on TV.

After attempting to edit and apply a basic colour grade on the footage we shot on Tuesday, here is the outcome after having gone through post.

I’ve included a before and after video with and without the letterbox and colour grade, to see the effects.

The first half of the week, we’ve been tasked to head out to shoot some ideas that we might have prepared over the weekend. Personally, I planned to shoot an action sequence such as a chase scene or a fight scene between two strong male. However, due to a twist of fate and how the universe and stars were aligned, I was grouped together with 3 other girls from the class. No offence or disrespect to the girls, we did a wonderful job shooting what we set out to do for the day, just that I could not realise my experiment or idea, not for this exercise at least. This grouping was just for this exercise and it was done in a random manner, and I don’t have any objections to it, I just thought how serendipity could play in this exercise.

Having the weather to pour just right before class started, the streets were wet and the skies were still gloomy by the time we were out shooting. We thought of taking this opportunity to capture movement of water and reflections off the puddles of water that we don’t normally see during dry weather. This shimmery effect on the grounds, trees, leaves, gave an extra challenge to get the right exposure, adding that with the gloomy weather, I can see what the camera operator was having a hard time adjusting the exposure. I assumed the role of the sound man, and I set off to record water dripping, footsteps on a wet ground, rushing water, and anything that I could think of that could relate to rain, or water.

Throughout this whole exercise, I was thinking to myself how am I going to compose a shot that could have a letterbox applied to it and something that looks cinematic. As we were shooting some footsteps walking down a flight of stairs, our director thought it would be a good idea to make use of the sun, while it was peering through the rain clouds. We did a quick roll of the sound and camera of our talent smoking, but instead of shooting her, I thought it’d be interesting to use her shadow that was made by the strong sun. That’s what I thought I might have something to experiment with in post. Applying a 2.35 : 1 letterbox, grading it, and applying some sounds that was recorded with it, and see how does that go.

At this point, we were contended with the shots we have taken, and we decided to just shoot whatever we can with the remaining amount of time… We thought nothing bad could come out of this, as long as we keep shooting something for us to work on in post. Of course, there must be some sort of direction and no just random rolling of the camera.

The group came across this water feature on campus and out talent did a little dance with her legs in the water. Again, ideas ran through my head thinking how am I going to make this shot cinematic under the given circumstances. And I thought the shot should be composed from the ground to focus on our talent’s legs with the running water flowing right at the camera.

At the end of the day, we transferred the footage and audio and went our own ways. I, personally, was looking forward to editing and seeing how the shots would turn out after having gone through some processing. Will update when I’m done with editing and grading in post.

On the second workshop for the week, we were given a little “writing exercise” by Paul. For the first time since week #1, we actually stayed put in one classroom for the entire duration of the workshop, which is very rare, as most of the time we would head out for a shoot or to the edit suites, or to record sounds around the campus.

During this exercise we were given a blank piece of A3 paper and some texters to write some of our ideas. Most of us, if not all, are not born writers and we might find it hard to get started on writing something for a short film or maybe even just a single scene. Hence, we were given sort-of-like-a crash course to writing, which I found really unique. As Paul said for himself, it is not one of the courses where we will walk out of the room feeling like we’ve just written a world-class novel or script, but just a simple exercise to get the juices flowing. And I thought it was really just that, getting the right juices flowing and starting on something. Even if it’s just a little spark, it could ignite to an explosion of ideas.

Over the timespan of 2 hours, my brain was bombarded with ideas and topics I wanted to explore for our final assessment in Week #12. One of which may sound like a rip off from Paul, as he did mention about trying out the use of action cameras in a sequence. And I have had place an order for a Chinese made action camera (too poor for an original GoPro), and I feel like there’s a whole big cloud of experimentation and exploration right there, on the uses of an action camera, right from the basics of how to use it, when to use it, how to mount it, where should  you mount it, what should you shoot with it, and a whole lot more.

Another idea would be the use of lighting for different scenes, Paul touched on off side and on side lighting on a particular documentary he showed a segment in class. Lighting is something I feel I have never really gotten the chance to explore or get a good basic foundation on the functions of lighting. Hence, I thought maybe this would be a good opportunity to shed some light on that technical issue I have with myself?

One more, and I think this might be a winner, I can’t entirely remember when or what sparked this idea, however, I got into thinking what makes a particular shot cinematic, and the first thing that came to my mind was the letterbox. These days, the letterbox has been used widely by filmmakers to give a cinematic look, and they are not the only ones using this visual tool to achieve the cinematic feel. Music videos are employing the letterbox too, which I believe are aiming to achieve the same outcome of the cinematic look. Personally, I have very little knowledge on the letterbox and how it came about, so I believe I have substantial amount to research and experiment on. The history of letterbox-ing a shot, the science that gives us that cinematic feel, the uses of the various letterbox, as I do know it comes in different sizes, and the standard being 2.35:1. So, I would say I’m quite excited on gathering these knowledge by the end of this semester, hopefully.

Over the course of last summer’s vacation, I’ve gotten into taking time lapse videos from still images. The result may turn out to be really rewarding, or sometimes unnerving, depending on how you’ve set up the camera, and it’s setting.

I personally do not own a fish-eye lens, which some people might feel that it’s an essential if you’re going to take time lapse shots. And while I was back home in Singapore, I did manage to borrow one while I was shooting a time lapse of the stars moving across the sky. I rotated around several venues, some turned out stunning images, and others, not so. I complied a few of my favourite time lapses into a sequences and exported it from Premiere, and this is the result.

ps. You have to watch in HD to really see the stars move.

Coming back to Melbourne, I thought I wouldn’t have the time to do such things, especially well into the night and early morning with the new semester kicking in, but I could not curb my urge to go out and shoot random stuff. On a side note, I consider myself to be quite a photography enthusiast, but no where near being a professional or aspires to be one. Moving on, in the second week of the semester, I decided to head out to the streets of Melbourne, to search and seek anything that might catch my eye or attention. I used to take long walks around the city and shoot at various things, subjects, spaces, anything that I could think of, however this time I was pretty fixed on a location, and that was Princes Bridge, linking St Kilda Road to Swanston Street going over the Yarra River. I had no intention of taking a time lapse at that very moment, as I was more interested in doing stills, and trying out a new “technique?” that I’ve just learned from the internet on making a cinemagraph.

However, while I was shooting various stills, I got the feeling it’s an opportunity that I shouldn’t miss, and given the fact that I’ve not tried shooting a time lapse in Melbourne before, and why not try it for once. And here’s the outcome.

Music used was purchased from iTunes, written by Moog of MightyCarMods.

These time lapses are just the ones that I thought are pretty decent, and I dare say that I am happy with, however there are still quite a number that I believe still needs some work to improve on, or maybe even a re-shoot (if I’m lucky). There is so much that goes into making a brilliant time lapse, and the ones that I’ve seen on YouTube or the internet makes me wonder how much does one have to invest into making just a short 30-60 seconds video. Obviously you have to invest a lot of time into it as well, while I was shooting this time lapses, I was on my phone calculating the duration my camera has to be shooting in order to achieve the desired duration of the final time lapse playing back at 24fps, also considering the amount of storage I have left in my camera’s SD card. Not to mention, the exposure, while shooting over an hour or so, the lighting of the sun is bound to change with cloud cover and the Earth’s movement and all the science behind it, it’s hard to maintain a good exposure on the camera, and I know there are methods of getting a consistent exposure by doing it in post, but overall, you would still want a decent level of raw images to work with.

A perfect example of exposure changing over time would be this week, when a group of friends and I decided to head out to Westgate Park to catch the pink lake and see what’s all the big hoo haa about. I left the camera to shoot over a shorter period of time, as compared to the other time lapses I’ve shared in this post as my friends and I were getting a little too hot from the heat and the sun, but I thought it’s a good example to show how often the light changes just over the span of 20 minutes.

Music from Free Music Archieve, under the Creative Commons.

Written and performed by Derek Clegg, Sit Stand.

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Derek_Clegg/DC4t/Derek_Clegg_-_DC4t_-_10_Sit_Stand

These examples are just what I have been messing around with lately, it does occupy a lot of time, both during the shoot and in post. However, I am still not entirely sure if I would like to take this topic up as an investigation for my final assignment, but it’s definitely a developing idea. Moreover, I am not too sure how this would sit in the realms of filmmaking, or is it considered more towards photography?

For the first workshop of the week, we were sent down to the dungeons of building 9 (the edit suites), work on the footages we shot in week #2, I blogged about how we went in the post, http://www.mediafactory.org.au/wen-sem-chin/2017/03/09/true-to-form-sounds-like-teen-spirit-week-2-2/. And today, we started off editing some of the footages, and not forgetting, mixing in some of the sounds we recorded earlier last week too.

Paul gave us a very in depth and detailed lecture on file management and all the necessary routines (can’t think of a better word), that everyone should practice before they even come close to cutting up and editing raw footages. It was a good thing that Paul brought this up during lecture, and I can’t stress how important it is to manage our files properly, neatly, organised-ly, and full blown OC(Deeee), as it is that much easier to keep track of things when we’re down the road of actual editing. However, I don’t think a single lecture would cultivate this habit into individuals, as it is a thing that is really hard to understand, unless we are in the middle of a editing session, or we have done this “X” number of times until it becomes second nature. Just like athletes developing muscle memory through drills and practice, I believe this is one of the things where we have to really go through it step by step to develop the same “muscle memory” except maybe not on a physical level.

One thing new that I’ve learned from today’s lecture was that you could sync sound on Premiere without having to do it the old school way with the slate, you could “Merge Cells” and it was automatically recognise the waveforms from the onboard camera microphone and from the microphone we used to record into the Zoom F4, and Premiere would create a new “clip” with the 2 sounds synced, and you can have a mixed of both. I thought that was really neat, as it would have saved a lot of time syncing sound, however (call me old), but I still would sync sound with a slate or a clap, as that is an idiot proof way and sometimes the computer might stuff things up without yourself knowing, and midway through an edit you realised your audio is not synced with the visual or you might have synced the wrong audio track at the very beginning.

We got split into our various groups that we worked with last week and started editing on the footage we shot previously. I decided to explore the effects of using the sounds we recorded earlier in week #2 and laying it over the visuals we shot later in the week.  As discussed in my earlier post, I decided to juxtapose the vision of walking barefoot on metal steps with the sound of walking with rubber soled shoes. I manually synced the sound to the steps one by one, and the effect was quite intriguing. It plays with my mind as if the subject’s feet were made of something hard or the stairs were made of a different material instead of metal. It was an interesting exercise. The next scene was the subject walking on a carpeted corridor barefooted as well. And I decided to lay in the sounds of water running and my buddy stepping on a bunch of leaves. This made the scene looked and sounded like as if the carpet was wet, and the footsteps on leaves gave a very soft timbre instead of the usual hard clocky sound you get when you’re wearing hard sole shoes on concrete.

This exercise and experiment made me realise how much we concentrate and focus on getting the perfect, correct, and the most true sound we can get to represent what happens on the vision, but little do we know that messing around with different sounds could also “bluff” our minds to think not everything in the vision is what we might seem or expect. Unfortunately, due to the time we spent discussing on shots and how to shoot different ideas, and also some unforeseen circumstances, we were left with little time for the actual shooting, and the entire video added up to only 13 seconds.

For some reason, I felt like editing and nothing gets me more excited than digging up past videos that I’ve shot myself fooling around on the tennis court many years ago, with no intention of ever using the footage, let alone editing it and then uploading to somewhere for people to view. Well, fast forward to now, here I am, cutting it into something a little more with a narrative and some humour. Though it’s just a short, slightly under a minute (instagram friendly), video, I still get a sense of satisfaction upon completing chopping up the video and putting bits together.

Of course, while I was shooting this video, it lasted for a good half an hour or so, as you can tell from the lighting it gets from day to night. Quite obviously there are many, many, many, more attempts of me trying to hit the tennis ball between my legs, but I assume that it would have made viewers bored by the time I reached my 100th attempt. So let’s cut to the chase…

One of last week’s exercise required us to shoot abstract footages that does not necessarily be representational and it could be completely 100% “out-of-this-world” abstract.

The exercise sheet encouraged us to experiment with various tools that goes behind composing a shot. Focal length, depth of field, image size, exposure, and so on, are all used to compose that “perfect” shot to represent your subject matter, and more often than not, when one aspect fails, the entire shot could possibly be ruined.

I decided to go about going through this exercise by doing something mundane, such as preparing dinner. I did not have any ideas in mind on how am I going to shoot the whole process as I do not have as much experience I would like to have being behind the camera. Therefore the shots turned out to be mostly point-of-view shots. However, there was one shot in particular I was pretty pleased with, and that was the shot of me slicing up the lettuce for the salad. For some reason that made me feel like I was right there with the lettuce, but being a safe distance away from the knife. If anyone has been watching the YouTube channel, “Annoying Orange”, we all know there’s no happy ending to that. However, for some reason, having the camera position at the same level as the lettuce gives a different perspective, something we don’t usually see while we’re the ones chopping up vegetables or fruits. I guess camera angles do affect storytelling and the angle of where the character is coming from (pun not intended).

What I thought I could have done better would be having the auto focus turned on instead of living it on manual. It is quite a challenge to do wrecking shots, especially if you have to watch not to burn your food. Also during the “salad dressing” scene, the auto focus would have help grab focus of the ingredients while I was showing what goes into the salad. Other things I thought worth exploring or maybe employing in my next exercise would be the use of lighting. Throughout this whole video, the lighting were just my house lights, which are not the best lights  for filming, also, maybe trying to get a proper white balance, as everything appeared too yellow when I have transferred the raw footage to my computer. I’ve did a little colour correcting on Premiere, but didn’t want to go overboard with it.

Overall, I thought this “Abstract” exercise turned out to be an instructional video on how to make yourself a quick meal from frozen food. As the exercise sheet states,  “As you work, think about the editing process.” And that was definitely what I had in mind majority of the time, coming from an editing background, I tend to worry if I have enough shots, or if I have recorded the right amount of duration, or if I might have missed a step, and matters along those lines. During the course of my internship as an assistant editor, I have witnessed cases where directors realised they might have missed out a shot or realised the whole scene needed some extra footage to elevate it and reveal more of the story it’s trying to tell, hence having to go back out to shoot some more.