Virulence

At the end of the day, I am really proud of our team and the short film we ended up with.

The experience of producing a short film as part of a crew has been an incredibly enlightening, valuable one. From the early stages of tweaking the script and shaping our expectations, to the who-knows-how-many hours spent tweaking the vision and sound, everyone did a great job.

Visuals

Exposure issues and some shaky shots aside, the cinematographer, 1st AC and editor managed to pull off something wonderful. The coverage when initially reviewing it appeared confusing; how is this going to fit together? Will it? Was my shot list nonsense? Was my directing horrible? Seeing it come together in the end however eased my fears in a big way. The aesthetic of the film is consistent, the world feels toxic and the overall decoupage is on point. Had things turned out how I thought they would from the beginning, I definitely think it would be a weaker film.

Sound

Seeing as I was the sole sound editor, I’m not completely happy with my efforts (because I am always nitpicking my own work). It works for the most part, it’s timed well and suits the aesthetic of the short but things like reverb and score could definitely be improved upon. Still, the sound lends itself to the visuals in a big way and for that I am grateful.

Technically, there is much left to be desired. I need to learn to better envelope the sounds I use in order to have them feel more diegetic/go unnoticed. There were moments when I thought just removing high frequencies would make something sound as though it was coming from another room when I they would require a certain amount of reverb. Panning would have helped significantly in this sense, however my workflow was so messy that it made this a difficult feat. That’s a big learning curve actually – workflow. While I could follow everything relatively well, I’m sure anyone else in sound coming in would be completely lost because objectively it makes no sense. I need to get better digitally organised so that not only is this problem fixed, but the fact that I could barely play with inserts and panning in fear of messing up significant portions of the short is reason enough to figure out a better structure to my sound design setup.

Themes

Yep. This is where things fall flat. In all honesty I think I knew the theme would slowly be diluted altogether by the end of it. This is largely due to my script. Revisions were made, lines of dialogue were added, and more abstract approaches to editing and sound were taken in the post-production process but at the end of the day we just found it wouldn’t work. Dialogue for the purpose of reinforcing the themes felt wrong, a voiceover didn’t work as we thought it might and the story/visuals do not push a narrative of a decaying world strongly enough. That being said however, I appreciate the subtly we decided on. While the subtlety basically sees the themes melt away into nothingness, seeing audiences scratching their heads, I think sacrificing this was the right choice. I hate the fact that I didn’t write a more cohesive script that covers the familial and environmental issues we set out to explore. It was a case of ‘script first, themes second’, when if we were to be following the spirit of the studio things would be reversed.

Post-production is definitely the part of the process that I’m most comfortable with. I can be a hermit, take my time and become sleep deprived while tinkering on my lonesome.

– Me, Just now

In all honesty, the editor in collaboration with the rest of the team saved this project in a big way. I was hoping to keep a lot of odds and ends that when cut together lacked the punch or level of understanding I could see them having in the pre-production process. I had very little to do with the editing of the vision which was definitely a benefit. I would sign off on things here and there but for the most part I wanted to distance myself so not only everyone else could tear apart my script/vision if necessary (it was), but so I could start thinking about the sound design aspect of everything as we knew from the beginning that sound was going to play a large part in the final product, like most in the horror/thriller genre.

The colour grading managed to sort out a lot of our issues with the original footage. We slapped a greyscale filter over the top early on as we were struggling with making the grade consistent and it was rightfully torn apart. The project was – from the start – intended to have an emphasis on a yellow/black colour palette as envisioned by the cinematographer. The lighting in the original footage held this to a degree, but it varied wildly and looked pretty rubbish. Our editor spent an insane amount of time trying to achieve a consistent colour palette and in the end it looks pretty great overall. Moreover, the amount of effort that the editor and producer put in to cut down the footage into a more easily-digestible 7 minute feast saved me a lot of trouble. Had they not done so, I would have been incredibly out of my depth when fulfilling my responsibilities in sound design and visual effects.

Sound Design

Having been the only one that had studied sound until this point, I took on the role of sound editor. I would consult with the group by sending updates as I progress through the short, looking for feedback as I went.

Using Pro Tools, I felt comfortable to start with. It was easy to start with – cars arriving, ambient noise. As I got further in, I realised that I might be a little out of my depth this time around. Particularly concerning foley. Over the course of more than a week I painstakingly timed every single shift of clothing etc in order to produce something the group felt worked well. Having spent so long listening to the same thing over and over, I learnt a lot in that time. Tinkering with the sound of footsteps for example, I found that the most ominous noise for Big’s movements were produced a pitched down, slowed bass drum layered with the sound of metal bending and wood breaking. I also rediscovered that importance of room tones and enveloping ambient sounds in order to give the visuals a feeling of space.

Amongst all the fades, EQs and inserts, I tried introducing dialogue and narration. My mistake, however, was starting out developing a sonic world without regard to the dialogue or narration breaking the immersion or pacing. This is part of the reason that the final product has such thin themes and is only related to our socio-political theme tangentially, very weakly. This is something for me to take note of in future projects. Maybe we should just record a reference track next time to make things easier too. Hah.

Virulence’s production phase – for the most part – went about as we all expected, I think. Time-wise, we managed to keep to our schedule pretty closely, which was incredibly helpful as shooting at night we didn’t particularly want to hang around until 2am. The first night of shooting we had all the actors arrive just before sundown, I ran them through their characters’ motivations and some general narrative stuff as our producer handled the housekeeping notes. Lovely.

We started experiencing trouble relatively soon after we began shooting – the lights. Damn. Nobody had thought to map out lighting positions with reference to the shot map, so there was a lot of fumbling with not only light strength, but positioning and direction as well. As a result, things slowed down quite a bit as we attempted to figure out the best/most consistent way to light each shot. Until this point, I had no experience in using any form of lighting equipment so I could provide little to no help to the cinematography department on that front outside of “that looks good”. Thankfully, our editor had some experience and was quite aware of lighting positioning so that mitigated the damage quite a bit. This whole debacle certainly elucidated to me the importance of paying attention to lighting when considering cinematography and decoupage. For example, while we were hoping for some stylistic, aesthetic lighting throughout Virulence, we should have thought of and noted how each light had been set up in each particular room so that we could at least try to have some consistent lighting across both nights of filming.

Further in relation to the lighting dilemmas, there ended up being a lot of issues relating to exposure. Upon reviewing the footage from both nights, it was clear that a lot of the shots that had been taken were done so using an inappropriate ISO or were underlit, resulting in incredibly grainy footage that would likely prove difficult to work with in post-production. Short of reshooting a significant portion of the film at a later date, we opted to work with what we had and change the structure in post-production as that process would take a significant amount of time – time we didn’t have. Similarly, issues with focus popped up from time to time that brought things to a standstill; unfortunate, for sure, but we managed to turn some of these focus issues into a technique of sorts. Not all bad.

It also became clear that in developing the cinematographic style of the film, we did not think about stabilisation or the difficulty of doing tracking shots without some form of rigging. On the morning of shooting, I scouted for some kind of action handle for the camera or a relatively cheap gimble to help the cinematographer and 1st AC pull of the more difficult tracking shots easily. I found the IT hire doesn’t have much in the way of handles or rigs for DSLRs and the stores that I went to looking for something of the sort had nothing for us unfortunately. I felt a little bad for not having thought ahead in this sense as anything I could do to assist the camera department was at the forefront of my mind until this point; shot lists being the main example.

I found that taking charge of an entire crew was about as difficult as I expected. While not the role of a director – moreso an AD – I tried my best to make sure everyone knew what I was after regarding their respective department. The actors were all very accommodating which made things a lot less stressful, which was nice, however upon catching up with one of our actors after filming I asked how I could improve and the feedback was “you can afford to be more strict”. Reflecting back on the production process, I see what they meant. In the future I need to worry less about being stern and more about making sure things are even clearer and smoother.

I got a lot out of the production of Virulence. A lot of lessons were learnt on both a technical and personal level that I will undoubtedly be taking into future projects, regardless of my role. That being said, I feel as though next time I would like to take on a role with less responsibility/expectation.

The pre-production phase of Virulence was certainly the most influential time for the development of our short.  While I had written the script, I had done so with a far weaker socio-political theme weaved throughout it; this is largely due to my affinity for story and tone over themes and commentary. Workshopping this element of the short film in class with the group lead to a far more apparent, cohesive socio-political narrative world overall. That being said, the themes were certainly diluted throughout the rest of the process (but we’ll get to that later).

I was heavily involved in the technical pre-production processes that I believed would allow us to produce the short with minimal errors in an efficient manner. After having our proof of concept (a total of ~15 shots) take 5+ hours to shoot, I thought it best to block out all the action personally at my house (the shooting location) so that I could devise shot maps and lists so that we would not be messing around between shots deciding how best to cover each action. The process took a couple days as I figured out what information was necessary to show, what was practically possible and efficient to shoot, and the most efficient order in which to shoot everything so that if possible we wouldn’t have all actors hanging around if they were not required for hours at a time. I made sure to be clear enough in my descriptions of the actions and shot types in the shot list that the camera department could move from shot to shot quickly: knowing where they were next to set up, what action they needed to cover and a general outline of how I think a shot should look. I iterated to the camera ops that the shot list was really just a guide outside of a few key shots that I could see working well in the edit, so that they had freedom while shooting.

Prop creation and set design were things I paid a little bit of attention to but could certainly have worked harder to improve. I was the only one interested in making fungus (fair enough, really) and organising the masks, but they were relatively easy tasks once I figured out some of the practicalities. The fungus was the most difficult part, because most of the materials I sourced looked too fake. I opted for actual flat mushrooms from Woolworths propped up by malleable electrical wire. I think they look okay for what they are, really.

The main lessons that I learnt from the pre-production process overall were really to do with collaboration and communication (funny that). In “leading” a project, I often found it difficult to express my ideas in a manner that would accurately represent my “vision” (I’ve also found I don’t like that word very much hah), which in turn made it difficult to explain why certain suggestions could potentially cause issues in the final edit – things such as decoupage and tonality in particular. So in that sense, I certainly need to work on refining my ability to convey ideas in a comprehensible manner so that everyone is on the same page and feels heard. At the same time, I also need to work on my leadership skills to be more decisive and authoritative. There were a few moments where people were looking to me for my ‘ok’ on things and for me to delegate tasks when I generally don’t feel comfortable telling people what to do (granted that is the role of a director to a degree), and would rather other people take charge of an idea or task.

I thoroughly enjoyed the pre-production phase regardless, as figuring out logistics and practical solutions on a zero-budget project felt more like problem-solving than creative processes which was a nice change of pace.

Shot Order

Virulence_ Shot List

 

Pitching a film is far more nuanced than I first thought. I was aware of the corporate/business side to an extent and the need to condense everything into a easily-digestible package, but the emphasis on this was certainly something I need to better address in the future.

REVISED SCRIPT

Virulence

Obviously not our best work; I could attribute this to time constraints but really it was largely a lack of effort. Lighting is off and the angle is too high, not to mention the depth of field has hardly been manipulated. Given more time – and more concern on my part for location/lighting – we likely could have produced something more accurate. I think I’m just far too focused on Assignment 3 in all honesty; I’ve been trying to constantly adapt and change the script in my head, account for location restrictions, work the themes we wish to explore into the script better.

After a mysterious airborne fungus has decimated the population, a reclusive botanist searches for her brother when he is abducted by a commune that see the plague’s effects as an evolutionary gift.

This exercise proved incredibly…invigorating? I feel that focusing more on world-building and script-writing rather than shooting/editing has finally encouraged me to better dedicate myself to our work. Well, that and the fact that I have no assessments in other subjects for a month; I have the time to be productive.

I find the development of a logline or synopsis to be helpful in creating a slightly more inspired (?) story and world. Upon spitballing ideas onto paper, tying together different adjectives and protagonist/antagonist types, I became more aware of what might and might not work. To start, I began with the kind of world that would represent the sociopolitical themes I wish to represent and the metaphors/symbolism that could potentially be employed. For the above script, I aimed for a mix of sci-fi and horror elements, however I aim for the tone to be more aligned with horror (It Comes At Night being one point of inspiration). The idea of a completely ravaged dystopia is not currently appealing to me, so the middle-ground of ‘mid-collapse’ – on the precipice of nature consuming humanity – was a good place to be.

The tips listed in the Raindance article certainly assisted me in developing a more engaging logline (at least I hope it’s engaging) as it helped my narrow its scope. I think that my main problem when it comes to any kind of media production be it script writing, world-building, production design or cinematography is my apparent inability to perceive certain constraints or limitations. I’ll often include too many characters, a world too obscure or grand to successfully produce with the equipment/spaces available to me or simply include too many b-lines or subplots that would see the script be a feature-length film.

I really do hope to hones these skills and reign myself in somewhat so that I can get involved in a writer’s room – or anywhere in film production for that matter. I hope that the logline I wrote and the subsequent script are small in scope enough while not too minimal so that I actually have the chance to produce it. Moreover, I feel like I need to really start seeking out external opportunities for media production in order to meet similarly ambitious people that are interested in producing horror shorts. I might need to sacrifice study/grades/work/money in order to do so but really, why not?

 

So.

The problems with this exercise are owed primarily to our team being a little out of our depth and unprepared/unorganised. In deciding to produce a film based recorded off of laptops over Skype we ignored the number one issue in doing so: delay. To produce this, ahem, ‘film’, there are 4 video tracks and 3 audio tracks that were recorded for various purposes – syncing these accurately against one another was an absolute nightmare and if we were to produce the work again, I would certainly opt to do so by not actually filming off of the laptops during a real Skype call.

Instead, the best plan of attack would have been to record off our phones (better audio and video in one) and simply add a Skype overlay to the footage, muddy the video quality a little bit and – shazam – movie magic. I truly do think the medium has some interesting possibilities (see Unfriended and Missing), however in order to make something worthwhile there needs to be significant pre-production involved so that things can run smoothly and we do not end up spending ~ 1 – 2 hours messing around with software (or a significant amount of time simply syncing two separate audio tracks to two separate video tracks and then syncing those two video tracks together). In the end, I did not end up editing the second half of the video simply due to the finicky nature of the first half. The ambiguity of the ending in my version is also something that I prefer; explaining the actual goings-on in horror can often take away from the scares (granted, this was neither scary or ominous).

I truly look forward to being able to commit to painstakingly analysing every element of a film we produce (likely the case in assignment 2 and 3), because the rush to film and edit these short exercises has thus far been just that – a rush. This semester has been quite front-loaded with assignments, so the next 4 weeks should give me an opportunity to focus more on these exercises – I look forward to it.

Technically – and aside from the syncing issues/video quality – there are issues with exposure, pacing and audio consistency. Noise reduction could have been done quite easily in Audition/Pro Tools however by the time I had synced the two audio tracks the task of reducing noise and normalising peaks etc would have been too time consuming. From a screenwriting perspective, I found value insofar that we had to adapt the script in order to have both of our performances feel as natural as possible. This has made it quite clear as to how and why screenwriters at times have a specific actor in mind for the character; naturalism can quite easily make or break a film, and in the case of horror this naturalism is crucial. Unless you are producing an incredibly campy horror film, that is.

I always find getting back into the swing of things takes a few weeks, and this week has proved no exception. The above video is certainly not anyone’s best work, however more disappointing than the lack of effort or foresight on my part is the fact that I know we are all capable of far better. As such, I feel we should be treating these exercises as the opportunities they are; yes, we may not have the locations or resources available to us on many an occasion, but that does not mean we can strive for proper framing, continuity and concern for the edit.

In cutting together this monstrosity, I did find value however. That is, it has worked to remind me of what I learnt last year in a lot of ways.

First, we have a lot of issues with continuity and eyelines. This is pretty clear and not something I feel warrants further analysis because I know what must be done during production (and pre-production) in order to combat/fix these problems. In terms of technical elements such as exposure, it’s not as much of a concern considering the fact we were shooting on our phones.

I do however think we could have focused more on acquiring thoughtful coverage. The difficulty in editing Dr. B. Rain’s Miserable Date was due in part to our crew not doing multiple takes of lines, and not allowing for breaks between lines of dialogue – meaning that cutting together footage from different shot locations and having the tone of the conversation not vary wildly was a feat. The conversation when filmed primarily on Dr B. Rain was far snappier and the pair were almost cutting the end of each other’s sentences off, while the footage of Emily’s mid-shot was far slower-paced. The dialogue sounds messy at times because I was aiming to have it feel as though the conversation was happening in real-time rather than in two different takes.

Not only this, but the added element of including voice-overs (in the form of thoughts) proved to be quite cumbersome. It might be an idea in future to record the voice-overs first, so that the actors can then listen to the recordings and act/react appropriately in sync so that their gestures do not seem as unnatural. I wonder if that’s how it is done in professional settings.

I guess that ultimately I used this exercise as a way to challenge myself in post-production; take very, very disorganised material and try to tidy it up as much as possible. Obviously there are a lot of technical errors with it, but the process of adapting a script to screen is always an interesting one. Perhaps if and when we are producing something from a script that I wrote I will feel more comfortable voicing my opinions/concerns about how to do things.

Evidence of an Other

Having watched the entirety of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, I have gained a deeper appreciation for the form his film takes – particularly after having made my own sketch in the same vein.

Initially I had to make a decision as to whether I would take my sketch in a more direct, literal direction (similar to a storyboard), or an abstract one. At first, I felt it best to match with my narration abstract imagery that best accented certain elements and themes of the dialogue. This involved a lot of images that – when seated side-by-side – did not have a strong decoupage; abstract art lined either side by high-res photographs of people was not particularly cohesive and was, in fact, distracting. Where La Jetée had a clear narrative with its literal, storyboard-like approach to images, my initial sketch proved to be more of an audiobook complimented by visual emphases.

I consequently revised my sketch to adopt a more literal style. Lacking the props and locations appropriate for the story and world I had developed, I resorted to sourcing images that give the viewer a relatively clear idea of what would be depicted on-screen were the sketch a proper film. This also required a bit of rearranging of the script and story elements as it was difficult to procure images that accurately represented what I wished it to. The resulting video is frankly a bit of a mess. Had I the time and resources to photograph the scenes as I had envisioned them, the video would have come out far less disjointed than it is. The addition of ambient sound for sections of the video definitely combats this disjointedness to a degree, as the chosen soundscapes add a bit of texture and context to the images. Sadly, they are not enough to make the video a genuinely engaging one.

In the end, this exercise proved to be incredibly valuable in highlighting the ways in which certain elements of a story can be accented or emphasised by a specific image or string of images. It also helped me in understanding how poor visuals can be held up by a strong story, while a poor story or world can not hold interest solely off evocative visuals. Imagery in film is meant to enhance a story, not act as a replacement for one. My sketch – while missing the mark in most areas – demonstrates this idea vividly.