In what ways do you hope your final work (whether individual or group produced) engages its audience and communicated a key concern of the studio?

In terms of the final short film that my group produced, I hope that it gets the audience thinking about the positive effects that VR/XR could have on the world, rather that the negative effects which are typically the ones focused on when the media discusses them. This was a conscious decision from the start for my two trailers as well, but I feel the short film shows these potential benefits best. This kind of technology is improving very quickly at an exponential rate as I saw from the many different advanced programs and technologies we explored throughout the semester, and so in my trailers and then in the group short film, I felt the freedom to choose topics that were quite ‘out there’ in terms of realism in the current age, but which may become possible in a relatively short amount of time (with the exception of my time travel device). The idea of an AI ‘clone’ that takes in your current personality and life choices then filters them through an ‘ideal scenario’ lens is something that potentially isn’t that far off, however its actual effectiveness would be another thing. Again though, we wanted to make sure the technology was presented in a positive light and that any negativity was through the misuse of the technology. We initially planned to have the character over-using the pills for a negative result, but instead settled on him simply running out, mainly because we did not have enough time in the 7 minutes allotted to show this in enough detail, instead using a montage instead to show the clone helping Peter to improve his life as he gradually runs out of the pills.

Imagine you are going to keep working on that media piece (e.g. to screen it somewhere else like a festival, or develop it into a different kind of work, and so on) – what would be the core things you want to improve and extend and why?

I think I would explore the idea of the clone becoming unethical when double dosing the pills, and I would also have additional scenes where Peter attempts to locate another supply of the pills once he runs out. I was very happy with how the split screen shots turned out but I would also utilize green screen shots as well, for more variety in the Peter and clone shots, allowing hand held shots or panning shots, rather than just completely still tripod shots, as well as having Peter and his clone able to pass each other within the same shot, to appear to be interacting with the same object, or for a more exciting visual element when the clone appears, bursting out from within Peter with glow and motion blur effects, rather than just appearing off-screen, which we felt was the most realistic way of doing things in the time we had for shooting and editing. We avoided this in the interest of keeping the shots as realistic looking as possible, but with more time and/or budget I’m confident we could get green screen shots looking just as good as the stable tripod shots. I would also further develop Peter’s struggling love life, perhaps showing him on a date with a girl with the clone giving him advice, which I feel would be a great scene comedically, with Peter responding directly to the clone’s advice, and then cutting to a wide shot where the clone isn’t visible and the girl is looking perplexed at Peter essentially talking to no-one. Again we avoided developing this due to time constraints and to minimise the amount of characters/actors required.

• You will present all that you’ve worked on since Week 8 – your pre-production, experiments, images, clips, scenes, tests 
• This could include the draft edits, sound mixes and colour grades – and of course, the reflection associated with it
• More scene deconstructions and analysis most welcome.

All above will need to be reflected upon and contextualised considering the studio prompt, brief and aims

• At least 300 words of the 800 words must be on Collaboration (over the whole semester).  Working individually is just as valid a thing to write about as group work. Appraise how you went with it this semester – its pitfalls, upsides (discuss group work done during weekly activities). 

In the above image we are preparing for the scene where Peter first interacts with his clone. We shot the scene twice, with myself sitting in and saying the alternate lines, to be replaced later when we edited them together and overlayed the clone over the footage of me by putting a feathered opacity mask around the clone, which due to lighting changing on the day, gave the clone an ‘aura’. We considered colour grading to match the footage so that there would be no noticable difference, but eventually decided this worked from a story point of view as the clone is ‘hyper-real’, so left it as is.

The location of the above scene, as well as the ones where Peter steals back his bike suffered from a high level of background noise due to trains and cars in the background, which we combated by a combination of re-recording wild lines, which we then added convolution reverb to, as well as denoise and vocal enhancer plugins to minimise the traffic noise and bring out the dialogue.

The above shot of Peter riding the bike down the road was achieved by me driving the car and Jen sitting in the back with the tailgate open, the result of which we were all very happy with, using it a few times through the film, and showing it in all its glory for the end credits scene. We felt it was the most filmic shot we got and so wanted to utilise it as much as we could. In hindsight I would have liked to get more of these shots in different locations to use.

We planned to do a shot of the clone jumping out of Peter for the grand entrance when we first see the clone, but for shooting and editing simplicity we omitted this. Additionally the reveal of the clone, initially speaking to Peter off camera we felt was more engaging than a dramatic special effects driven entrance, which would have only served to be visually engaging rather than driving the story.

Above is a screenshot from Ableton of some of the original score I recorded for the film. I wanted a kind of meandering aimless score for the intro, reflecting Peter’s life at the start and to a lesser extent the end of the film, into an intense fast paced score for the scene where he is running late for the medical centre, and the end where he is debating whether to stay at the medical centre, and also a very happy-go-lucky upbeat score for the montage where the clone is helping Peter to improve his life.

Jen and Ryan added several sound FX to the film, such as typing sound effects, the bike lock, the bleeping for censoring the swear word in the end of the narration, and most importantly in my opinion the tape stop sound and whirring noise when the clone ‘paused’ the film and would speak directly to the audience, which we were inspired by The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) to include.

The colour grading I feel was key in giving the short film a professional ‘filmic’ look, and created cohesion between scenes, especially ones that were shot on a sunny day vs a cloudy one, and allowed us to reduce the stark difference between them somewhat. It also allowed us to visually illustrate the bleakness of Peter’s life before the clone, and the happiness he is feeling once the clone begins to help him, particularly in the montage sequence.

Collaboration

In terms of collaboration, our initial pre-production consisted initially of me and Angus writing somewhat of a screenplay, not quite a full script, but more an outline of the action within each scene as well as any accompanying dialogue. Writing together was far better than writing alone and being able to bounce ideas off each other was extremely beneficial. Through discussion between us we were able to work out the rest without the need for a full script. We felt this was the best way to conceptualise the film in greater detail, beyond our initial discussions with Jen and Ryan regarding ideas of perfectionism, a utopian life/existence as well as Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

It is possible that storyboarding further would have prevented a couple of the errors we made, such as missing a line or two of dialogue while shooting, however it turned out to be a happy accident, as the missed lines of dialogue necessitated having the clone narrate the film, which I felt was highly effective in terms of engaging the audience as well as adding more comedy to the film. This narration was not a part of the film until quite late in the editing process but after discussing it together we felt it would really tie the narrative together in addition to the other benefits. This is an example of how the group work really elevated the final product.

By working together particularly on the shooting, I feel the shots we got were far better than if any one of us was doing it alone. In the editing process, it was great getting a few sets of eyes on the project, reducing ‘edit fatigue’ and getting perspectives that I never would have on my own, allowing us to be more ruthless with editing, and being able to divide up responsibilities, with Jen and Ryan mainly focusing on audio editing, and me and Angus focusing on the assembly of clips and precise clip editing. I can sometimes find it hard to relinquish control over a project, as it becomes my ‘baby’ but my group for the short film really gelled well and were able to fluidly play our roles in the group without stepping on each other’s toes.

In terms of in-class collaboration, I was somewhat disappointed with the lack of input by a lot of other class members, with only a select few consistently contributing. Having said that I still enjoyed and benefitted from the discussions and debates that did occur with the people that did contribute, and found it useful not only in the group short film, but also in discussing my teaser trailer and trailer assignments as well.

Write one reflection on, or response to, the content of the Presentation in Week 9 by student work other than your own 

I thought the strengths of Cem’s presentation of his film idea was that it had the potential to be quite easy to shoot the raw live action footage for, due to only having one actor and one location, but I did wonder whether the film would be engaging without any other visible characters within such a confined location, with only disembodied voices accompanying the character, with minimal visual action from the actor within the kebab van. The story to me seemed a little bit vague, and the genre of the film as well seemed somewhat vague, but perhaps this ambiguity was the point. The story where the first part is a drug-induced dream/hallucination before the Physicist walks into the light was also very open ended, and reminiscent of the ‘it was all a dream’ trope that generally would want to be avoided, but the ‘real world’ second half very serious subject matter relating to the car accident and the Physicist’s partners death could become even more engaging if it does double down on the realism and specificity of the Physicist’s situation, when starkly compared to the drug-induced ambiguous fantasy first half.

The CG elements did sound very interesting, but I did also wonder how effectively these could be done without breaking immersion for the audience, as they seemed very high-concept ideas such as dinosaurs with tentacles in a pre-historic jungle and outer space along with various other locations, which could be very difficult to do realistically, especially in such serious subject matter. I believe lower end CG elements are more forgivable in a comedic setting, such as in a film like Mars Attacks! (1996) but if the Star Wars prequels suffered from similarly unrealistic CG elements then the immersion would be broken and the viewer would disengage far more easily. Therefore if the green screen elements and associated sci-fi locations are done very well to the point of photo-realism then it could be very visually effective, helping to ‘sell’ the story as well, but a huge amount of time would need to be devoted to this, which as a one-man show could be difficult, although Cem appears to have more of a background in this type of thing than myself, so it may be easier to achieve than I expect.

Similarly, relying on just one visible actor (as well as the off screen dark force character) may be asking a lot of said actor, with the potential for the film to become visually boring and the audience to not feel empathetic about the character, or that they are believable, but again if the actor can pull it off then it could be very engaging. Using Unreal Engine and Blender for the CG elements/backgrounds could be effective, but I feel it could also be jarring when overlayed with the live action footage as although it does look fairly realistic, personally I don’t think it is at the truly ’real’ level yet based on what I’ve observed. Despite these concerns, I do feel the film has the potential to be very good and emotionally effective, if these potential pitfalls are avoided.