Daily Archives: September 5, 2018

Inspiration Reflection – Edgar Wright Transitions

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Edgar Wright Transitions/ Quick Cuts
(Image Below links to Example Video)

One of the first ideas I had when considering the heist aspects of this film was how we were going to pull off the feel of a heist movie, in the short estimated five-minute time limit. My suggestion as to how we were going to do that was to emulate the fast-paced transition/ editing style of Edgar Wright. (Examples in the video linked through the image above) I had this style in mind, as I believe it to be an engaging, fast-paced way to convey movement and a character’s action, through a short amount of time. My concern with time limits being a past experience where a ‘media project film’ I had developed going a whole two minutes overtime, which doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, but in the context of a film can make a vital difference.

Based on the footage, I will attempt to break down the transition style, and what compels it to seem so impactful. From what I can tell, it has a lot to do with the sound design working alongside the cinematography and editing style, the common theme is sharp, loud diegetic sounds coupled with fast transitioning, zooming on still shots for added emphasis. I think what makes this design work so well is how it makes shots that focus on one image ‘pop’ to make an impression on the viewer, even if the action happening in the frame isn’t particularly interesting.

Links to Video

My effort to emulate these types of transitions in practice while making the project, however, was not exactly how I imagined. In a way, the stars didn’t exactly line up to reproduce this type of shot for a variety of reasons, mainly, all I had in mind while actually filming the footage was the close-ups on specific actions. The other aspects of the style, being the sound and zooming, were not really present in the shots I ended up with, but I did consider playing around with adding these effects in Adobe Premiere.

Here I boosted the audio volume on the tracks of the stealing, and also added a pretty amateur ‘zoom transition’ to try and achieve the feel of the shot type. The reason these don’t really work is one, we didn’t get the isolated audio of the stealing, so attempts to boost the sound have a lot of unwanted background noise – and it’s rather a task to recreate the audio heard in the footage without looking artificial, so that aspect was pushed slightly out of focus. It is regrettable that I didn’t get any good zooming shots on this footage either, because the zooms featured in the example above are the best I can do editing-wise, but they would’ve had a lot of troubling focus issues due to the lighting, so the shots we ended up with are probably the best of a situation that was not ideal.

Creative Reflection – Storyboard pt. 3

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What do these other… other shots look like?

Part 3 of the Storyboard Trilogy. So here’s where the storyboarding really fell off track, and by that, I mean stopped existing for a few reasons. The major one being I was really busy with preparing work for a lot of different classes over the break time in which we were supposed to be filming, so somehow I filed the storyboarding as less important and didn’t end up doing any for scene 2 or 4. Another reason for this was trying not to run into the issue I had both times with my storyboarding, which would be my unfamiliarity with the location, as once again I would be drawing up a plan for a space I hadn’t been able to really analyse before, so I knew I would have to just change the framing and positioning once I got there anyway.

What I opted to do instead, however, was once again take photos during the pre-filming preparation time, and cross reference with the scripted events that would happen, and just shoot based on what logically lined up.

This time, I decided against drawing up character placement, as there was no specific framing where I wanted to include anything very visual, just the fact that they were clearly in a different house was more important, in my mind, for this scene – so for that they could really be anywhere in the frame, just as long as this was the basic shot structure. Seeing the final film along with these images has me realise that this structure was actually followed pretty closely, which I’m somehow surprised with.

A reason for that may be that on this shoot I had to leave about forty-five minutes earlier due to a scheduling mix up with my plans on where I would be staying, so some of the scenes (such as the screaming girl and the reverse shot of the table discussion) were up to Joel to frame and shoot, although it is unlikely I would have done the shots very differently to what ended up in the final production.

To wrap up, I’ll quickly go into why I didn’t do any storyboarding for the final beach scene. Basically two reasons again, one, I knew a lot of it would be go-pro shots, so I wouldn’t be in control of the camera – therefore was not required to think too hard about how I would frame the shots, as I wouldn’t be making them anyway. The second reason being the ‘on land’ scenes were pretty much self-explanatory when reading the script, so once again there wouldn’t be that much I had to really consider when all we needed was a two-shot of the characters and a close up on the hands.