Drama Presentation Reflections

Today has brought grave disappointments in our drama presentation. As a result of the late stage at which we have had to shoot the project, brought on by a lack of motivation from most group members during pre-production to get shooting, and a series of late shows and lie-ins throughout by those crew, I went without any sleep last night in order to go back over the greenscreen effects as planned, and to tweak the cuts to improve the pacing of the film. I have been working remotely with the editor to do this, using dropbox to exchange files. This is due to a particularly tough funeral I attended yesterday, back in Leicestershire.

Once sound recordings had been edited individually, the sound mixing and placement through the video took place late. Though, having heard the full results, a fantastic job was done on the sound design and all of the recordings were clear and inventive, this last-minute rush has caused a disastrous issue. As they were initially working with the rough cut, the sounds were timed to fit with this. I later sent over my changed version in a FCP document via dropbox, although as neither the producer, sound designer or sound recordist informed me, they were unable to access it. As soon afterwards they could no longer use the edit suite as it became late at night, the plan was for them to make the changes from 9am this morning.

What in fact happened was that they had to finish the edits onto the rough cut, and though I arrived back as early as my off-peak train ticket would allow, they did not have time to readjust the mix to fit in with the latest (and much improved) cut. Another factor causing this problem was that they worked with an exported video of the rough cut, rather than sending the sequence from Final Cut Pro. The files were distributed across various computers, making an alternative impossible.

Thus, the efforts I endured throughout the night, and much of the work I have put in throughout two weeks of early mornings and very late nights to the point of exhaustion and copious amounts of stress, has been made irrelevant. In all honesty I feel despondent, and incredibly frustrated and let down. I feel cheated out of a better piece of work by a willingness by others to complete work at the very last minute, and annoyed by the many instances of late appearances, no-shows and distractible attitudes occurring during shooting of the film.

In reflection concerning the post-production process, in future perhaps a greater emphasis on data control and backup is needed, and I will certainly be maintaining my own copies of every file in order to prevent these problems occurring again.

The problems have stretched further than the technical aspects of the film; the late confirmation of our script has led to a late casting process, which coupled with a series of actors unable to help out at the short notice I had to provide, has impacted on my ability to hold any rehearsals or indeed to work with actors in advance of the shooting at all.
Story development has been stunted by a rush to organise shooting and obtain what was needed for the film, at the cost of having any time to consider the fine elements of the script and redraft them. The two redrafts we've had have been small changes focussing mainly on corrections of errors.

Colour Grading

The rough cut so far doesn't contain any colour grading, so I've made use of Magic Bullet Looks for Final Cut Pro to complete this step. The results are looking much stronger and more cinematic; I have placed a cool colour temperature onto most of the footage along with a contrast increase. For the white void scene I have hidden some of the bleed-through of green screen by grading it in a very stylistic and saturated manner, and in the closing scene I have applied a blown-out aesthetic in order to elevate it above normality in a small way. Below is a brief sample of the grade.

Last Minute Keying

At this extraordinarily late stage in production, I'm finally able to look back at keying the green screen material, in order to improve upon the version completed in Final Cut Pro. I've used AfterEffects and the Keylight plugin to create a white void around the characters, and so far the results have been cleaner with less bleeding of colours, and a lot less softly outlined.

However, a problem has arisen, after waiting 2 hours for rendering and exporting, in that each video file is only 5 seconds long. It's getting late to the point that I'll soon be departing to catch my train to Sheffield, and the sun is coming up outside! So it looks like I'll just have to try to tweak the keying already done in Final Cut after all.

That's a Wrap, At Last! (With Stills From Rob)

After a stressful 10 days or so with little sleep, it's a relief to have our final scene in the can. Thanks to Jacob's dedicated editing we're almost up to date with rough cuts, so it's hopefully uphill from here.

On a positive note, following the rather awful-looking cosmonaut suit we previously used, and the diminishing light in which we were forced to shoot, Jacob remembered that through his volunteer work at the Fire and Police museum, he had previously borrowed a very 50s B-movie spaceman-like suit, which was in fact for airport firefighters.

After seeing footage I immediately knew it was right for the project, and we scheduled a reshoot for today. Sure enough, it looks fantastic in comparison to our previous material!

Another stalled start occurred, though, when I was unable to wake anybody from their sleep at 11am (when we had been due to meet). Eventually we were ready to shoot, aside from one small issue: the producer had borrowed the SD card from the Marrantz recorder, something I'd forgotten about. He soon said he was on his way, from his flat 2-5 minutes' walk from our location. No less than 50 minutes later he finally arrived. 

In the afternoon we shot the first half of scene 1, rushing through to get done but maintaining quality and getting good coverage of each moment. Overall I'm pleased with today's shoot, despite a few issues with getting everybody on location. Shooting was also an uphill battle against distractions, and took a great deal of effort before each take to get everybody focussed and quiet.

Below are some location stills from the flat.

Drama Post-production - Sound Design

In conversation with Aaron, our sound designer extraordinaire, I have previously discussed the music used on the opening titles of Enter The Void. The song used is Freak by LFO - its chaotic, electronic sound is fairly unique, pumping out a fast rhythm that produces adrenaline in the listener and is perfectly complementary to the tone of the film.

We would like to consider this music when deciding on music for our own film; through the use of synths and MIDI controllers, coupled with the effects library of Soundtrack Pro, perhaps we can emulate the style demonstrated in the LFO track.

On the other hand it may well be, due to the emerging slow pace of our film, that a more ethereal and ambient score is required from start to finish. Experimentation will be key.

The music is inspiring for me, in that it conjures up a very distinct emotional response, that seems to enhance the introductory experience of Gaspar Noe's film, while as a standalone track it make an immediate impression through its intensity.

In the Studio (More Production Stills by Rob)

Following a very long and difficult booking process, it has been very rewarding to get into the Workstation studio. We've been able to shoot greenscreen material throughout the day, which has turned out well. An added bonus has been the discovery of a fairly sturdy dolly, with curved track! I conceived some shots on the spot to fit in with the scene, and we gave it a go.

The day started off with a severe stall, and having arranged to meet at 11am, it was 2pm before I was joined by the other remaining crew member (the producer - the other two were unable to make this part of the shoot) and we could start shooting.

In the evening, we shot our hospital corridor. Our chosen location was Firth Hall, in the biomedical sciences corridor (resembling rather well a medical environment). Being a weekend there was nobody around, and we were able to shoot in peace. After Rob fetched a lab coat to make a cameo as a doctor in a walk-on part, we got to work shooting as many takes as we could of 2 connecting dolly shots, culminating in an ambiguous ending for the film. Our actor Missy did very well to pull off a distressed performance with a single glance, and in such a short time period. This part went successfully, and there remains half a scene to shoot on Monday, along with a pickup in the abandoned building to fix our cosmonaut shots.

A Brief Studio Shoot (With Stills by Rob)

Today, I went through a difficult process of booking the studio with Dom's help, and eventually secured the space for 2 hours. Tomorrow we're in there again, but we have a good head start now having shot a portion of the scene already!

The section we shot looks good, and the acting comes across well. The green screen looks nice and clear too so should be no problem in post.

Abandoned Building (Stills by Rob)

Today we shot the abandoned building scene, making use of a very nice and aesthetically-pleasing location somewhere near the Kelham Island Museum. Jordan operated camera for the most part, allowing me to concentrate on staging the scene and working with Will on his dialogue. Given the short notice he had in preparing for the scene, and the fact he is not normally an actor, it took some time to develop the flow and timing of the scripted dialogue, and to work on it in order to give a more natural sound.

Previously we had scouted the location, during which time I chose the best rooms to show, and the best path to travel for Will. In advance of shooting, we applied relevant writing to the walls in places that hadn't already been graffiti'd.

Our cosmonaut outfit, unfortunately, looked awful. Entirely unconvincing, we will probably need to come up with a solution, either reshooting or simply cutting the character out in favour of a disembodied voice. Along with all of the delays we've had getting the crew into action, this is concerning news.

Transcendence Script 3rd Draft

Part way into the shoot, late as things are coming together, here's Rob's second set of slight script revisions, in the script's 3rd draft.

Transcendence v3

Projector Effects

In order to create a colourful sequence of geometric shapes and shifting patterns, we decided to use a video data projector, connected to a laptop running Windows XP, in order to project visualisations which could then be filmed from a white surface using the Canon 7D. The source of our visualisations? WinAmp coupled with a plugin called MilkDrop. Due to the entirely random nature of the patterns, we will not run into copyright issues with this method, and the aesthetic the software provides, while not quite on the level of Enter The Void, remains a beautiful and effective alternative. Below is a sample of the projector footage.