During my first year of studying media production at college I have been tasked with many different projects and presentations, however my final major project for year one has definitely been the toughest but most enjoyable. We was given the task to create a ten minute single camera drama in groups of three to four or individually. I chose to work alone as I wanted to challenge myself and have full control of my production as I wanted to use an idea of my own and be able to direct and produce by myself. Overall I have really enjoyed putting the whole film together, I have faced challenges along the way, but it has been well worth it because it has helped me to learn more for becoming a professional director/filmmaker when I am older.
I will evaluate each stage of production, starting with the brainstorming of my concept ideas. So first things first, before I even started putting together my pre-production portfolio, I brainstormed on paper a load of different film ideas and then wrote them up on my blog. Before I brainstormed, I already had a clear idea of what kind of film I wanted to make, as well as an idea of the story and the characters I'd have in it. However I decided to brainstorm because I figured I shouldn't limit the amount of ideas I could think of, as I may suddenly come up with a better one. Even more so it could help to develop my principal idea. This exercise did help me because it helped me to develop my main idea, as small parts of my other film ideas helped to piece together my final piece.
The main idea was clear from the start, I wanted to do something of a darker tone. Set in a world where a deadly virus had broke out and human nature had fallen. The word 'fall' was always very important to me because it represented a society that was damaged and I wanted two best friend characters who previously before the outbreak got on like a house on fire, but have to suddenly deal with the infection and more importantly each others desires in this new dystopian earth. I always wanted to include flashback elements which would help to piece the narrative together, mixing the structure up a little bit. After I had my initial idea for a plot, thinking of the title came quickly to me. My title I thought of was 'The Fall of Man', the reason I loved this name was because it clearly represents the tone of the film, as well as giving an idea of what the story is about. The title clearly says in my head, the deconstruction of society and the uproar of the human race.
My idea was to have two boys who were best friends, as well as four army characters and another male friend. My story idea which I stuck with in the end, was set just after the aftermath of an infection that had reached breaking point and had killed off half the population, due to a rabid form of infected people who are ripping apart innocent humans. The film is then about how the two best friends have evacuated inside and how they deal with the oncoming events. The infected who are still loose out in the world are known as 'Marked ones' or 'rabid' and one of them who initially I wanted as the other main male character in the story is seen unconscious out on the grass, in the house that the two main male leads are hiding in. I decided to call the two main male characters Liam and George and the Marked one in the garden Luke. The reason I changed the third main male character to being a dead Marked one was because I felt it would be more dramatic and it adds to the disruption part of the Todorov narrative theory, something he claims is applied to all films and it makes them more appealing to audiences because it has a more understandable climax. I also wanted to include various flashback elements to my film as it helps to give some backstory to the characters lives, right up to when the apocalypse began.
After writing the story idea, I then took inspiration from some of my brainstorm ideas and decided that the pre titles sequence would be about Luke and it would involve some dialogue scenes, which would then result in his death. After deciding to write a scene for Luke, I felt more depth was needed to his character to make the audience feel closer to him and to make it more plausibly needed for the film. My decision was that he had been infected and that he was being chased by a human, on the hunt to kill all Marked ones. This idea that he was trying to fight an infection came from one of my other film ideas, my other brainstormed idea was about a boy who was seriously ill and he was trying to fight his illness so that he could see his sister for one last time. I also decided that the pre-titles sequences would show look pleading for his life, sift a medium shot of a gun pointing to his head. I didn't want to show who was at the helm of the gun, this was because I wanted to create enigma codes and make the audience ponder who it could be. One of the later flashback elements of the narrative would be an extended version of this scene, showing the person who was pointing the weapon.
Being happy and confident with my film idea, I was then raring to get started on my single camera drama. I started work on all the pre-production paperwork, making sure to have a clearly written up outline of my story, as well as a log line and synopsis so that my narrative was easy to understand and clearly represented the themes it covered. During the pre-production stages, I went to various different fields to do location reports and assess the environment around so that I had a good idea of what the visuals would look like, as well as being aware of what sound I would pick up. Knowing that I wanted to use a couple of different fields for my single camera production, I managed to find two which were perfect for what I wanted. After the title sequence, I wanted a dream sequence with George's girlfriend Lucy, playing and running around in a field. This is an uplifting no dialogue scene, which shows the contrast in before the disaster, everything is happy and bright. So I wanted a bright field, luckily I found a yellow rapeseed field which was perfect for that very scene. My initial idea for my single camera drama did not include any female characters, however after noting down a beat sheet and a sheet for my characters wants and needs I realised that I needed to create some tension amongst George and Liam. So I decided that George's want was that he wants to find his missing girlfriend in this new post-apocalyptic universe. This causes tension amongst the two of them because Liam just wants to stay inside and stop George from leaving to find Lucy. I hoped that by adding an extra female character, it would make my film more interesting and engaging to watch.
In conclusion to doing all my pre-production work, I felt it went rather smoothly and had all been completed within a couple of weeks, well in advance to filming. One of the only issues which did arise in terms of pre-production was that I had to do quite a lot of re-writes of the scripts. All in all I did about five different drafts of my scripts, the day before I was scheduled to film the army flashback scene, one of my soldier characters called Redman M pulled out due to other commitments, so I had to get rid of all his lines and sift them amongst the three other soldier characters. This caused a lot of hassle as Redman M's lines really involved a fourth soldier, so I had to rewrite his lines to suit the conversation. I decided to still go ahead with the scheduled shoot because I wanted to give myself a lot of time with this scene as it was a tricky shoot and if anything didn't go as planned, I'd have had time to reshoot.
Now onto the production filming side of my single camera production, all in all I did six separate days of shooting. These were all for different scenes and reshoots of certain shots. I started filming on the 15th of April and I finished filming on the 27th May, the last two shooting days I scheduled in, were for if I needed to re film anything. And this was useful because on both of my scheduled reshoot days, I decided to re film some shots from the army flashback scene, pre-titles sequence and cutaways of Luke's hands and body. The reason I did this was because some of my army flashback scenes looked way too overly exposed, as well as this I also needed to add some extra dialogue because I needed to make up a bit more time. The cutaways I re shot of the character Luke, were also necessary because they break up the dialogue and the cutaways I previously shot were also too overly exposed. To avoid the problems with over exposing in the future, I will make sure to turn down the contrast and saturation on the camera, as well as using boards which can help to block out the sunlight. Below is a comparison of the overly exposed shots and the newly filmed shots which I redone.
Filming the pre-titles chase sequence at the very beginning of the film with my actor Jack was a challenge. This was because I was looking to make this sequence as fast paced as possible, I wanted to use fast cuts to make it more engaging. This proved quite successful in the end, however I had to film a lot of different angles just to achieve this. It was hard because my actor grew tiresome from all the running, and the lighting at many times made the shot really white or really dark. So keeping it consistent was hard. My other vision was that I wanted to involve the use of various cutaways of cars zooming past, just to make the scene seem more hectic and more action packed. However this would be hard to achieve without breaking laws or violating peoples identities by showing their number plates.
Lighting is an element in itself which is worth discussing in terms of my evaluation on production, when filming all of my scenes I had very little artificial lighting, mostly all the lighting used was natural lighting on location. For all the main scenes in the house, most of the lighting was natural. Overall for the scenes in the house, I wanted a desaturated murky feel to it, I planned to colour correct it like this in post-production. However I also had to play with a few different colour grading settings on my camera to achieve this, for example I had to change the aperture and change the settings for saturation and contrast. Because I did this it meant the lighting was slightly toned down and at times my actors faces were dark, although I didn't want to change the colour settings on my camera because it would just look plain and not how I wanted it. So I used the ceilings lights in house to light up the scenes, this helped to illuminate my actors faces, while still keeping a slightly murky/desaturated feel to it. I decided that I could tweak the colours so they were better in post-production.
As previously discussed, filming the army flashback scene was probably the most challenging filming slot. This was because the actors for my film weren't professional actors, they were just my friends and with that comes a lot of hardship for them to act in a professional way. It took a lot of takes for each line because a lot of the time they wouldn't be able to portray the emotion or they'd laugh a little. I expected this to happen anyway, but overall they got the performance right in the end and we had fun producing it. Other issues which were a problem when filming was obviously natural lighting, this caused masses of problems as some of my really important dialogue lines weren't usable as the footage was too bright, I decided I didn't want to even attempt to try and colour grade and fix this in post-production as it would bring down the quality down and the mood I was trying to achieve did not need high amounts of colour correction, sos I felt it wouldn't good. My preferred solution to this was to just reshoot it, and this is exactly what I did, below you can see a couple of screenshots of the overly exposed shots on the army flashback initial shoot and a shot of my actors all laughing during an intense scene.
Now in terms of sound planning and production on my single camera drama, I did a lot of research and planning as well as using the best equipment possible to bring out great diegetic sound. First of all during pre-production, I analysed various different scenes in movies, looking at how sound makes the narrative more engaging and dramatic. After this I then visualised in my head how I wanted it to sound, I generally wanted my film to have a dark ambient theme throughout, I wanted this to be a non-diegetic sound which represent the apocalypse that is unfolding. Amongst this the diegetic sound was also important for me, so to achieve clear dialogue I wanted to do my proper research in microphones and then purchase the best one possible in my budget. After doing a lot of research on different models such as Rode, Samsung and Zoom I decided to go with the Rode Video Mic Pro, this is a clip on shotgun microphone with four different settings for achieving different levels of sound in different environments.
My reasoning for purchasing this mic was because of it's popular reviews and because it has a strong directional range. Meaning whatever the mic is pointing at, it will pick that sound up from a large distance. When I filmed dialogue scenes in the house, I used the 0db setting on the mic, this setting best picks up diegetic sound for quiet environments so I new this would be perfect. For the rest of the film, I recorded the outside diegetic dialogue scenes using the -10db and high pass filter setting. The reason for this is because I did not want to get the sound of the wind or rustling and the high pass filter can cut this out. The -10db setting is also useful in recording dialogue in outside locations. In conclusion to recording sound for my film, there are still some issues which I need to address. When filming outside, a couple of times I forgot to switch the -10db and high pass filter setting on, this was a problem because some of the dialogue is muffled and you can hear the wind. However in post-production I tried my best to get rid of this, I know for the future to constantly make sure to check the right setting is being used. One of the other issues with my sound recording was that when filming in the house, some of the lines of dialogue are meant to be shouted and they were shouted by my actors, however the microphone at close range really picks up loud diegetic sound. And listening to it back, it is almost deafeningly loud, so loud that is starts to get muffled. However I managed to fix this in post-production. I will briefly talk about that later.
Post-production was a lengthy but enjoyable process for me, I started editing on the 25th of April and finished on the 4th of June. My aim in terms of my whole single camera production was that I wanted to spend a lot more time on post-production as opposed to the production filming side, this was because for my film I wanted a very specific dark and eerie tone and to portray this I would need to do a lot of colour grading, effects and use of different soundtrack. So by giving myself a large window to edit in, I had the best chance of getting the right look, without over doing it. I also felt that with editing, if my footage all turned out really poorly, I would still have a better chance of improving it, as with editing anything shoddy can be made to look good.
My first plan was to just put together a whole ten minute rough cut of my film, without any effects, colour grading or soundtrack which had been edited in. The first reason I chose to do this was because first of all it was just more practical, the reason for that is because every time you add any effects, transitions, sound components etc, Final Cut has to render the clip for you to be able to play it back and watch it. And this can take up to 50 minutes to render, so by just doing a rough cut, this gave me the opportunity to put the whole film together without having to wait for a render. Doing a rough cut also meant I could do some "spotting", this is where you watch your whole sequence through and then mark out in every possible part, where you need to add colour grading effects, transitions, sound and anything else. The reason the process of "spotting" is necessary is because it gives you a perfect idea of where certain effects and sound/transitional elements will help to make the film stronger and more engaging. Often you can't tell if a piece of music or colour will work, so watching the whole thing through as a rough cut will help you to understand whereabouts the film is lacking and this is where you can position your effects. Marking out points for each part of non-diegetic, ADR, foley or other sound effects also makes it easier to sync up the added sound with the live recorded diegetic sound. Below is a link to my uploaded rough cut, as well as some images of the "spotting" process during the rough cut edit.
I placed a marker point during the last scene in the house, for when Liam picks up the gun. I placed a marker at the very moment he touches/picks up the weapon. The reason I placed a marker here is because it gives me a guide as to where I can add in a foley sound effect for a gun being picked up. The effect of an added foley effect is that it makes the film more realistic. As well as this, we as an audience are so used to hearing loads of amplified small sound effects in film, and if we don't hear anything, our ears can't adjust to it and it doesn't sound or look right.
Below are a couple of other various screenshots of markers I placed during the "spotting" stage, which helped me to add in the right effects where needed. For example the first screenshot below is a marker I added in for when the character Luke hits his hand on the glass window, for the exact second his hand touches the window, I have added in a non-diegetic jump scare sound effect. The reason I added it in when his hand hits the glass is because I felt it synced together nicer and would make for a more darker/jumpy twist. The other screenshots are examples of me marking out other parts for "spotting".
Colour grading and correction was another important element to me in the post-production stage, this is because for my film I wanted a darker more murkier feel to it. I wanted a desaturated, low contrasting feel to it. The reason I wanted this look was because for the new fallen word, everything was dying and I wanted colour to help portray this. To achieve this look as seen below, I went onto video filters, image control and the desaturate setting. This look was perfect for what I needed. All I had to do then was apply this desaturated look to the clips. One of the only issues when applying image control effects was that at times, the natural light shot on the day was dark, so by using a desaturated look it takes down the quality and it can make it darker. So I had to be very fiddly and make sure not to make my clips look worse.
Another colour grading effect I played with on some of my clips was the colour corrector 3-way, gamma, brightness and contrast and again desaturate. I used these effects on the dream scenes with Lucy and George (as seen below). I wanted to make the dream scenes really bright and I wanted to bring out the colours on certain parts of the location, so for the clip below I really wanted to bring out the green in the grass and the blues on their clothing. I wanted the dream scene to be all bright and happy, because I wanted to show a clear contrast between the apocalyptic world and the past. Showing how happy the characters used to be and how they are now. I had to add these effects in anyway, because a lotos my dream scenes were too overly exposed. In terms of problems with adding these effects, it did take me a lot of time to get the colours how I wanted. Initially I just started changing the levels on the colour corrector 3-way, using the blues and the yellowy green colours to bring up their intensity. However this still didn't look right, so I added some gamma effects to bring up the background colours, as well as using desaturate to give their faces a glowing feel and brightness and contrast to make it look more summery.
BEFORE
AFTER
This is when the sound levels are too high and they reach the red scale of the sound levels, this means that because the sound is so loud, it starts to get muffled and it isn't professionally correct. Cinemas also won't accept films if they have clipping in them, the way I knew there was clipping is because I watched through the whole film again and any times the sound levels reached the top and the lights turned red, I knew I had to fix this. This caused a lot of hassle because it meant for the majority of the film I had to turn the sound down so that it wasn't clipped. Doing this also meant I had to make sure the sound was then consistent throughout, after turning all the sound levels throughout and using key frames to make it stay consistent, sound was then as I wanted it. Below are some screenshots of the process I went through.
After correcting all the sound and fixing all the colour correction I was happy with my edit, my main plan which I visualised was to get a darker cinematic feel to it. I focused a lot on my establishing shots during production, because I wanted to try and put across in my film an eerie ghostly feel to the world. And I knew if I could achieve these shots, I could use colour correction and non-diegetic music to help further the narrative. For my final scene in the house, I wanted to also use a load of quick cuts of the character Liam panicking as he sees George dying. The way I went about this was I used the razor tool to cut a load of clips together quickly, I also used dark ambient music to make this scene more intense. These shots then cuts to the jump scare of a rabid Luke banging his hand on the glass. The reason I added in this jump scare clip straight after the fast cuts was because I felt it kept the narrative engaging and adds as a nice final cliffhanger before the credits and post credits sequence.
In conclusion to my evaluation I am really happy with how my final major project has turned out. I have faced many challenges along the way, but it has been a big learning process which will help me to develop even better films in the future. In terms of problems I have faced and things which have gone wrong during the whole process, there are some things which need to be addressed.
Firstly I should have done a lot more takes for all my scenes, because for each line of dialogue I only did a few takes. And this caused a lot of hardship during editing, the reason for this is because it was harder for me to find a really great shot, because some of the shots weren't visually what I wanted and if I had made sure to film it four or five times even if it looked good, I would have had more choice of what clips to use. Also some of the scenes I shot didn't look right, either they were overly exposed or there are things which distract you from the main dialogue. Say for instance, a piece of clothing in the garden or a random person in the distance. However I know for my next project to do a lot more takes, to fix these problems, I did do a couple of reshoots.
Another problem which occurred during my production was some muffled dialogue, especially for the flashback army scene. Some of the dialogue is really muffled because the day we filmed on, there was lot of wind. And I forgot for some diegetic scenes to turn the high pass filter on. So for some dialogue, the sound is really clear, but others the sound is really loud and the ambience is amplified, or the dialogue is really quiet, but the wind is really loud. So to fix this I reshot some of the dialogue and added in a audio filter on post-production to try and fix this. In the future I will make sure to constantly check the microphone, so that all the diegetic sound is recorded with the right settings. I will also make sure to purchase a wind shield for my microphone, so to try and cut our more muffling.
Lighting was also a problem in some scenes, however I have already discussed this. I know for my next project, to alter the white balance and contrast settings on my camera, as well as using items to try and block out the heavy sun light. Some of my sound isn't consistent or perfect as well in my film, the reason for this is because I recorded dialogue in different environments and with different settings. A lot of my sound also had clipping so I had to adjust the settings. To avoid this in the future I will make sure to place the microphone from a further distance for scenes where the dialogue is shouted, as well as using more key frames to keep the sound editing consistent.
Overall in conclusion to my single camera drama, I have really enjoyed producing the film. It has all been a challenge but it is exactly what I joined the course for. I definitely know for my next project that I will be able to make improvements in all different areas. Making sure to film a lot more different angles and film dialogue scenes a lot more times. I also want to use professional actors for my next project as they will be more used to the work and it is something they can engage in a lot better. If I had to change anything, I would say I could improve a lot of the shot reverse shots. After realising in post-production that I didn't follow the 180 degree rule, which I should have. However on the day of filming I focused too much on other aspects and when I came to relaise I didn't follow the rule, it was too late to reshoot. Having highlighted all my faults in this production, I am very proud of what I have produced, but have learnt a lot which can help me to make a better film next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment