Dave's Final Cut

After a bit of re-jigging and more shooting on my director's part we came out with this.

Last Orders

Here is a scan of all the final tasks for my Editor and VFX men. From this point on the final product is in their hands!

Dave's Editing

I also did some editing for Dave. This is what I had cut after first going through the footage. Everything is a mess. He hasn't shot enough footage to properly fit the timeline at normal speed, let alone edit! We still managed to scrape something else together though, you'll see the final cut in a sec...

Rather late silhouette making of

Here's how we filmed the silhouette footage, all pretty straight forward.

DVD Cover

Part of the brief was to also design a DVD cover. I thought I'd keep it simple with a nice scribbly look.

Last Editing Liaison

Here are two video commentaries documenting steve and mine's decisions regarding the final edit before we give it to Matt for VFX.

Editing with backdrop footage

After filming my backdrops Steve was able to do a bit more work. Above are our various thoughts.

Editing Session Number One

After filming the footage of foxy brown I gave it to my editor, Steve so that he could start work. He did this very helpful little audio commentary for me which I think has made everyone's life a lot easier. I'm going to have just the close-up of her face all the way through apart from Steve's edit of her second phrase that crossfades, very much like that.

The Mouth

Here's the result of the bedroom filming. As I recorded it all at half speed and then doubled it it all looks nice and weird and jerky. When it comes to compositing I'll simply mask off the mouths as well as the eyes and nose and put them over the top of my silhouette.

Rigged and Bound!

Here's my skeleton rigged and bound. As you can see I've put him in a rather bizarre pose to illustrate this.

On Close Inspection

Stumbled across this the other day. Not really much to say about it really I just wanted to post it. You see I can't really put my finger on why I like it so much. It's probably because it appears to be bunch of familiar bits of vegetation that one still can't seem to make out in full.

U.V Map!

After modelling it I created a U.V map. After a little trial and error all it really entailed was selecting an appropriate edge loop to cut along and one to fold out from.

I "Act"

For another music video I offered to prance around in a blue Gorilla suit. The director felt that I was the appropriate character for the job. The finished product would involve me eating a bizarre packet of crisps resulting in me being transported to a surreal world where, in the newly donned gorilla suit I would proceed to defend myself from hoards of little wax men. The day was pretty straight forward. In the gorilla suit by 10.30, lots of standing around and sweating till our lunch-hour at one (it gets hot under those lights and suit) and then all done by three. It was pretty fun prancing around in front of a camera for once and despite the sweat I very much enjoyed the whole experience. I also felt like I might have in fact done a reasonably good job of acting!

Filming in me room

This bit of filming was a lot more casual. All I needed was a handful of people's mouths lip syncing along to the tune. All I needed to do was get my flatmates in my room one by one. They had the lyrics right in front of them on my laptop and I even put the tune at half speed. Each person took about 20 minutes at most and I did five people in total, I also used myself. I put the results into final cut it was all pretty dandy apart from one or two lines which my flatmate and I rerecorded later. Big thanks to my flatmate Jay (pictured) for letting me use his beautiful 5D camera to shoot on and also to George, Weenie, Star and Phil for letting me film them.

Filming, Day 1

I was pretty nervous before this as this was really the only bit of shooting where we were up against the clock. I had limited time in the studio and with the camera and I had an actress', a D.O.P and a lighting technician's time in my hands so I had to be on my toes. Still we ploughed on through and got all the essential shots done. I had story-boarded a number of shots but a fair few of them were only shots that I'd do if I had the time.

The first hiccup we had was with lighting as I stupidly assumed that the studio's photography lights would be sufficient to light the set so we had to go look for the tungsten lights resulting in us loosing an hour. Secondly-I only realised this once I'd copied the footage off the next day-the footage looked too orange. I had already noticed this when filming but it wasn't so pronounced on the monitor and I kind of liked it so I didn't do a white balance. In hindsight I now realise that was rather a silly move as any colour grading one can do later with a more colour neutral bit of footage. Thankfully this specific colour problem can be tided up.

Da Clothes

To make sure I get things bang on for my shoot on tuesday I thought I'd take some photos of the clothes my actress could potentially wear. She's going to be playing the role of the female radio d.j who chats in between the verses, "foxy brown". I'm thinking leopard print jeans and furry jacket second from the bottom with many accessories and jewels.

The Shotlist

Here's the shotlist I drew up for the video. The bottom two sheets are for my location footage and the top two are for my footage of my actress broadcasting. You'll see that there are some blank spaces. This is because I'm anticipating a few more shots that my D.O.P might suggest and then there are of course quite a few shots that will pop up when we're out shooting on location.

Brown Bread

This was probably one of the best little bits of work I could've done as these guys are doing exactly what I'm looking to be doing eventually. Brown Bread Films are a film production company made up of three guys who all finished their courses after I had done my first year. Like me they specialize in music videos and short films.

The shoot was only a test but was still educational none the less. Armed with some gaffer tape I helped set up the cardboard set and ferried bits and bobs about the (massive) studio. More than anything it was a good insight into the workings of the kind of environment I feel I'm likely to end up in; my own "artist's" studio as opposed to constantly running all over other people's sets.

3 Opinions

Opinions are just opinions and nothing is absolute. Still, here are three people who's opinions I would (hypothetically) ask for and value when judging my work.

1. Autechre

Although these two guys are musicians by trade, they have in their time trained as architects and worked on the comic 2o00A.D so it is fairly safe to say that they are well schooled across various media. They'r by far my favorite artists and have worked with numerous moguls within the world of the digital arts including the director Chris Cunningham . Basically I love everything these guys produce and I feel that they would be able to judge my work with a clear eye.

2. Miss Good (my art teacher at school)

Basically she was just fair. She knew when I slacked, she knew when I had tried and failed and she knew when I'd succeeded and slacked anyway and she always seemed to be right about what work of mine was any good.

3. Darren Aronofsky

Definitely my favorite director, this man produces stylistically my kind of work done to perfection. I feel that if this man were to so much as smile upon seeing anything that I ever do I feel that I would have accomplished something. I'm sure that would be no mean feat seeing as he's one of the Hollywood directors that's had a 100% success rate with his films; something you don't get by being anything short of ruthless.

FX Test 3

Just did a little test to see how I would composite my proposed footage. I shot my friend, masked off an area over a hole on a cardboard box I made and put him within the mask. It still only looks like he's on a screen on the box not inside the box. Never the less if I light my set well with soft light on the day and shoot it on a tripod then I'll have done all that I can do filming wise to make sure that it works. It might actually look kinda good as a screen on a radio!

A Taster

Saw this streets video and realised it's a pretty good example of the vibe I'm going for. Replace Mike Skinner with nothing but a silhouette of his torso and ad a few cool effects and that should give you an idea. All will become clear in my shot-list though.

FX Test 2

Here is a more developed test of my previous idea. I want to place my silhouette over footage of Leeds streets so it looks like it's walking around. I did the above by filming Mark walking on the spot and did as I did in the previous FX test. Then I filmed some footage of me walking backwards, being careful to make sure that I had a point in the composition of the picture that remained in roughly the same position throughout.

My Maan

I just realized I haven't really laid out my character's backstory yet so just to clear things up...

Maan Budakhan is completely human and at the age of fifty seven he was a victim of the Bhopal crisis. For reasons unexplained he was the only survivor and now at the age of eighty four he has not aged at all thus suggesting that he has been made either immortal or simply rejuvenated.

Maan appears throughout the game, to offer advice to the player character trying to find his wife who has reportedly run off to the heart of the site of the incident, with a cult. This cult believes that the incident was the first effort by their unseen leader to wipe out the major religions of India and ultimately ushering in a new age of human existence where there are no differences of faith to divide people. Ultimately Maan's role is to show the player character-a Hindu-the fact that in the grand scheme of things all theistic religions might as well be the same and that they can never lead or protect you, to or from life's various pleasures and pains.

Maan doesn't need to eat but he sleeps whenever the pain of existence gets too great for him. On these occasions he resides within the area surrounding the wreckage of the plant and the plant itself. He possesses no superhuman powers in particular however as a result of the incident he is very strong and doesn't loose a fight, nor does he feel any physical pain. Although he is close to blind he is still able to sense more than most due to all his remaining senses being heightened. He still regularly suffers punishing emotional flashbacks that cause him to wreck all in his path for brief periods. On these occasions, if he is near any other life-forms, he anticipates this and retreats to a deserted area of the plant.

Film Festival 2

I thought I would catch more of the festival while I still could so I quickly bought a ticket one afternoon to see a film entitled "R U There? This film sounded up my street from the word go as the story revolved around a professional gamer and questions surrounding the nature of reality. The story is simple and there are only really two prominent characters. The film consists of a world champion gamer travelling to Taipei to compete in a gaming championship. Whilst in his hotel he meets a local girl who despite their lack of language manages to make him take a break from his gaming. A lot of this break involves the two of them conversing in the online world Second Life-somthing I was all too familiar with just under a year ago. There a numerous blatent parallels with the film "Lost in Translation" and whilst I did quite enjoy watching R U There? it is still a rather cheap imitation. Never the less it was an entertaining view even if only to see a film cleverly incorporate machinima into a film and so on the ratings card I ended up giving it three out of five stars.

FX Test 1

Here is a little test of the idea I had, it was all pretty simple. I just filmed my friend on the plain white background of our whiteboard, keyed out the white and turned down the contrast and brightness. Then it was just a case of masking the various other body parts that I'd filmed and putting them together with my silhouette and a background.

Da Hood

So for the shots of my rapper I'm going to have a number of urban backdrops. Not too urban though, as you can see from this nice park below. I went out the other day round my neighborhood and I think I've come across more than enough locations to provide the backdrop. They're all divided roughly into fifteen areas. Now all I need to do is choose some good ones and make a little storyboard.

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