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.