So I've just got back to college for my second year and have been set quite an exciting brief for our digital film production and visual effects module; designing a title sequence. The film must however be of a text that we have read and that hasn't already been made into a film. The final piece has to be 30-45 seconds and must be entirely individual, i.e no need to crew on anyone's work or work as a team.
Now as you may know by now I'm quite interested in documentary film making and I'd be lying if I said I'd never want at some point to try and make the next Bowling for Columbine...
Well actually mabye I would be, because despite that film's brilliance it is (like all documentary films) a bit too err, "documentaryry". By that I'm referring to how documentaries are from a Director of Photography's point of view pretty basic. The architecture of talking heads, voice overs and vox pops doesn't leave the poor old D.O.P with much room for fun and games. So the kind of film that I would be proposing here would be far more than one's standard information fest. This book is made up of lots of references to popular culture as well as familiar, comprehensive modern day situations as examples, so I feel that there are plenty of opportunities to illustrate things using actors and interesting shots without the encyclopaedic overload.
I guess this is a bit of a tangent but I just felt that I might as well lay out how I imagine the film panning out or more to the point stress that this film won't be anything like what one might expect. As far as first ideas go regarding the look of the title sequence, my first thoughts are something like the intro of Q.I; light hearted and inquisitive with many worldly images flying past. I would certainly make the music a little more on the serious side though!
O.K so I've finally done a rough cut of the film that I shot in Bolivia. I would say that as far as the video side of things goes I'm probably about 60-70 percent done as although this is a rough cut a tremendous amount of effort has already been spent simply just getting rid of all the rubbish. Now I need to get a rough version of my audio...
The editing didn't take too long either. We started doing a few things in rough after the first day of filming and after the second (and final) day we pretty much knew what we wanted and what was rubbish. Luis and I did a joint effort on the editing which was pretty straight forward as we agreed on most things. However it kind of felt like being up against a brick wall when things came up that we didn't agree on so in places we just had to make compromises. Anyway I'm still pleased with the result and am now very excited about the prospect of making more documentaries.
Well this was a nice surprise. The other day my friend Luis (also a film student) said he needed some help making his documentary on the area where he lives, Dalston. I had always had documentary film in the back of my mind-if you remember correctly from previous posts-and so I was more than happy to lend a hand. The plan was pretty simple; with Luis holding the camera and me holding the microphone we waltzed around Dalston for a couple of days asking to talk to anyone who looked interesting. I know that seems rather vague and I guess it kind of was seeing as we didn't really have any hypothesis or specific matter to investigate but we felt that we'd just go out and see what happened and hopefully we'd be able to drag some decent footage out of the editing. Our results felt pretty good after whaking everything in Final Cut. We came across quite a few characters who gave us a lot of lovely bits and bobs about the area however we did have a small set of questions to begin with these were.
1. If you were mayor of London what would you do to the area?
2. Dalston in three words?
3. What gives Dalston its character?
4. How has Dalston changed over the years?
We rarely asked one person all the questions as usually various other good questions would spring up as we went.
Now I've just got back from South America and I thought I'd do a little filming out there. Admittedly it was only on a little point and shoot pocket camera but baring in mind what I've filmed I think that grainy vibe will go well with the guerilla style that I employed. I filmed things wherever I went, various Argentinean towns/cities bits of Bolivia and the Andes in all it's glory. So, I guess I've got a lot of editing to be getting on with!
As for the Music this is the first track that came into my head and I've been scratching my noodle and searching but I can't really find any other track that is any closer to the kind of sound I want. Although I want the tune to lead the way and to fit the pictures to it, the final film will be a 50/50 audio visual experience.
So it's summer blockbuster time. Time for that film that you ask your mate if they've seen yet or that you overhear people talking on the bus about, to have it's metal tried and tested with the upmost of raised eyebrows and stroked chins. This summer we have our old friend Christopher-candonowrong-Nolan offering up the goods with his intriguing (from the title alone) Inception.
Now I'd heard from a number of sources that this film had been a pipe dream of Mr Nolan's since 2000 and that he'd been caressing the screenplay ever since. At the time of Inception's errr... inception, Mr Nolan and Warner Brothers had come to the agreement that he needed a little more experience-and probably as far as Warner Brothers was concerned success-with "big" films. With this back story in mind Inception was always going to be a big fat ego trip, which can for the movie goer result in a dire final product, think Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Fortunately though this flick is nothing of the sort. To start with the basics it's got incredible performances from everyone-apart from the Japanese bloke who on occasion I couldn't understand-and a nice hefty load of part matrix, part layer cake action sequences that make John McClane look like a morris dancer. Add that to the film's exemplary production design and special effects, you already have the foundations of a very solid Blockbuster. All this still pales in comparison to the marvel that is the overall concept behind Inception. I'm not even going to begin to describe all the brilliant ways in which this concept wows the viewer, mostly because I feel that a lot of the concept's appeal acts on numerous levels of the subconscious. Still a short explanation combined with a few pointers won't go amiss. As you may have heard already this film is about a bloke who, along with his compatriots, enters peoples' subconscious (using rather dubious technology) in oder to steel information from their minds whilst both he, his gang and the victim are all asleep. This involves all the respective characters being transported into a fancy alternate reality with loads of space for matrix-esque environment manipulation and that lovely feeling of questioning reality. Pretty much all of the film is however focused around one mission of epic proportions where the gang must go deeper than ever into the depths of one man's subconscious to plant information. So..... this is where it all gets interesting. To go deeper they must construct a series of alternate realities; dreams within dreams, so that the idea sticks within the victims brain. We also hear early on that within dreams time flows many times slower than reality and even slower as one goes deeper into the subconscious. So try picturing this; one epic mission where its events are spread across multiple realties, each one in some way influencing the next, all with their own relative time frames. For example there is one instance where the environment that the protagonists are in in one reality causes a complete upheaval of the physics in its subordinate reality, however the causes in the first reality (which only last a few seconds) cause effects with a feeling many times longer in the subordinate reality. The result is an epic point in the film (one of many) where we are being cut back and forth between action that is occurring simultaneously, involving a van falling in slow motion with the characters asleep within and on the other side a matrix like action sequence with a much larger time frame. You follow? If not don't fret, even with the film before your very eyes it can be hard. Either that or I'm rubbish at explaining things.
I do have one slight niggle about this film there are quite a few instances where Mr Nolan as used a little careless artistic licensee or overlooked a few things. Fortunately the film has such a wow factor, one doesn't notice them (first time round) but they certainly are reasons for lack of Oscars come the new year. There's no point going into all of them because-amongst other reasons-I feel that they are all encapsulated in the below video, enjoy.
These techniques all focused on arranging my scene through parenting and layers. I had done a little of this before but sadly never really got to grips with it and I knew in the back of my mind that it was pretty easy. I guess I was pretty dopey in the first place to not have got it, anyway...
The concept of parenting objects involves grouping child nodes under parent nodes and baring in mind that all child nodes inherit parent node transformations. I opened up my outliner and shift selected all my scene's content and then grouped it. All the content is now grouped under a group node and is a child to the group. From this point on I created groups within groups and added other nodes to the group by clicking, dragging and dropping with the middle mouse button into other groups. In order to parent objects I selected them from the outliner and then held control and selected the columns group and pressed p on my keyboard.
Another way of organizing my scene is by using display layers. So I created an empty layer in the layer editor beneath the channel box and then double clicked on it to let me rename it and then saved the new name. From the outliner I selected the ground and the dome objects and added them to the new layer I just created. I am able to toggle the layers between being hidden, shown, normal, templated and referenced. When templated, layer objects are unelectable and displayed as dimmed wireframe. When referenced, the layer objects are unelectable, but displayed normally in the viewport.
So I've just got back to college for my second year and have been set quite an exciting brief for our digital film production and visual effects module; designing a title sequence. The film must however be of a text that we have read and that hasn't already been made into a film. The final piece has to be 30-45 seconds and must be entirely individual, i.e no need to crew on anyone's work or work as a team.
