It’s been a while…
Ok, so the last few weeks have been daunting, in fact so much so that I made myself ill again recently.
The critique went well, with a lot of good work produced by the other groups. Our own crit was very enlightening, especially concerning what defines a viral video. It then came to a conclusion that our group had put a lot of time and effort into creating our movie however we overly considered the viral video and produced what could only be called a short movie.
The movie we produced had a lot of semiotics and long shots; the duration of the movie was also quite long. So to improve our movie we would need to shorten the length of the movie, make it more of a viral video by adding some sort of innovative slant to it. I was thinking, make it recurring so the ending is actually the beginning.
The production of the viral video itself was considered a lot more interesting, this was important for me as I would rather have the course itself more based upon the work we aspire to produce rather than work that I am already capable of achieving (e.g youtube videos).
Conclusion
The production of our viral video was a long and enduring one. I purposefully aspired to make a viral video that was intellectually challenging and aesthetically pleasing. I treated the production with all due respect, as if the production was that of one in the industry. The only contradiction was that, the creativity and purpose was one in which I conjured myself.
The actual finished piece was not displayed in the critique itself, instead using the rough edited version and I gathered during the criticism, re-editing much of the footage we used and produce a video shortened to the correct terms of which the class and lecturers demands.
The team and I worked really well. The roles sort of went as follows:
Me: Director/Producer/Script writer/Camera Operator
Bradley Marsh: Co-Director/Actor/Set designer
Sam Ibrahim: Camera Operator/location scout
There were a lot of problems during production and pre production of the viral video. The first day of filming according to the plan was cancelled because Bradley had an un fortunate accident and crashed his car on the way to shooting which was beyond his control. We started shooting on the Friday of that week, which was test footage. The deadline was the 24th November, which was the following Monday.
An extension for the entire group was conceived.
So the week after we all met up on Tuesday to film shots 1,2,3 (see script/shot list). Another flaw arouse when we realised the camera had been left on and the battery life had expired. So we cancelled filming the next day
The day after we finally started filming and we managed to complete shots: 1,2,3,6,7,8. The steady camera I had made out of the tripod made a huge difference however Sam still found great difficulty in the usage of the apparatus.
The steady cam was of great usage and provided us with some great shots.
The scene where Brad had to change three times in a row to do each character to make it one continuous shot was a lot of fun to do. Although, because of its complexity it took a couple of shots to get it completely right, firstly, the traffic again and secondly was get the shot of Brad walking without any continuity errors and getting the whole shot itself to run very smoothly.
Another issue that arose was even though the steady camera reduces the movement whilst tracking trying to keep the camera level is a very hard job. In future I think we could adjust the tripod so the weights are moveable to counter act the weight in any direction e.g. for filming/tracking sideways.
Being part of this project has been a lot of fun but there has been a lot of problem solving involved the whole process as you’ve read. One last minute change to the script was that instead of the protagonist walking into a room to see his dying wife looking out of the window, it was changed to him walking into a room and seeing his wife with another man. This whole scene was originally him walking into a hospital to see himself at his wife’s bedside in the hospital. We decided that the script was good enough without the hospital and that it would take too long to sort out the legalities of filming in the hospital. So we made the change to the script to make it something realistic.
Lastly, editing was of extreme difficulty as there were a lot of aspects that were different from straightforward timeline cutting. Firstly I cut the pieces into the right timing from two different cameras, one being an AVCHD camera which took a lot of time to render into suitable AVI files to edit.
Then I worked on the most difficult scenes, the first being the scene in which Bradley gets up from his body which has been mutilated, Bradley is in this shot 3 times so I had to edit in after effects make it appear he is looking over the body whilst in another shot he is walking away from the damage.
The Second most difficult shot was the transition between walking away from the accident to walking away down another street. Essentially, a tree was going to smooth out a wipe from one scene to the other however the trees timing did not correspond to the wipe and the whole scene was abolished.
The last difficult part of the editing process was the continuous shot during the ending of the viral video. The timing there had to be precise so that the viewer does not recognise the time gaps in between the footage which was when Bradley was doing a set change.
I’ve learnt a lot during this task whilst honing my own skills. More importantly, I think I have learnt more about the potential of my work mates. Hopefully in the future I will get to work with them again and anyway else who shares the same enthusiasm as me.
I’ll be posting both versions of the viral video soon….
