This is the original shoot of the One Shot Film project we did:
And this is the edited version of the video that I made myself:
Thursday 27 November 2008
Narratives: The One Shot Film Project - An Insight Into What We Did
One Shot Film: The Meeting
With the Narratives module, our second project for it was all about the "One Shot" method of filming. One Shot filming is where the video is shot with one camera consecutively running throughout without it stopping. The camera can move during it, but for the project we had to work on, we were only allowed to move the camera once.
We had to create our own One Shot film in groups that was based around a fixed title, which was; “The Meeting”. As the title suggests, the film had to be some type of meeting and due to only being allowed one camera movement, we had to rely on other methods to help create the right feel for the film. This included the use of lighting, the content of the script, the position of the camera and how we used the single movement we were given and so on.
In my group, we decided to go for a humorous approach with this film rather than a dramatic one, as we felt we would be able to produce a comical video more easily. The original idea we had was to film a dinner date at an Italian restaurant, where we had a girl waiting there for her date to arrive. We planned on having the waiter gaining an “interest” in the girl and then flirting with her before the date arrives, upon when he does, the waiter suddenly shows a ruder, more “snobbish” side to his personality. We also filmed a test video of the dinner date to see how it turned out, but we felt it wasn’t enough as it was so we worked on a more “fleshed out” and complex idea.
From that idea, we kept the original idea from it being a date, but instead of being just a normal date, we changed the scene to become the setting of a girl trying out speed dating instead. The idea this time would be that the girl would be sat a table, and a range of weird and disturbing characters would visit her during the speed dating service. We found a suitable location to shoot the film in, but we did have some problems with setting up the lighting and positioning the microphone. We managed to sort it out in the end though; the biggest problem that remained was the tables we used. The tables were pretty high up along with the chairs, and basically the camera had to be positioned behind the person who was sitting opposite the girl but it had to be above them as much as possible so you only saw their hands. This was quite a pressing problem as we had to replace the chairs with smaller ones and also had to “duck” to avoid our heads appearing in front of the camera.
The reason we chose to film the person’s hands though was because we had more characters in the film than we had people to play them, so we tried to give create the impression that there is a different person sitting there each time. We were also quite limited on time and budget, so we couldn’t afford to spend money on buying costumes, which would probably only be used for this film only, hence we improvised here. We had a lot of characters altogether in the background and foreground, thus we had to create some sort of schedule so that we could have our characters enter and leave with ease as well as giving us time to get into position and such.
When it came to filming the final video, we did end up having to retry it several times as expected due to unexpected problems, including a girl who walked in playing her drum during one of our final takes, hence ruining it. The video we have right now is where I said to the group we should stop filming now and take what we have now as the final version, which was really lucky because literally five minutes later, the African society turned up next door and started singing, dancing and playing drums which would thus created some sort of a rainforest or jungle style setting due to the “backing music” coming from that society. We still made minor mistakes in the final shoot particularly me, but we are all happy with what’s been produced and it has turned out better than we expected especially in certain places.
When I looked over the video, I noticed things that I could change or improve to be honest, and I guess that what helps to form a great designer/inventor/creator or the like. If I had another chance to produce a film like this with more time to develop it, I would be happy to as I wish I had more time to rehearse my parts and also plan more ideas for it. The final video did turn out to be very long in length by the way, we were thinking of cutting out sketches from it, but we may just keep it as it is.
With the Narratives module, our second project for it was all about the "One Shot" method of filming. One Shot filming is where the video is shot with one camera consecutively running throughout without it stopping. The camera can move during it, but for the project we had to work on, we were only allowed to move the camera once.
We had to create our own One Shot film in groups that was based around a fixed title, which was; “The Meeting”. As the title suggests, the film had to be some type of meeting and due to only being allowed one camera movement, we had to rely on other methods to help create the right feel for the film. This included the use of lighting, the content of the script, the position of the camera and how we used the single movement we were given and so on.
In my group, we decided to go for a humorous approach with this film rather than a dramatic one, as we felt we would be able to produce a comical video more easily. The original idea we had was to film a dinner date at an Italian restaurant, where we had a girl waiting there for her date to arrive. We planned on having the waiter gaining an “interest” in the girl and then flirting with her before the date arrives, upon when he does, the waiter suddenly shows a ruder, more “snobbish” side to his personality. We also filmed a test video of the dinner date to see how it turned out, but we felt it wasn’t enough as it was so we worked on a more “fleshed out” and complex idea.
From that idea, we kept the original idea from it being a date, but instead of being just a normal date, we changed the scene to become the setting of a girl trying out speed dating instead. The idea this time would be that the girl would be sat a table, and a range of weird and disturbing characters would visit her during the speed dating service. We found a suitable location to shoot the film in, but we did have some problems with setting up the lighting and positioning the microphone. We managed to sort it out in the end though; the biggest problem that remained was the tables we used. The tables were pretty high up along with the chairs, and basically the camera had to be positioned behind the person who was sitting opposite the girl but it had to be above them as much as possible so you only saw their hands. This was quite a pressing problem as we had to replace the chairs with smaller ones and also had to “duck” to avoid our heads appearing in front of the camera.
The reason we chose to film the person’s hands though was because we had more characters in the film than we had people to play them, so we tried to give create the impression that there is a different person sitting there each time. We were also quite limited on time and budget, so we couldn’t afford to spend money on buying costumes, which would probably only be used for this film only, hence we improvised here. We had a lot of characters altogether in the background and foreground, thus we had to create some sort of schedule so that we could have our characters enter and leave with ease as well as giving us time to get into position and such.
When it came to filming the final video, we did end up having to retry it several times as expected due to unexpected problems, including a girl who walked in playing her drum during one of our final takes, hence ruining it. The video we have right now is where I said to the group we should stop filming now and take what we have now as the final version, which was really lucky because literally five minutes later, the African society turned up next door and started singing, dancing and playing drums which would thus created some sort of a rainforest or jungle style setting due to the “backing music” coming from that society. We still made minor mistakes in the final shoot particularly me, but we are all happy with what’s been produced and it has turned out better than we expected especially in certain places.
When I looked over the video, I noticed things that I could change or improve to be honest, and I guess that what helps to form a great designer/inventor/creator or the like. If I had another chance to produce a film like this with more time to develop it, I would be happy to as I wish I had more time to rehearse my parts and also plan more ideas for it. The final video did turn out to be very long in length by the way, we were thinking of cutting out sketches from it, but we may just keep it as it is.
Sunday 23 November 2008
Successful Practise – Colour and Light Online Journal Task
Double Dervish by Rebecca Partridge (2008)
In this piece of work by Rebecca Partridge, she has used the various different properties of colours to an astounding effect. As you can see in the picture, the painting is all about coloured light prisms and how they create new colours upon making contact with one another and blending together. The amount of colours used in this picture, the size of it in general and how the artist has managed to portray them blending together is pretty staggering.
There are mostly bright colours used in this painting, but the artist has used blending capabilities of colour itself in order to produce darker versions of colours that appear in the painting. If you study the painting carefully, you can see due to the extreme mixture of colours, the theories of clashing, complimentary and harmonising colours are all in abundance around the painting. For example, you can see “cool yellow” prism next to a “cool green” prism, which is an example of harmonising colours.
If you also look towards the outer areas of the painting, the colours are at their most luminous, which is due to what I believe is called “tinting”. Tinted colours seem to have a faded style effect to them and are significantly brighter than their pure, original hues. To me, it seems to be creating a ‘colour pastel’ effect, which is often very luminous and colourful. The artist has used Colour and Light to a very interesting, stylish and unique effect in this painting, which also seems to be evident in her other piece of work too.
In this piece of work by Rebecca Partridge, she has used the various different properties of colours to an astounding effect. As you can see in the picture, the painting is all about coloured light prisms and how they create new colours upon making contact with one another and blending together. The amount of colours used in this picture, the size of it in general and how the artist has managed to portray them blending together is pretty staggering.
There are mostly bright colours used in this painting, but the artist has used blending capabilities of colour itself in order to produce darker versions of colours that appear in the painting. If you study the painting carefully, you can see due to the extreme mixture of colours, the theories of clashing, complimentary and harmonising colours are all in abundance around the painting. For example, you can see “cool yellow” prism next to a “cool green” prism, which is an example of harmonising colours.
If you also look towards the outer areas of the painting, the colours are at their most luminous, which is due to what I believe is called “tinting”. Tinted colours seem to have a faded style effect to them and are significantly brighter than their pure, original hues. To me, it seems to be creating a ‘colour pastel’ effect, which is often very luminous and colourful. The artist has used Colour and Light to a very interesting, stylish and unique effect in this painting, which also seems to be evident in her other piece of work too.
Saturday 8 November 2008
Succesful Practise - The Rule of Thirds (Image Composition)
The Rule of Thirds is a set of guidelines created for help to improve the composition of images whether it is a photograph, painting or even video. The idea with the rule is that any image can be split up in a 3 by 3 grid with 9 equal sized parts, 2 parallel horizontal and 2 parallel vertical lines making up the grid.
Upon research of "The Rule of Thirds", I found a couple of websites that explain what it is and how to try it for yourself within photography. The link to the first website is: http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/John_Longenecker/Rule_of_Thirds.htm.
According to this website, The Rule of Thirds is a guideline to help you with the placements of the various elements in a picture when you are framing it. They also say by ignoring the rule, you may still achieve a great image, which is dependent on the content of the picture and how well the elements are balanced in it. This is only good if you want your viewers to focus on one element in the picture, which would then need to be stuck right in the centre of the picture. As said on the website, "Knowing why you do something and what effect it will have leads to good composition."
On the other website (which is located at: http://photodoto.com/rule-of-thirds/),
they also describe what The Rule of Thirds is and also provide examples of it in effect. On this website, the author of the article has displayed some pictures he has taken of his daughter to demonstrate the rule. They are all headshots but they vary in how far they are 'zoomed in' and how much is consequently cropped out of the image. Each one of the photgraphs has the 3 by 3 grid added on to show how the rule in effect. As shown on the website, the overall balance of the picture is affected by how far the picture is zoomed in on the girl. After some experimentation, the author managed to get the balance right in the bottom-most picture by panning the camera to left and zooming out to show the whole face. There is a fairly significant difference in this picture to the previous ones, which shows how using the Rule of Thirds can really improve the composition of a picture.
-Video will be added soon with comments on it-
Upon research of "The Rule of Thirds", I found a couple of websites that explain what it is and how to try it for yourself within photography. The link to the first website is: http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/John_Longenecker/Rule_of_Thirds.htm.
According to this website, The Rule of Thirds is a guideline to help you with the placements of the various elements in a picture when you are framing it. They also say by ignoring the rule, you may still achieve a great image, which is dependent on the content of the picture and how well the elements are balanced in it. This is only good if you want your viewers to focus on one element in the picture, which would then need to be stuck right in the centre of the picture. As said on the website, "Knowing why you do something and what effect it will have leads to good composition."
On the other website (which is located at: http://photodoto.com/rule-of-thirds/),
they also describe what The Rule of Thirds is and also provide examples of it in effect. On this website, the author of the article has displayed some pictures he has taken of his daughter to demonstrate the rule. They are all headshots but they vary in how far they are 'zoomed in' and how much is consequently cropped out of the image. Each one of the photgraphs has the 3 by 3 grid added on to show how the rule in effect. As shown on the website, the overall balance of the picture is affected by how far the picture is zoomed in on the girl. After some experimentation, the author managed to get the balance right in the bottom-most picture by panning the camera to left and zooming out to show the whole face. There is a fairly significant difference in this picture to the previous ones, which shows how using the Rule of Thirds can really improve the composition of a picture.
-Video will be added soon with comments on it-
Tuesday 4 November 2008
Pixilation Project: The Final Version
This is the final version of the video we had to make as part of our Pixilation project for the Narratives module.
To make this video, first I had to apply a series of effects to all the original pictures to create a consistent look through out the video. Thankfully, the program we used to do it (Adobe Photoshop CS3), has a feature which takes a series of custom set settings and applies them to every image in the folder one at a time. Once the pictures had been customised with the effects I had chosen, I had to put them into Adobe Premiere. And from there, the pictures became the video in Premiere and I was free to edit the new video how I liked with all sorts of tools and effects.
I tried to recreate as much as possible, the original video that I made at home. This included repeating the part where our coats appeared to be 'sliding across' but I fear due to have speed up the video to help minimise the size, it's a ltitle too fast for it's own good. I've spent a lot of time tweaking the video though, especially with speeding up and slowing down chosen segments so I could minimise the size but sitll keep the video running at a reasonable speed. The size limit for the video is 100MB, but with a fair bit of tweaking here and there as well as changing some export settings to help minimise the size, I managed to get the final version of the video to around 40MB. I had already saved the video a few times before, but there was always something wrong with it so it became a trial and error process for me.
I'm really happy with the audio I've chosen for the video though. It's a song I haven't heard in years and it just happened to be playing at the Glo Bar yesterday. And for some odd reason, I felt that the song would be perfect for this video and I believe I was right to now. The seems to compliment the video quite well because they both seem to emit the same sort of 'kooky', upbeat and amusing impression.
I've been having a look at other pixilation videos by other students and on the web, and I've noticed how easy to see how rough my attempt is in comparison, but I know what I need to do now in order to create a more simpler but far more effective video. I think I'm actually better at coming up with ideas rather than executing them, as shown by this video. To be honest, I am fairly disappointed with the way this final video has turned out, it definitely needs improvement especially with the brightness of it. If I had a chance to make another pixilation video at NTU, I would definitely jump at the chance and also do my best to make it a lot better than its predecessor.
To make this video, first I had to apply a series of effects to all the original pictures to create a consistent look through out the video. Thankfully, the program we used to do it (Adobe Photoshop CS3), has a feature which takes a series of custom set settings and applies them to every image in the folder one at a time. Once the pictures had been customised with the effects I had chosen, I had to put them into Adobe Premiere. And from there, the pictures became the video in Premiere and I was free to edit the new video how I liked with all sorts of tools and effects.
I tried to recreate as much as possible, the original video that I made at home. This included repeating the part where our coats appeared to be 'sliding across' but I fear due to have speed up the video to help minimise the size, it's a ltitle too fast for it's own good. I've spent a lot of time tweaking the video though, especially with speeding up and slowing down chosen segments so I could minimise the size but sitll keep the video running at a reasonable speed. The size limit for the video is 100MB, but with a fair bit of tweaking here and there as well as changing some export settings to help minimise the size, I managed to get the final version of the video to around 40MB. I had already saved the video a few times before, but there was always something wrong with it so it became a trial and error process for me.
I'm really happy with the audio I've chosen for the video though. It's a song I haven't heard in years and it just happened to be playing at the Glo Bar yesterday. And for some odd reason, I felt that the song would be perfect for this video and I believe I was right to now. The seems to compliment the video quite well because they both seem to emit the same sort of 'kooky', upbeat and amusing impression.
I've been having a look at other pixilation videos by other students and on the web, and I've noticed how easy to see how rough my attempt is in comparison, but I know what I need to do now in order to create a more simpler but far more effective video. I think I'm actually better at coming up with ideas rather than executing them, as shown by this video. To be honest, I am fairly disappointed with the way this final video has turned out, it definitely needs improvement especially with the brightness of it. If I had a chance to make another pixilation video at NTU, I would definitely jump at the chance and also do my best to make it a lot better than its predecessor.
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