FINAL PRODUCT: FILM OPENING [The First Degree]

          The day is finally here, I am finally finished with my film opening! It's an amazing experience and one of the most fun I've had in an academic year. I cannot be at this point without my partner Richy, without him I think I would still be on the phase or in the filming phase. All in all, I really hope that for A2 we will get to be together again, only time will tell but it's unlikely for now since we each have a different taste of music.

     Anyways, here is our film opening which we decided to call it  "The First Degree".

MASKING in Adobe Premiere Pro

     There are two scenes in which I want to touch to improve or add more to a scene. One of them is the fact that from the feedback obtained yesterday, I saw a comment in which someone left a comment saying how the scene where the glass of water is shown in focused when the characters are not; the water in the glass are hard to be seen due to the room being all white and the water being clear. The following images below show an example of the following scene:

     By instict, I thought that I could somehow duplicate the layer so that there are two layers of the same shot then somehow having to crop the layer on top to fit in with the glass, at first it was just a square box, then I realised that water are not perfectly rectangular, so I tried masking it instead. Turns out that masking it was a far better call than using crop by itself; I then colour grade the masked layer so that it gives off a light blue ish tint to it. P.S. Somehow the mask actually tracks the water movements as well! it was all amazing and my mind was blown away.

    This next masking was when I was working on the credit's with the information Richy gave me on a message via the LINE app. I was also free to add whatever I feel like adding as well!

Ryu Techa Productions (include with the logo please)
STARS:
Zacharia Ford
Chavit Homsiri
Maria Scrutner
TITLE OF FILM
Director of Photography: Ryu Techa
Produced by Richy Monopoly and Ryu Techa
Written by John Bunnell
Directed by Richy Monopoly

     I was thinking of a way to make a name on an opening sequence look fascinating, therefore I tried to masked Richy's pretend star name in the movie and mask it behind him, normally if I mask one frame hit the track button it should track automatically but this time it doesn't work. Why... This means that I must track each shot individually fameby frame. The end result was really amazing that I ended up using it again in the shot where Toy was walking towards the camera and we can only see his foot.

FONTS

     Deciding on fonts is probably one of the hardest aspect of editing for me, there are billions upon billions of them and choosing just one that will suit the filming is like finding treasure in the sea. I looked through dozens of websites ranging from 1001fonts.com, fonts.com and many more...

      Eventually, I used the website dafont.com and found a font that Richy agreed should be used, however this is only for the names of the credit only and not the film title itself.

    After this point, I spent the entire day editing and key framing the fonts with the list that Richy listed for me via message. Richy allowed me to have the freedom to change anything I wanted to, therefore I change the placement of the title of the film only.

I finished editing the credit sequence at around 4 so I went outside to have a walk for a bit and came back at 5 to find the font for the film title. I used the website and found this font so I messaged Richy and he approves it.

This is the final film title

COLOR GRADING in Adobe Premiere Pro

     Today as it's a Friday I and Richy as well as other people in the other group stayed until 4PM after school. Reason being that we wanted to finish our coursework this week. Therefore we hooked up my laptop to the HDMI chord of the TV in our classroom. I wanted use it because my laptop monitor screen is slightly desaturated that what is shown on a normal TV or monitor, furthermore so that everyone is able to see the picture clearly.

      We discussed back and forth between about what the end product should look like, first we were going for a more warm look to indicate that it's in the afternoon but then we decided to look at the color theory for a more informative perspective on this. As shown in the image below, warm color tend to give the feeling of warmth and positiveness. Therefore we changed to a more "dead" feeling. that only left us with blue and it turned out great!

         The first screenshot shows the initial color grading we were going with, the bottom screenshot is the one used in the final opening and as seen, the second looks more intimidating that the first with the low key lighting and a "cooler" look rather than the warm one. The vignette of both were kept at the same amount.

          Overall, I think this method of connecting my laptop to the HDMI of the school's TV is definitely an effective way of working in a team It makes everyone see clearly what the product looks like and I might even use it in future uses. However, one weakness is that I cannot access the keyboard without being directly under the TV so I must walk over every time I there is something wrong that needed the keyboard. Other than that, my mice wire was super long so there is no worry on that aspect.

FEEDBACKS from the 2 CLASSES

     Today me and Richy finally got back the feedbacks of the rough cut and we read them through together and they were quite intrestring; some we already know the mistake ourself, some we did not even noticed. Overall, it was a positive feedback for us to improve upon.

P.S. One person/group actually noticed that we used the eye shot from the game "Dead Island"

From the feedback we have decided to reshot the suspect's entrance into the interview room as there was some confusion as to its location and just who Ying's character was.
We will also reflect on the length of the interview scene as some feedback said was too long.
There was some complaint about the diegectic sound - so we will see if that can be improved in post-production.
Also there were some suggestions about colour correction and making it look less monotone and grey.

TO DO
Colour grade
Make a decision on diegectic sound
Reshoot the entrance to the interview room (sign needed?)

EDITING FOR ROUGH CUT

     In today's lesson, I and Richy sat down editing the film for the rough cut being shown tomorrow, both of us had a part in editing this project together and exchanged idea and got a semi complete film opening without any color grading, sound effects nor any music at all; just the audio recorded with the camera. I told Richy that I will work on the spinning eye shot at home and the picture below is the key frame of this shot.

     When I came home, I continued with the editing of sound effects and finding the music fitting for the film because I felt like the music that Richy chosen doen't fit with the eye shot that we were hoping for. Also, we sadly must use the footage that Richy's eyes were moving because the footage is longer and it is more in synced with the music I've chosen but turned out for the good. I have once again recreated a point of view of a security camera by lowering the frame rate to 10fps when exporting and changing the colour of the footage to black and white then overlaying it with a green screen security camera overlay. FYI, this was the only green screen used in this film opening.

     For the intro used, I decided to use my old Adobe After Effects intro for my channel since when I retested my PC for an upgrade in graphics card for A Level Media Studies, I forgot to tell the shop to keep After Effects and ever since I wasn't bothered to download it for a second time. And also, the reason I used this intro was also because both me and Richy, our name starts with an R so why not use this intro for the sake of it.

Here is the rough cut:

P.S. The thumbnail of the video is actually the timeline of the rough cut and the only screenshot I've got because I stupidly did not save the photoshop file individually than the JPEG file. Well done me.

I also lost the recording to this editing session due to storage problems which was really dispointing.

ACTUAL FILMING: Interrogation scene

     Today was kind of a repeat of the other day where we had a test run of the interrogation scene, the only thing that is different is that last time Richy was the one to move ALL the chairs and table to the other side of the room, but this time it was me since he has a psychology mock next door. Once he got in he came in with 2 glasses of water; one full and one almost empty, at first I didn't understand what these meant. He told me that it is to create meaning which was really clearly explained. Once all the cast got here we got started immediately, this time I did not forget my SD card which was a relief.

     We finished filming under an hour and the room was put back together like it was before like nothing ever happened. Once home I created a google drive file and dragged all of the video files into one single folder for Richy to check and that is the end of today's filming.

ACTUAL FILMING: Chase Scene

     Today was finally the day that the actual filming has come! Both I and Richy were really excited for this time since Y11. We booked the entire corridor and the rooms in the corridor all the way from 3 PM to 5:30 PM so it would give audience a better understanding of the time of day and also help save time on the color grading process as well.

      The night before Richy prepared some fake blood which I didn't even know we were going to use, he just surprises me with a bottle of Harrow water full of red food coloring! Therefore we spent the first half an hour spreading this fake blood all over the shirt and drying it because that is the shirt that Richy prepared for himself to wear for the filming.

Here is a picture of the shirt front to back:

Here is my hand after around 10 to 20 minutes of spreading food coloring on this shirt:

   

P.S. Looked like I just killed someone, ugh

     Before I left home today at 2:40 PM ish because I wasn't feeling well in the morning, I stayed home and worked on how I could shoot each angle properly to make everything go as efficient as possible. When we were about to start filming after Richy had put on his "bloody" shirt, when I switched on the camera, I realized that my 128GB SD card was left on my SD card reader at home;

therefore I must run to the ICT office to negotiate with the staff to borrow an SD card of any capacity for today and the weekends which was normally unacceptable, this was a really bad on my part but I keep negotiating until the staff let me borrow it for the time period mentioned. After around 10 minute wasted, we can finally get the filming started! We explored many camera angles including a canted angle as well which we think we wouldn't be able to pull off. We much shoot everything concisely because we only have 8GB to work with instead of 128GB. Canon DSLR are also known for their video taking up lots of space also.

      It finally came down to the hardest and most anticipated shot which is the eye shot, my lens focal length was only 30cm this mean that I must zoom more in post production which reduces the quality tremendously because we were already filming this particular shot at 720p 50fps because my camera doesn't support 1080p in 50fps it only goes up to 25fps which means that warp stabilizer will not work as well with it and it will not be able to slow down without jittery and stuttering movements.

     At the end, we had a total of 10 different takes on the eye shot alone and shot a total of 7.38GB which was really close to the maximum capacity. Phew. The day ended with a beautiful portrait of Richy and also a wonderful sunset.

P.S. While we were filming we also had a checklist as well!

Trial Run of The Interogation Room

     Today, since Richy and I were both free from 3 to 4 but Ying who was going to be the interrogator and Toy who was going to be the suspect wasn't, we decided to have a trial run at the interrogation room scene but instead having Jay be the interrogator and Richy being the suspect.

Brief storyboard of our initial outline

The set created: two chairs, two signs. Symmetry.
Notice the theme of the room to blend into the white and beige tone of colour.

Props: Paperwork for the interrogator.

CCTV Signs on the board to create more realism within the scene.

FINAL PRODUCT: the interrogator on the side with a blank wall to symbolize his shallow knowledge of the case.
The suspect on the left with a white shirt- not only continuity from the crime scene (what he wore)-
but also hinting his rather cold and calm mannerism. Also, there will be loads of folders and paperworks
on the table next to the suspect- this symbolizes his knowledge of the crime and how much more he significantly
knows than the audience (the detective).

Vlogging For The First Time

      In today's lesson, since we basically can't film because the room we were going to use for the interrogation was our current classroom, we cannot just all of the sudden move all our peers to somewhere else in the Sixth Form Center. So what I and Richy decided was that we should do was a mini vlog done and uploaded by the end of the lesson. It took us around half an hour to film the vlog with several takes, then another half an hour to edit and show it to Mr Harrison for the last 10 minute.

     Mr Harrison's response to the video was really positive in that he said that the way I edit in a very modern and compacted way in just the fact that I only took half an hour to edit. I was really happy with the response that I couldn't help but watch it back several times in my own free time.

     The one talking was Richy and I was the person to hold the camera and edit the vlog itself!

  Without further a do, here is the vlog:

This is the timeline of the project in premiere pro of the vlog:

Evaluation of Location

     Today I went on location scouting while Richy fill out the risk assessment form in the class, we first discussed where I should go first to make sure I use my time wisely and efficient based from the sheet I wrote on the other day.

LOCATION 1: THAI PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE

Script Location: Using this place for the interrogation scene

Strengths:

• Formal
• Small
• Realistic
• Room can be adjusted

Limitation:

• Limited shot types because the room is quite small
• Mise en scene creates more of an ‘office’ type of atmosphere

LOCATION 2: MR JOHNSON’S OFFICE

Script Location: Using this place for the interrogation scene

Strengths:

• Good lighting
• Room for variety of camera angles
• Room can be changed
• Lighting can be manipulated; dark and hostile; bright and friendly

Limitation:

• Looks too friendly
• Does not look serious

LOCATION 3: SOCIAL SCIENCE OFFICE

Script Location: Using this place for the interrogation scene

Strengths:

• Good lighting
• Room for variety of camera angle
• Interrogation room like

Limitation:

• Glass wall may affect the film
• Only available on certain time of day

LOCATION 4: SECONDARY BUILDING CORRIDORS

Script Location: Using this scene for the chase scene

Strengths:

• Long corridor
• Great for a chase scene
• Able to be used for dramatic or gradual zooming in/out
• Takes a long time to make of the whole shot (long and narrow corridor) so this wait may be used to build tension

Limitation:

• Because of lockers, it looks more like a high-school; doesn’t provide a scary atmosphere
• High amount of light needed

LOCATION 5: WALKWAY NEXT TO CONSTRUCTION SITE

Script Location: Using this scene for the chase scene

Strengths:

• Provides a good atmosphere of an alley way
• Long path
• Contrast divide of lighting- gives a perfect shaded and lighted area; great for cameraman to expose and play with shadows in post-production

Limitation:

• Pictures to the left restricts the amount of camera angles
• Construction site; noises and debree (health and safety)
• A lot of white noise

LOCATION 6: SCIENCE BUILDING CORRIDOR

Script Location: Using this scene for the chase and crime scene (where body is found)

Strengths:

• Able to control amount of light- many switches available: dramatic, bright, sinister, plain black
• Range of camera angles can be explored

Limitation:

• Excessive amount of posters; very high-school setting
• Bags and benches
• Classroom doors exposes to classroom settings

     We shared a Google Doc file via Google Drive and work through the strength and weaknesses of each location I went to; furthermore, the scan below is the risk assessment that Richy did.