3) How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
Throughout the span of 4 to 5 months, I have developed some production skills that was very useful that I will be sure to remember for future uses. As a reminder to my future self, I have created 2 top trump cards that replicate me at the start of Sept of last year (2016) to now (Feb 2017).
There were 3 films in total that I've created with various different people from the class, 2 of which were sort of a practice to understand conventions and editing and the last one is the actual film opening.
My creativity skills has improved a tiny bit, partially because I have already been uploading videos to my own YouTube channel. I started my YouTube channel a year ago and making a bit of money from it, I tend to do lyrics video that is unique from other YouTube channels out there by going outdoors and finding a perfect fit scene to the song, I must be very careful of copyright though. Once I finish editing these videos I would then upload it on to YouTube straight away then shared onto social networks where my friends would see it. I would then show it to my family and relatives, most of the time I would get a many response out of them and that would give me motivation to do more. I would also ask people for feedbacks of what they thought of it also. This applies the same to my project as well, once I was finished with my rough cut, I'd show them to my relatives. However, due to the videos I due are lyrics base and it's just the case of me listening to it, breakdown the song in Japanese and in some case if I'm very free, translate it; the film opening and the other two requires more creativity and to get more into the concept of it, this makes it more complex than what I'm used to doing.
From October of last year to now, my cinematography skills had gone up a fair bit. At first I did not really have a clue on how I could achieve a specific camera angle. However, this changed tremendously when I changed my mindset from thinking "I can't do it" to "I can do it!". I have so many camera angles that I was unable to achieve at first; but due to the change in mindset, I was able to accomplish all these angles. It's unbelievable how much have changed. But then again, I still have many things to learn from this. Here are various different camera angles I got to explore from all the three film I had made.
As seen in the collection of screenshots, these were camera angles that I never thought I will be able to do before; tracking shots were amongst the hardest shot to execute with no other tools other than my own hands and feet, we would take about 6 to 7 shots of them and only one of them will look the way we wanted to, in fact, in 2 of them I was required to run/walk with my back turn to the wall and find this really challenging indeed.
POV (Point of View) shots can be awkward in some cases such as the fact that I must put both of my hands whilst grabbing on to my camera and wrapping myself around the person that we were looking through the vision of and holding it still. There is this very awkward moment when we were filming the last scene for the film opening where we were looking through the eyes of the interrogator it happens that Ying was the interrogator so I must do what I've said to Ying. Thank god there were no teachers around there because we were filming after school. We took 5 takes until it actually look quite decent. However, in some cases it could actually be fun! the one we did for "The Chase" was that Bing who played as the victim in that film wasn't willing to hold the camera and do a POV shot so I had to do it since Bamm2 was already playing as the murderer. We were finding a way to prevent me breaking my back when falling to the ground, we tried looking around school for a mattress or something soft to fall on to, as we were about go to the PE department for some gymnastic matte, I thought why not use the couch in the drama room which was much closer that the PE department. We asked Mr Herbert the drama teacher nicely for it and he approved so we dragged and carried the couch to the filming location which was pretty near. So now we were able to film the POV shot without myself getting injured. Yay... All in all, POV shot can be quite challenging to execute, but once I got it, it's an amazing feeling to have.
OTSS (Over The Shoulder Shot) requires a fair bit of balancing skill which I do not have, as seen I have only used it once and didn't use it again because we didn't really have a use for it. Although that one shot alone took me 6 times to film because I kept on felling off the chair I was standing on, it was really funny to actually watch back the footage back.
Canted angle is hard to maintain consistency, especially if I wanted to film in the exact same place, this is because I did have anything to put the camera on a fixed position. Sometime, even though we nailed the performance, but a change in the angle that was too acute or obtuse made us had to reshoot the sequence again and again.
Lastly, the shot that the most anticipated and the hardest to pull off, it was the zoom out shot. At glance it seems simple to just place a camera at an angle, zoom in the most at 250mm, apreture 4.0 and then slowly zoom out. Turns out, this shot took us 15 times to record because we were having issues of how to zoom out very smoothly and spinning as well. The obstacle along the way were firstly, Richy's eye must not blink for around 15 to 20 seconds, secondly the camera was on the floor as well as myself which I will slowly spin the camera around as well as zooming out the lens. First 10 times I was spinning the camera but then we realised later that we can actually do the spinning in post production. That meant that one of our issues was eliminated. Zooming out the zoom ring was still challenging to keep it smooth. At the end when it was 5PM and it was getting darker, we started to lose light so we called it a day there. When I went home, all the shots were near unusable, when we applied an effect on premiere called warp stabilizer, it looked alright but one significance problem was that Richy's pupil was moving. We decided to just leave it be and use that specific shot.
Before starting this project, I have a decent knowledge of editing already, if I do not understand a specific area of editing I will often look through YouTube for tutorials online so I don't need to interrupt my teacher. However, there are some new things that I never learnt before which was then suggested to me by my friend who also likes editing.
One of those new things I that my friend suggested to me was "Warp Stabilizer" it was a stabilising tool which works really well, I was really surprised the first time I used it. Since then I've been using it when necessary. The first time I used it was on the home when I was capturing a still shot of just placing my phone on my car dashboard towards the window and just letting it sit there for 20 seconds. The initial footage looks really shaky but when I've applied warp stabiliser it was a totally different kind of footage.
Furthermore, I went even further with masking by combining it with key framing! This was when I was really finding it fun to mask points, normally premiere would automatically track the points we've chosen automatically, however this wasn't the case for this project. I must manually move the mask around for each frame. It was tiring but sure is rewarding.
Key framing was something I knew a bit of at the first of the year, I asked my media studies teacher Mr Harrison for a little advice on it and he essentially taught me how the positions, scale and rotation of the sequence can be moved all at once and requires a little bit of patience. I then applied this to the most anticipated clip which was the zoom out shot on the eye which was then combined with Warp Stabilizer to create the smoothest footage I can accomplish.
This was the key framing timeline for the eye shot.
Throughout the span of 4 to 5 months, I have developed some production skills that was very useful that I will be sure to remember for future uses. As a reminder to my future self, I have created 2 top trump cards that replicate me at the start of Sept of last year (2016) to now (Feb 2017).
There were 3 films in total that I've created with various different people from the class, 2 of which were sort of a practice to understand conventions and editing and the last one is the actual film opening.
This film was sort of a challenge set by our teacher to create a 1 minute film
This film is created so that we understand about conventions of thrillers more in detail
This is the actual film opening
My creativity skills has improved a tiny bit, partially because I have already been uploading videos to my own YouTube channel. I started my YouTube channel a year ago and making a bit of money from it, I tend to do lyrics video that is unique from other YouTube channels out there by going outdoors and finding a perfect fit scene to the song, I must be very careful of copyright though. Once I finish editing these videos I would then upload it on to YouTube straight away then shared onto social networks where my friends would see it. I would then show it to my family and relatives, most of the time I would get a many response out of them and that would give me motivation to do more. I would also ask people for feedbacks of what they thought of it also. This applies the same to my project as well, once I was finished with my rough cut, I'd show them to my relatives. However, due to the videos I due are lyrics base and it's just the case of me listening to it, breakdown the song in Japanese and in some case if I'm very free, translate it; the film opening and the other two requires more creativity and to get more into the concept of it, this makes it more complex than what I'm used to doing.
From October of last year to now, my cinematography skills had gone up a fair bit. At first I did not really have a clue on how I could achieve a specific camera angle. However, this changed tremendously when I changed my mindset from thinking "I can't do it" to "I can do it!". I have so many camera angles that I was unable to achieve at first; but due to the change in mindset, I was able to accomplish all these angles. It's unbelievable how much have changed. But then again, I still have many things to learn from this. Here are various different camera angles I got to explore from all the three film I had made.
As seen in the collection of screenshots, these were camera angles that I never thought I will be able to do before; tracking shots were amongst the hardest shot to execute with no other tools other than my own hands and feet, we would take about 6 to 7 shots of them and only one of them will look the way we wanted to, in fact, in 2 of them I was required to run/walk with my back turn to the wall and find this really challenging indeed.
POV (Point of View) shots can be awkward in some cases such as the fact that I must put both of my hands whilst grabbing on to my camera and wrapping myself around the person that we were looking through the vision of and holding it still. There is this very awkward moment when we were filming the last scene for the film opening where we were looking through the eyes of the interrogator it happens that Ying was the interrogator so I must do what I've said to Ying. Thank god there were no teachers around there because we were filming after school. We took 5 takes until it actually look quite decent. However, in some cases it could actually be fun! the one we did for "The Chase" was that Bing who played as the victim in that film wasn't willing to hold the camera and do a POV shot so I had to do it since Bamm2 was already playing as the murderer. We were finding a way to prevent me breaking my back when falling to the ground, we tried looking around school for a mattress or something soft to fall on to, as we were about go to the PE department for some gymnastic matte, I thought why not use the couch in the drama room which was much closer that the PE department. We asked Mr Herbert the drama teacher nicely for it and he approved so we dragged and carried the couch to the filming location which was pretty near. So now we were able to film the POV shot without myself getting injured. Yay... All in all, POV shot can be quite challenging to execute, but once I got it, it's an amazing feeling to have.
OTSS (Over The Shoulder Shot) requires a fair bit of balancing skill which I do not have, as seen I have only used it once and didn't use it again because we didn't really have a use for it. Although that one shot alone took me 6 times to film because I kept on felling off the chair I was standing on, it was really funny to actually watch back the footage back.
Canted angle is hard to maintain consistency, especially if I wanted to film in the exact same place, this is because I did have anything to put the camera on a fixed position. Sometime, even though we nailed the performance, but a change in the angle that was too acute or obtuse made us had to reshoot the sequence again and again.
Lastly, the shot that the most anticipated and the hardest to pull off, it was the zoom out shot. At glance it seems simple to just place a camera at an angle, zoom in the most at 250mm, apreture 4.0 and then slowly zoom out. Turns out, this shot took us 15 times to record because we were having issues of how to zoom out very smoothly and spinning as well. The obstacle along the way were firstly, Richy's eye must not blink for around 15 to 20 seconds, secondly the camera was on the floor as well as myself which I will slowly spin the camera around as well as zooming out the lens. First 10 times I was spinning the camera but then we realised later that we can actually do the spinning in post production. That meant that one of our issues was eliminated. Zooming out the zoom ring was still challenging to keep it smooth. At the end when it was 5PM and it was getting darker, we started to lose light so we called it a day there. When I went home, all the shots were near unusable, when we applied an effect on premiere called warp stabilizer, it looked alright but one significance problem was that Richy's pupil was moving. We decided to just leave it be and use that specific shot.
Before starting this project, I have a decent knowledge of editing already, if I do not understand a specific area of editing I will often look through YouTube for tutorials online so I don't need to interrupt my teacher. However, there are some new things that I never learnt before which was then suggested to me by my friend who also likes editing.
One of those new things I that my friend suggested to me was "Warp Stabilizer" it was a stabilising tool which works really well, I was really surprised the first time I used it. Since then I've been using it when necessary. The first time I used it was on the home when I was capturing a still shot of just placing my phone on my car dashboard towards the window and just letting it sit there for 20 seconds. The initial footage looks really shaky but when I've applied warp stabiliser it was a totally different kind of footage.
Masking is one of the editing aspects that I was once trying to stay away from just from the fact that I did not have a stylus, that was a bad choice on my part when I realised how simple it actually was. Initially I did not use it in the film opening at all until the rough cut came around where as a class we get to watch each others film opening and gave feedback to one another. Some of the feedback mentioned that water was too clear to see.This either requires a reshoot or editing so I said to Richy that I will try to fix up the water, I didn't have a clue at first how to fix it but then I duplicated the sequence and try to mess around with the glass until I decided to touch upon masking. What I did was I masked it so that it only highlight the water and colour correcting it to a more light blue look. Although it looked a bit weird at first, it's certainly better than nothing right?
Furthermore, I went even further with masking by combining it with key framing! This was when I was really finding it fun to mask points, normally premiere would automatically track the points we've chosen automatically, however this wasn't the case for this project. I must manually move the mask around for each frame. It was tiring but sure is rewarding.
Key framing was something I knew a bit of at the first of the year, I asked my media studies teacher Mr Harrison for a little advice on it and he essentially taught me how the positions, scale and rotation of the sequence can be moved all at once and requires a little bit of patience. I then applied this to the most anticipated clip which was the zoom out shot on the eye which was then combined with Warp Stabilizer to create the smoothest footage I can accomplish.
This was the key framing timeline for the eye shot.
During this project, we had so many paperwork for filming, risk assessments, storyboard and more, in order to keep track of all these, we have our own thought book to put everything into. Bamm2 who I filmed "The Chase" with had suggested an app that I can keep my paperwork digitally, it's called "FasterScan" and it's totally FREE which was a relieve.
The scan is very reliable as long as the image is clear, this is great because I can organise all the paperwork on my computer in the order I wanted to. In terms of organisation of how we get things done, me and Richy will first plan together at the beginning of the week of what's happening on the week; for the first few weeks they were straight up planning and location evaluating and anything besides the actual filming. Here are some examples of the scan, in this case it was the risk assessment and the storyboard for both the film.
Around three weeks in is when we started to do some actual filming. My equipment were prepared properly e.g. camera, battery fully charged, tripod, laptop. However, on the day we were supposed to film the chase scene for the film opening, I forgot to bring put my SD card into my camera the night before so I ended up needing to borrow one of ICT services. My SD card that I forgot was 128GB and the one they let me borrow was an 8GB which mean that we were limited on how much we can shoot because Canon are known for their ridiculous video file size.
If I have not forgotten my SD card, I would have given myself a 5/10 rather than a 4 because other than that I have never did anything wrong this major because without an SD card I wouldn't be able to film anything. At the end of the filming session I was left with 620MB which was less than a GB left. What a relieve that we did not overshoot the capacity or else we might need to borrow one more from them which I would not want to do that because getting one was already a hassle.
Sound has always been a big part of my life ever since I started my YouTube career. To finally get a chance to work on projects that sound is quite important was really exciting, first time that I was placing each footstep sound effects was very repetitive but once I get to see the big picture of why sound is important for communicating the mood to audience, that made me want to do more. My placements in the first few sequence were very out of place and as I kept on going it started to get more "in sync" with the footage and so when I finish with everything sound related, I would watch the film from the beginning and see in which area it's not in sync At the end, the echoes falls right into place and it definitely adds the tension to the film and gave the film a lot more depth. To study more abound sound, there was a brand new "Mod" which is essentially an add on to a game called "Minecraft" called the "Sound Physics" mod. Essentially, it give us the player an atmospheric feeling of actually being in a giant world with more realistic sounds. E.g. when in caves everything will be a lot more echoey. This made me motivated to make a video on this particular aspect. From that point onward, it made me felt that sound is quite a major part in movies.
In terms of how I find these sounds, they were ranged from several sites such as YouTube and websites that I used maybe once or twice which is caleed freeSFX, it's a website which contains more than 1000 different sound effects and all of them are unique and free with no extra cost for them. When I do find one effect that I happen to like but they sounded a little bit weird, I would fix up the sound by using a software called Audacity. This program is so useful if I wanted to add extra echoes to a sound effect. This program is widely used by many film director because extra plugins can also be installed on this software.
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