Film Opening Day 16: Final Piece - Rough Cut

Film Opening Day 16: Final Piece - Rough Cut

Okay, before we go anywhere further with this blog, I just wanted to let you know that I did this and the rough cut on a school laptop because mine broke. It's got issues with the mainboard and basically it's decided it no longer wants to be a laptop and stopped charging completely. Buying a Macbook Pro Retina 13"... smart move. Buying the first generation? Not so smart.

Right, back to the rough cut.

Now that we have this nice footage and all good, it's time to do the final bit of the project; the editing. From this point on, I'll probably be using "I" more than "we" because I did most of the editing; Ten did the planning and the music, and Pooh did a lot of the camera work and some of the planning, and we all the did location and the organising.

Well, when I say all is as planned I mean most things are going well. So far we're missing:
- A scene for the credits scene
- My laptop *cry*
- ALL THE AUDIO
At this point we still don't have any audio, as Ten is finishing the music, and the audio from the footage had issues (I'll explain this later) so our rough cut will most likely be a silent film.

Summary of rough cut.
What went well:
- The footage was good. Most of the shots were as we wanted, and some even better (what didn't look as good in real life, we decided not to use and found/experimented with shots that worked better).
- We finished on time!

What didn't go well:
- Some of the audio had people talking in it and there were words in there which probably shouldn't be in a film opening. This is most likely because there were a group of teenagers hanging out near our filming area... understandable as this was a public area. This was just the background/white noise though... and I remembered filming the area without the actors before we began filming the actual thing, so I could probably use the audio from that.
- I wasn't allowed to have a tripod out so some of the shots weren't as stable as I hoped.

Summary:
- Silent film done
- Good shots
- Generally pleased
- Here it is.

Film Opening Day 15: Final Piece - Logos and Names

Film Opening Day 15: Final Piece - Logos and Names

As I began the editing process, Ten created 3 logos of production companies to which we were to put into the final piece, so that our piece would look professional and authentic. I also had another logo in which we were going to include in our final piece; the "Pico and Pleco Multimedia" logo which I made for my friend Pun and I as we work on a lot of projects together.

Initial, Ten and Pooh wanted to purely use company names and no real names at all, but I argued that using real names looked more professional and showed them each variation of the final piece; they liked the real name version better.

Although I only included one of the 3 designs Ten sent me (due to the 2 minute time limit and the music transition not fitting if we added more), the other two were fairly nice as well. The final ones are a little different to these as we decided to make some changes to the logos for the final piece. Here are the originals:

Mountain Peak Photos (Supposed to be Mountain Peak Pictures):

 

Corrected:

Mounten Peak and Macken Pictures:

 

Edition 2:

Square Root 10^-9 studios:

Pico and Pleco Multimedia:

Which isn't a professional company yet... some day though ;)

Film Opening Day 14: Final Piece - Music

Film Opening Day 14: Music - 

Part A

We decided to make our own music, just so our film opening is even more unique. The music was written by Rute, a friend of ours, played by Ten, and recorded and edited/enhanced by George. Overall, we were quite pleased with the piece and went with it.

Initially, Ten and I spent about 10-15 minutes in the school's music department playing the piece on one of the computers, and into 'Garageband' so that we could experiment with instruments effects. Eventually, we decided that just playing it with the piano seemed ideal, as we felt it was more authentic. The following is a sample of the piece.

Film Opening Day 13: Filming - Part C

Film Opening Day 13: Filming - Part C

Film Opening Day 12: Filming - Part B

Film Opening Day 12: Filming -  Part B

Today was the first official day of filming. Once the team assembled (both humans and equipment), we applied makeup on Too's face and neck, so that he looked dead and lifeless. This was done by May Blanch, a friend of mine in which I asked to come along to give us a hand with the makeup. Following this, we tried some test shots at the first house (nice house). We also made some changes to our initial plan, such as camera angles and positioning of the actors as we found that certain things didn't turn out as planned (the changes made the shots look better and more mysterious). We filmed the head stroking scene (scene 2) next to the pool and the kitchen scenes at this house. An issue we had here was the limited amount of space we had to set up equipment; convenient/safe places did not give good shots. We had to risk damaging the equipment by setting up on edges and rocky surfaces, so either Pooh or myself always held on to the camera+tripod.

After a short break (it was REALLY HOT today), we made our way over to the uncompleted house to film the second proceeding scene of the  of the rubbing head part (Second scene). Once we were satisfied with the shots, we traveled to Paragon (a shopping mall in the centre of Bangkok) to film the very first scene when she bumped into Pooh (protagonist). I think we did about 10-15 takes until we finally got what we wanted. The other scenes at the same location (such as the walking away/Pooh closeup scenes) weren't so hard and only took 4-5 takes before we got it right. I think we may need to add warp stabiliser to a lot of the footage, as the security guard there did not allow us to use tripods (BUT OTHER PEOPLE USING SELFIE STICKS AND HAVING A PICNIC IS ABSOLUTELY FINE... I EVEN HAD MY LAPTOP SET UP ON THE FLOOR)!

SUMMARY:
- Too puts on makeup
- Ton, Too, and Ken are fascinated by the GoPro
- I break a tripod
- I buy a new tripod
- A guard then tells me I can't use a tripod
- Selfie sticks are okay :/

Film Opening Day 11: R&D - Snapshots/Montage

Film Opening Day 11: R&D -  Snapshots/Montage

Day 11, we worked on the snapshots and the montages. It took a substantial amount of time as I messed around with shots in order to get the shadows from each shot and actors to fade in/out as closely together as possible. Perfectly aligning them was not possible as the body posture of the actors were different. We also used different actors for each shot (e.g. drinking and kissing). However, we adjusted it so that it aligned as closely as possible. We as took as many takes as possible, therefore it was difficult to choose which ones matched and involved a lot of importing and deleting.

Film Opening Day 10: R&D - Music

Film Opening Day 10: R&D - Music

This time I went to the music department with my friend to make a sample tune of the music we're going to use for the film. We used Garageband to create the sample of the original tune at first. We mostly focused on the tune of the piece, as it was undecided on how we're going to play the piece so it goes well with our film.

Here is the sample piece.