Reshooting

Production today was so much better and I think we all came away from the day feeling pleased and refreshingly more confident that we had some good footage.

We added to the list of shots we wanted to film that morning and we got all of them, plus some extras and things we hadn't thought we'd have time or would be too complicated shot as well. I think the group felt much more uplifted after a good day of filming with no hiccups or major problems. Jen and Dan are going to capture the footage on Saturday and I'm going to start work on the sound design. I'd recorded a little sound today and some sounds were left on the Marantz by the previous group so I've decided to investigate them when I begin to work with our sounds tomorrow.

Tutorial

The morning of the tutorial, we got together with Jen, as she had fresh eyes, to see how the piece was coming along. She was able to point out some areas that weren't working and we changed these around before going to see Esther.

The tutorial was really helpful because it gave us a fresh insight into our work and Esther came up with some suggestions that I think we can expand on to the benefit of the piece.

One of the suggestions she made that I was really interested in and was wondering why we hadn't thought of it to begin with was getting the protagonist touched by the colour - she suggested having the dots that appear on the wall begin to appear on the protagonist's face. I think this is something we hadn't considered because trying to keep a face still whilst spending time creating a stop motion would be difficult but I think if we think creatively then there will be a new way of approaching this.

The structure was a little weak and she said we could definitely do with paying some attention to tightening it. She picked up that the candles lighting up were our weakest shots - we agreed and decided to reshoot them. She suggested taking out one shot which I hadn't considered removing but once she'd mentioned it, it appeared glaringly obvious it needed to be removed.

When we screened our rough edit to Esther, we had yet to add any sound. Esther again suggested some interesting ideas for a mix such as contact mic on pipes with interesting internal sounds such as water or electricity, a kettle coming to the boil with a whistle that could increase tension and perhaps the juxtaposition of happy music over depressing scenery.

She also suggested some points of reference such as David Lynch's Eraserhead and Jacques Tati in Playtime and Monsoir Hulot's Holiday due to links with mimes in our piece.

I was very pleased with the outcomes of the tutorial because the group had been feeling a little defeatist in terms of our footage and edit - we weren't sure if we'd gone too far off track with all the issues we'd encountered along the way and so hearing that the piece still had potential and was just needing tweaking and some fresh footage uplifted us somewhat. We resolved to reshoot some footage tomorrow and sat back down to edit. Once we'd sat down and were reviewing the footage, we made a list of what we had and what we thought needed doing. We stopped for the day and decided to be fresh for the following days filming.

New Ideas/Direction

From editing today, Dan and I have realised that the original idea was very linear and almost narrative based. From the footage we have, we don't feel we can communicate the same idea we had at the beginning. We are going to take a much more abstract feel using repetitions and begin to splice in frames in segments and make the pace of the film much faster using rapid cuts between objects.

We still want the emphasis to be on the colour that begins to seep into the character's life and mindset but we want to do it in a more abstract way, without having to explicitly explain the characters motions to getting there.

When we'd first envisioned the piece, the character was going to be static in most shots and one important shot would be the character's interaction with a different self in a mirror before the colour began to seep in - we also wanted the colour to come from a malleable figurine which would be stop motioned into the character and would trigger the colour transformation. However, the mirror we intended to use was never delivered and the stop motion idea with the time we had and now have left is too complex for the amount of on screen time and it's effectiveness will have, so we decided to change these ideas subtly. Instead, we show the black and white character trapped in the television and the colour balls represent the colour beginning to seep into the protagonist's life. We were going to use the veins stop motion in conjunction with a solid ball object appearing in the protagonist's hand but again, this caused problems when we tried it and the footage of the stop motion was good aside from the lighting which made the shot unusable.

Editing

Today we captured the footage from the previous day and began to edit the stop motion together. During this process, I learnt that a setting can be changed before importing pictures which creates a duration for every picture that is then imported. So, when changed, the image will be imported as a 00:00:01 clip which is very useful when importing images that need to be used for just one frame.

We set out a rough assembly of which order we wanted to begin with after viewing the footage we had (above) and then we began to refine the shots.

More Filming

Today we aimed to get some of the stop motion footage that we'd been allowing time for and so hadn't shot yet. Although it is perhaps one of the most time consuming things I've done, working well as a team made the process easier. We co-ordinated by having two people changing the stop motion and one person operating the camera, swapping every so often.

As well as shooting the stop motion footage, we took some more footage that we thought hadn't turned out as well when it was reviewed. Our lighting hadn't come out the way that we'd thought when we were setting up with the small viewer on the camera, also some of the scene that we had counted to be out of shot was in shot when the footage was uploaded to the computer. The screen omitted a larger amount of space being captured than we'd thought and this made some of our shots unusable.

Capturing and Reviewing

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go in to capture and edit the footage over the weekend - instead, I was filled in on the progress by Jen and Dan. We had been worried about getting enough footage to fill 5 minutes as our main elements of the film were stop motion and we knew this was time consuming to produce but once edited amounts to little on screen time.

Our suspicions that we wouldn't have enough footage to fill the time were confirmed and once Jen and Dan had told me, I began to try to think of some ideas that I could bring to further shooting. After some deliberation, Jen and Dan decided to continue with some editing today and to begin more shooting on Tuesday.

I was unable to go in today because I'd been unwell, so I again got some feedback. The reshoot tomorrow will be the last opportunity to get some footage before we begin editing on Wednesday for our tutorial on Thursday.

I hope that we can get enough to make a decent rough edit so that we can get some much needed feedback.

Filming

Above: Materials for stop motion and stop tricks

We got off to a disappointing start on Wednesday as the actor called us half an hour before we intended to start shooting to say that he had just been injured and was in the hospital! This left us with no alternative but to try to get as many cutaways and shots that we thought we might be able to do without the actor needing to be present that day. Unfortunately, because our idea is to have the black and white section then the colour, we couldn't shoot out of sequence as this would create an issue with continuity - the colour stop motion meant using the wall space and this would invariably be in shot when we wanted to shoot blackand white scenes if we didn't shoot chronologically.

Therefore, this set back created a major problem for us that day however, we did try to get as much done as we could.

Above: Filming the clock cutaway/stop trick

On Thursday, we did a lot more. Dan was now going to be the protagonist as we felt we had little alternative but we did lose some time trying to find white face paint that would cover enough - the stuff we'd found on Wednesday was useless!

We worked our way through a fair amount of shots on the rough list we'd written out but we'd anticipated we'd get through more. A lot of what we need to do is stop motion and we decided to do that in one big chunk, so we finished the shooting with the prospect of using the weekend to capture and edit the footage we already had and review which gaps we had that needed filling in terms of shots we had wanted and if there were any new ideas that came to us after seeing what we'd already got.

Below: The ending image for the veins stop motion