What did I do?
I am mainly in charge of filming the whole opening while Noor is the main actress and she have to do most of the acting.
What have I learnt ?
time-management :planing is important.
Myself and Noor thought that we have enough planing in the preparation process. However, when we test out, some of the plans does not seems to work successfully. And we are aware that we are not totally ready for shooting the footage. Some shots does not seems to be the same as what er think it should be, and failed to meets our exceptions in the continuity when we combines the footage. Also, the process is much more time-consuming than what we thought at the beginning. Adding non that me and Noor are both perfectionist, we always want one more take and shots from different perspective for a better quality. However, this must go in to planing.
2. Equipment and development in skills of using it
1) Nikon D3500
We uses Nikon d3500 for our filming process. Within the process, I have learnt how to adjust the parameters in setting, which gives a more natural effect than edit it after filming. Aside from basic setting like ISO, aperture, shutter speed. I also encountered and learned how to adjust white balance, exposure mode and etc. to changes the color grading and creates effects straight out from the camera.
For example, white balance is the color temperature of a image. Nikon camera provide you with default settings under different situation that you can choose from, but you can also adjust and set it yourself base on the effect you want to create. Not only temperature, the tonal range is also changeable. And this is a big thing that I learnt and actually creates some shots with very good color grading.
Moving away from the camera setting, I also learnt how to apply the shot angles and movements that we learnt in lessons to reality when I was physically handling the camera. The camera is pretty heavy and other tools are needed to maintain stability sometimes. Therefore, I learnt how to use:
2. RONIN Camera stabilizer
Although a stabilizer further add on the the weight, but when it connect to the camera, no matter how hard you hand shake, it will stabilize you camera perfectly and creates stable footages.
Before using it, you need to balance the gimbal. It takes me a whole afternoon try to learn and balance the camera so it is reading when we need it. Balancing is required in all axes(tilt, roll, pan), and also I download a app to do the final balancing when activate and control the movement of the axes.
3. Tripod
I also learnt how to use tripod for unmoving shots, as it maintain the camera at a same level, but when you want to move the camera with stability, tripod is not a good choice.
3. What skills have you utilizes and developed?
1. Teamwork and cooperation
One skill that we clearly developed is ability to work as a group. Despite from me and my partner always match on generating ideas and agreement on decision-making. We still have little conflict when we are discussing the logic of plot and what semiotics we want to put in to hint the audience. So this time I felt a effective conversion is really important, to stand on each other’s perspective and don’t be that extreme. Be a good listener and always leave space for changes is important when work as group, to produce a product which 1+1 > 2. Me and my partner did that very well in understanding each other.
2. constructing meaning through mise en scene, camera, sound, and editing.
camera angles and movement
Fo example, a high angle shot of the character can signify his/her vulnerability, and a sense overwhelm especially when it is a pov high angle. Also, handheld to show the inconsistency and instability of mental state. We give a reason to every single shot when we are planing and doing the storyboard, try to visualize the shot and see if it is fit for purposes.
editing
development of editing technique and how to use editing softwares. — creates effects which cannot produce by camera. And apply what we learn for editing technique and what we see from movies to our own products. For example, like montages and cross—cutting. I was deeply inspired by “godfather”, the montage in the end of the film creates a parallel timeline and matching the moment of equilibrium and disequilibrium. I think this is also a skill to apply what you see in to what you did.
mise en scene
I believe, every piece of prop, setting, and things appear in the footage is there for a reason. So I did spend a lot of time consider what should we put in on the set to hint the audience, and what should we eliminate from the footage that may misleading the audience to maintain the rationality.
sound
The background music at the opening is unique because I added my hum of “Daisy, Daisy…” on the existing background music. This is a way I developed of add creativity to the existing material and construct a new ingredient when audience is try to analyze this part of the music.
3. What did you learnt about continuity editing?
Most narrative film is made with the goal to construct a clear and coherent event structure so that the viewer can readily understand the sequence of events depicted in it.Film continuity is managed in the service of telling a story and thus creating a sense of continuity and discontinuity of events within the story world. To this end, filmmakers rely on formal devices for editing together the distinct camera shots that make up a film. Some of these devices are quite dramatic, such as the fade-out, fade-in, or dissolve, and are intended to signal a shift in scenes. Most often, a cut is intended to convey a continuous flow of events and be “invisible” to viewer. So our job is tomato the connection of shots natural.
4. What difficulties have you encountered and how do we overcome that?
1. Making sense
In the process of filming, we need to consider the rationality of the story, the story should be consistent, but also innovative and imaginative. By the fact that we also took into account the quality, cohesion and aesthetic of the shot, there is a lot to think about in making the storyline logic and not put tonnes of information in 2 minutes for audience to decode. In this experience, I think the most difficult thing to overcome is to let the audience understand the information we want to convey. In only two minutes, we need to clearly explain the story background and shape the first impression of the protagonist. We spent a lot of time balancing the logic of the plot and creating the Enigma code. The quality and reputation of a movie depend on the audience, and we overcame this problem by collecting a lot of different opinions from variety of audience and making sure where is the part that they don’t understand and fix it. Also, thinks of alternatives to present the information more obvious by letting the audience to guess the deeper meaning.(We add narration)
2. unexpected emergency
problems we met which breaks the continuity
Noor’s glass break in the middle of shooting process and we already have a lot of quality footage with her previous glass
When filming the scene outside of school gate in the afternoon, there are more and more parents gathered around the school gate to pick up their child. So every time we shoot, there background people is different as previous
However, after we are aware of that, to solve problem 1, we find a specific perspective where the the broken part of Noor’s glass isn’t that obvious (glued by glue gun).
To solve problem 2, we edit and cut the part where audience can easily tell that there is a difference in the background parents from different footage.
NEXT STEP
We need to finish the final cut after collecting the responses from audience towards our rough cut.
There are still existing problems such as, some of the audience does not understand the main message/ relationship between characters/hints that we are trying to transfer.
Also, we are still not quite satisfies with the hallway scene to Daisy and Chris transition, it is a little bit odd and the pace slightly rushed. There is not a reason gave for why Daisy is at Chris house, maybe an extra bit will be added to inform the reason.
Another problem is time. After added our studio logo, we still have 30 second more than the maximum time of 2 minutes, we need to think of solutions to reduce the time. At this point, we might reduce the time of the seduction montage.
Some reshoots:
1) scene with low-key lighting- there are too much noise which reduce the quality of our whole opening and seems distracting We might want to try to reshoot some of that with a camera that can give you better low-light performance.
For all footage done in low-key lighting, the noise is obvious
2) When Daisy stand in front of the mirror, the mirror is dirty and distractive because of the spot/ water trace. The angle and quality of this footage is perfect despite by the negative influence of the spots.
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