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| A storyboard for the bike accident production |
Planning the final video:
Ideas:
-
Video diary in abandoned building during apocalyptic
times.
A camera switches on and a person walks to
a chair and sits down, the room around him is in a wreck with peeling wallpaper
and dusty flooring. The person starts talking, explaining the situation, that
civilisation has collapsed. The camera cuts away from the person showing his
past experiences, surviving in the building. The video ends with a plead for
help should anyone find the camera.
-
Lost in the woods being hunted by an unknown figure
Someone ends up getting lost while out in
the woods and goes deeper and deeper into the forest, as night falls he starts
to see things moving out of the corner of his eye
-
Someone dies and becomes a ghost, they then try to get
peoples attention
Someone dies in an accident and goes about
their daily life. Everyone seems to ignore them until finally they see they
have been found dead on the news. The victim runs home and finds the body
I picked idea 3 and began developing the idea:
Final
design idea
Someone wakes up in the morning and goes
about their daily routine, the camera
goes through multiple shots of them brushing their teeth and eating breakfast
before falling over and hitting their head. On a counter.
They wake up shortly after and head to
college. A person ignores him as they pass on the stairs and a large group
seems to blank him. The camera cuts from a long shot as he enters the building
and another as he climbs the stairs. The pass on the stairs will be a medium
shot and another long shot will follow as the character approaches the group.
They all proceed to the classroom and the
character sits himself down and tries to get the computer to work. It doesn’t,
and not too long afterwards a classmate calls everyone over. The character
looks over his shoulder and sees a news report all about his own death.
The next scene is of the character running
home and going inside to find their own body on the floor. Long shots will be
used for the running scenes, either one or two and a close up will be used as
he goes inside, zooming on the characters hand as he unlocks.
Final Outcome
Finally, I got filming and editing until the video was done. The finished product can be seen below.
Evaluation
Unit 54 was a task given to
us to create a short film in order to develop your skills in editing media. The
idea itself wasn’t the most important aspect, it was the edits we needed. My
film was created over the entire time we were given to complete the task. This
was about a week. The filming was done over the course of a day, and the
editing was finished a little while after. These edits included a change of
soundtrack, audio effects, cutting, fading, and text on-screen. Along with
animations with the credits scrolling and a small use of masking to create
duplicates of the actor and myself.
The video I created for unit
54 had been created over the period of 7 days, a week. So some mistakes were
bound to happen. For one, the camera movement would have been better if the
panning shots were smoother. The camera movement did tend to be quite shaky
when moving so I could have done something to smooth that out, like place a
surface down to slide it along etc. Another minor error was the fact I did not
have professional actors. Although they performed well, and it would have been
hard to get hold of better actors, this is still something that could have been
improved.
Of course many things could
have been improved, but one aspect that stood out to me as one of the largest
points was the sudden jump between music tracks at one point. I attempted to
resolve this issue by fading the music into the next track, and then inserting
a large empty space for the music to fade out and the new music to fade back
in. Unfortunately, these took away from the effect of the film and so were
scrapped. I ended up just choosing to have the music cut out to be replaced by
distant memories of the protagonist. It seemed to work reasonably well and gave
the effect of being jerked out of your everyday life.
During the production of this
film, I learned a little more about camera control and editing. For camera
control, it’s not as easy as just standing in the right place and holding the
camera as still as possible, you need to think of ways you can keep it in the
right place, and plan where things will come in and out of shot. There’s also a
need to keep a consistency of speed when panning so the shot doesn’t just suddenly
start and stop with a jerk. The shot needs to look smooth.
Then editing. Most of it
wasn’t all that difficult, just a case of placing the clips next to each other,
however, I did learn a few new things, for example I learned how to add echo
effects and make two of the same person in one shot. All of the edits I used, I
felt were effective in conveying what was going on in the short film.
If I were to film it once
more, I would change a few things. Such as the visibility of the body at the
very end of the film. All you can see in the final product is the feet and this
does not show that I did in fact duplicate the actor. I could have added
several effects to improve the visual quality of the movie. This could have
included film grain etc. If I could, I would have resolved the cutting issue
between the two tracks near the beginning, as this would be m main quarrel with
the production. I may have used different tracks all together or maybe replaced
the sudden silence with a large crack of the head hitting the kitchen counter.
In conclusion I felt it went
reasonably well and the short film delivered the effect I was after. The
editing was where I needed it and even though the camera wasn’t the most
stable, it still was as effective and was clear enough to see what was going
on.
