Unit 54 Film and Video Techniques

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.