Film Opening - First UK Shoot

Last Friday 11th March, our group went to Isaac's house to shoot the scenes for our opening which we could easily complete in the UK; only the footage of New York City has so far been needed to be shot on location. We found it simple yet effective to use the household items readily available, which in many shots are the main focus as this section of our opening sequence reflects ordinary household life in contrast to the busy bustling life in New York City we saw previously. These scenes we shot in the UK were considerably easy to film in comparison to the US shoot, where setting up for a scene would take time as we all had to agree on the angles we wanted and the places we wanted to film; the shots were also much longer in duration. Each shot from the UK shoot took between 1-3 takes each time, and for both UK and US shoots we used the same camera and all the footage was shot in 1080p HD in 16:9, as opposed to our preliminary task which was edited in 4:3.
We still have more footage to film, specifically of the main character driving his car, which at present we plan to shoot later this week (between 14th-18th March).

Film Opening - New York Shoot

We have recently started shooting our film opening which has been going quickly but efficiently and we are all pleased with how the footage looks thus far, especially because both Isaac and I have been able to travel to New York over the February half term to shoot footage especially for this project. We have filmed footage which successfully reflects the busy lifestyle of New York City and also its rich culture and most famous sights, such as the view from the Empire State Building we shot by night. We had hoped to visit the Brooklyn Bridge although we couldn't due to time constraints. We shot all the footage between our stay from 22nd-26th February (Tues-Sat) as we visited each place within the city and shot whichever sights we felt would be appropriate for the feel of our opening, so we filmed each shot as we came to each location. Other filming locations include the metro station at Grand Central Station and the exterior of the New York Film Academy.

Usually only one or two takes were required for each shot taken during the New York shoot, so the process was very quick and we fortunately shot all of the footage we wanted during the time we had.

Film Opening Task - Part 2

During this week we have been planning our film opening further and have come up with many ideas. We have resourced to other films in the comic book genre or films which have used similar techniques to those we have thought of using for inspiration, referring back to recent films such as Kickass, The Dark Knight, The Incredibles, Sky High, Watchmen and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. We originally started planning our sequence out at an estimated length of 5 minutes, so we came up with ideas to fill the entire length before we realised we were aiming at a length of 2 minutes, so we have had to decide which ideas were the best ideas and shorten ideas without losing important content. We gathered to combine our ideas into the story of the sequence, and from this I drafted the first storyboard during our session last Wednesday. As reflected in the storyboards, we always knew we wanted the setting to be a big city (as per almost all typical films of this genre) such as New York, where we will be filming many key shots during out visit there in half term, so the opening shots will highlight New York's most famous sights and landmarks, in particular the Chrysler Building, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge and the entrance to a Metro station. Later we will also be planning the remaining part of the sequence which involves the main character (assumingly the hero although he is only seen in silhouette form) getting ready, before the sequence closes to a shot of his silhouette on top of a building against the sky with his cape flapping in the wind, although this part is yet to be fully storyboarded.

Here are some film openings we used for inspiration when devising our concept:






LINKS:
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXufvwnqz4A
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: http://www.artofthetitle.com/2011/01/03/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world/
Watchmen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14vTrFyHO94
The Dark Knight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OYBEquZ_j0
The Incredibles: http://www.artofthetitle.com/tag/the-incredibles/

Film Opening Task - The Brief

We're now in our groups and have been tasked with creating an opening for a film - our group consists of myself, Isaac, Tom and Sophie, and our topic is the comic book genre. We instantly liked this idea because it sounded like an idea where we could expirement with lots of different techniques and have plenty of creative freedom. We have decided that our opening will be a mix of live action, animation and comic book art, which I am really looking forward to as a budding animator, and we also have talented "Photoshoppers" within our group. We may also be taking our cameras to New York for some realistic city shots when we go on our research trip. We are yet to devise a storyline but it will most likely follow the style of typical comic book film adaptations.

Preliminary task - Post-production

After we finished filming, we uploaded all the recorded footage onto the computer. This was very difficult because we could only upload the footage via our editing software - Adobe Premiere - which we had previously not used before for this task. Later, the computer also started freezing up so we couldn't upload the footage all at the same time, and we had to do this over two lessons, which in the end took a lot of time. After all the footage had been uploaded we started editing. We had only expiremented with Adobe Premiere one time so a lot of time was also spent finding out where everything is. The effects we used were fairly basic - fade in, fade out, titles etc. Another effect we used came as a late addition because we had had trouble with colours during the dialogue - when the first character speaks, the footage was very dark, but it was much lighter when the second character speaks for the first time. We expiremented with altering the lighting on Adobe to avoid this effect, but in the end we decided to use black and white throughout the whole film. This saved us the trouble of correcting the colours, and also added to the dramatic feel we wanted to create. We added to this feel further by adding some music from a royalty free website, Incompetech. Again we felt it captured the feel well, and made a huge difference by improving the film itself. We suddenly found our film was much, much better with black and white and the music included. All three of us are very pleased with the final result, and we especially feel we have captured the emotion and created the film we set out to make.

Preliminary task - Production

As soon as everything was in place, we were ready to film!
We realised that we would not have time to finish all the filming in one lesson, but it would in fact take several, so we filmed all the external scenes first so the lighting and weather conditions would not change. Filming for the external scenes went very smoothly and, as hoped, we managed to film all of these shots in one lesson. We then moved on to all the internal scenes, which were all filmed in the same order as they appear on the storyboard. This took more takes to get right because the camera we were working with started fading in and out every time it filmed. None of us could find how to sort this out, so we had to start counting down for the action after the camera had started filming. This took longer and we had to film several takes of each shot. Fortunately this was sorted out in time for filming the dialogue between the two characters.
We decided to include a tracking shot following the first character to create effect. We achieved this by placing the camera tripod on a set of wheels. This also took several attempts because Isaac (the actor) and myself (the cameraman) were both moving at different speeds each time, and in the first attempts we shot the face of the character could not be seen, which we knew was important to show the emotion the character is feeling.

Preliminary task - Pre-production

We were assigned with a preliminary task of producing a short film to demonstrate everything that we have learnt so far. For this we were divided into groups of three, and I worked in a group with Isaac White and Tom Coatsworth. We had to incorporate everything into the film such as shot, reverse shot, match-on-action, the 180 degree rule and others.
We started with our brief idea of the type of short film we wanted to make. Our vision was to create a short dramatic piece with suspense, mystery and fear, which I feel worked well because it allowed us to incorporate different types of shots well in the final product. Isaac and Tom crafted the storyline and I adapted their suggestions and ideas into a storyboard, which helped to visualise how we wanted the film to look and how the film could look. Only one scene from the storyboard was cut in the end (the shot with the heads on the floor at the end), which we decided before filming didn't seem necessary since we had thought of a better ending to the piece as seen in the final cut.
Throughout designing the storyboard, the three of us went out to the different locations around the school where we might film, so we had a better idea of how the storyboard should look. We also planned the camera angles and different types of shots here which we thought we might use. This helped us a lot and saved us time thinking about the locations on the day of the shoot. We also agreed at this stage that Tom and Isaac would be two actors in the film, and I would spend most of the production stage behind the camera, although Tom also had a chance to film during the first scenes of the film. Again, this saved us a lot of time, so I think we were all happy to have planned everything in advance before production would start.