Film Opening - UK Shoot 2

For the second half of our filming here in the UK we focused on the exterior scenes. This took almost two hours to plan and film on the day although these scenes only appear for a few seconds of film. The shoot went smoothly and we were satisfied with the end result which will appear in the final cut, although we did face a problem when filming shots of the car driving past, as it had to be going at the right speed. This took several takes because the car was often going too fast, and we didn't want to risk reducing the film quality by slowing the footage down. Fortunately we went to a very quiet street during the afternoon at a time of day when it wouldn't be so busy, so we were lucky to get as many takes as we wanted or needed.

 

Learning in After Effects

As well as crafting most of the storyboards for our opening sequence, I was also chosen for the task of animating part of the sequence itself. In the style of 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World' the sequence would include text (onomatopoeia) flashing on the screen as a key sound effect plays, so there is one instance where a 'Beep! Beep!' noise would flash on and off the screen in time with the noise coming out of the alarm clock.

Here is the opening sequence of Scott Pilgrim which I used for reference:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbEsSsiozNU

The words would have to move in a cartoony but believable and smooth way, so I attempted Adobe After Effects for the first time to animate this for our opening. Prior to this I had no experience with using After Effects and my initial feelings were that the software seemed complicated and daunting, even though I had created my own animations for pleasure before (mostly using stop-motion). I resourced to YouTube to watch tutorials from experienced After Effects users who had explained the basics, and the instructions were easy to follow and enabled me to teach myself afterwards how to work the software.

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.

Animatic

Recently we completed the animatic for our film opening project - the animatic features drawings which are almost all drawn by me apart from the last few frames, which I personally feel proud of along with the fact I was chosen to be the storyboard artist by the rest of the group. Well done me!!
Here is the animatic in its completed form:

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.