Colour. Like. No. Other.

In the last two years or so I have realised how important colour grading is when it comes to film. Colour grading can help identify narratives, genres, values and ideology's, even time and place, which is why I am going to make sure I spend time making sure my piece is graded to its specific genre correctly. By doing test upon test of different colours for different scenes I will make sure I get the correct meaning from the end result.

Here are some colour grade tests I did with my footage using Red Giant's Mojo plugin.

1. Raw footage.

2. Warm tones.

3. Dark tones.

Day 2

Today was a very short shoot as I was only filming three shots.

The reason for this was due to my make up artist only being able to make it today, as she is kindly travelling from Leicester, and obviously I have to work around her as I needed this shot out the way and completed with it being a vital part of my film.

Sian, the make up artist, was really easy going and great at her trade, and she kindly agreed to let me film the make-up process of Tom.

Here it is sped up, including a colour grade tease to show what I want to achieve come May 4.

Second Teaser

First Teaser

Day 1

Day one of shooting is officially over, I am extremely happy of the shots I have captured today, and the simplicity of direction I was able to give Joe and Reise. They were both able to adapt to my directions and surroundings, thus enabling them to give a great performance and bring my story to life in the vision I had penned in the beginning.

I shot everything today on the Nikon 3100, 720p at 25fps, which looks incredible. One of the major problems I had today though was being ale to see the camera's LCD screen due to the sunlight, so it was difficult to tell if shadows were getting recorded by accident.

For example these shots will need to be re-shot as the camera goes extremely out of focus and shadows are clearly evident :

Overall I am very pleased with the outcome of today and will be playing around with some footage tomorrow which I will upload after the second day of shooting wraps up.

Dress Up Mark II

Final Dress Rehersal. Battle Ready for February 23.

Shooting Schedule

Shooting Schedule

My shoot will begin on Thursday February 23; this is when I will have all of my equipment, costumes, and Actors ready.

This Thursday I will go to Nottingham and shoot the first half of my film. Reise and I will be getting the train down early Thursday and meeting Joe, then heading out to our first location and shooting will begin.

The second sequence I will shoot will be the shot inside of Andrew’s house (my house) on the 24 of February. I have managed to acquire a make up artist, which will be needed to show that Andrew has been murdered by the Sentinel. Sian Revill is currently doing a make-up course in Leicester, and will pursing her career furthermore in the Summer with plans of studying further in LA.

Here is an example of her work.

  

Hardware & Software

After my development project last Semester I realized something very important when it came to my lightning whips. The fact that shooting in 24fps wasn’t accurately picking up the markers I stuck on to the skipping ropes, resulting in always second guessing where the rope would be frame by frame in Adobe Flash. Luckily my friend has a Canon 60d, which films at and optional 50fps in 720p, and has kindly offered to lend it me during the course of my shoot. With that I can easily get some quality shots, which will also have much better readable markers on the new ropes, allowing the editing process for me to be easier than it was previously.

So basically I am aiming to shoot everything with the Canon 60d in 720p. Although the camera and I are perfectly acceptable to work in 1080p, I feel it isn’t that necessary when a lot of my shots will be shot at 50fps rather than 1080p’s native 24fps to fully capture the motion of the Sentinel’s electric whips. Also editing something in 1080p would mean rendering would be very time consuming, and time is something I am against unfortunately.

When it comes to software I aim to use After Effects as my main body of work to do all the teleporting and Lightwhip effects. Red Giant’s Starglow package will be utilized too as I have seen many people use it for Lightsabre and lightning effects which look amazing for The Sentinel’s Lightwhips. Adobe Flash will be used to trace the Lightwhips movement, then later rendered out as an alpha layered PNG, overlaying it on video footage in After Effects and beginning the Starglow process. Once I have all my VFX shot’s complete I will bring them all into Final Cut Pro X to bring the final master together, this will be where I bring in the sound elements, like the narrative voice over and non-diegetic music.