Webpresence for She/He

So, I am amidst thinking about the design of our web presence. It’s difficult to decide what to do. I am mainly concerned about hosting the site and was thinking of using a free service such as www.weebly.com.

I would have liked to have a little more control over the design, but looking at the templates I am quite satisfied with this solution.

Eliminating a full flash site was mainly due to time constraints. The architecture and coding alone can take 30-40 hours, then comes the design and content management which will be another 30 or so hours. At the moment, I can sadly not find this time.

HTML and CSS however can still create a nicely designed site, which pushes functionality rather than fanciness. I think this is more that we are after.

I’m now waiting for all the content from Charlotte to include in the shell.

Lionel

Shoot 2

Today we were outside and in even less control of the environment. I felt a little useless as the gaffer, since there was no time, nor the equipment to really control the strong sun that influenced the majority of our shoot.

At one stage at least I picked up the camera a shot one shot, I held the camera for Latch, I crowd wrangled people who were crossing into our scene, etc.

We did have one particular guy, who would walk through the scene several times, I guess he was excited to be involved in a film production.

The wrap was more of a relief as we had finished this project. About half the time that we needed we had, let’s see how that pans out on the big screen at the showcase.

Lionel

Shoot 1 – our SECOND film

It’s rather insane to expect two shorts from a group of five students in their last semester and on top of that expect quality work. Time is everything in this medium of cinema – but that’s not what has been created.

It was more about trying to find a balance of “shot-gunning it”, work to insane time constraints and at the same time not to fail nor put our names to shame.

The first shoot we did for our second film was rather depressing. There was no time, no location (other than the office next to Paul’s…) and we were barely able to ‘cover’ what we needed to cover.

I was Latch’s gaffer and tried to do as much as I could, however sadly witnessed as his creative vision crumbled in front of his eyes. “No time to do this – just light it.” Not necessarily the words I want to hear from a creative DP.

Sacrifice WILL show on screen, there is just no way around that, not with any post-production measures (if there was substantial time for those).

Now, this may sound a little bitter, it is not. I am merely disappointed that great things were promised in first year that we will get to make an almost constraint-less film over the course of one year, with people we chose. We started to plan our project then and there.

SPLASH!

Lionel

Working with Actors

Due to us having to re-cast 4 days before the shoot, we didn’t really get a chance to rehearse our actors. Jason who made an appearance in Bill’s film was nice enough to agree to play the part of Daniel with 4 days notice. I had spoken with both Emily and Jason separately about their characters but I was concerned about getting their characters’ chemistry right on the day without any preparation.

With two days of shooting, we shot the second half of the film on the first day. The actor’s performed really well given we were shooting the scenes out of order. I was a bit hesitant in giving direction to the actors at the start but came to realise that they didn’t see it as you bossing them around but instead helping them with their performance. It was actually a lot of fun figuring out things such as character motive and how the actors should deliver their lines. I found that in having discussed the characters over and over again in pre-production with fellow co-writer Latch, with the actors and with Christine and trying to figuire all that kind of thing out before the shoot really helped me to know what kind of thing I wanted from Emily and Jason. Furthermore, they also brought a lot to their own characters with things that I hadn’t even thought of myself.

We were lucky that we weren’t really strapped for time during the shoot on the second day so we were able to have read throughs and rehearsals. We found what we really needed time for was blocking the actors especially when they were moving around so much in the alleyway.

I found I took a lot from the directing workshops we had last semester. One thing that I remember one of the actors from the workshop saying was that actors often didn’t appreciate directors acting out the lines themselves as a form of direction. They preferred to be told how the characters are feeling and what their motives are so that they could interpret the characters themselves. This was kind of hard for me because for me, the easiest way for me to explain something is by example and I had to stop myself from spelling things out by delivering the lines myself and showing them what I wanted. I think this helped me express myself more coherently and forced me to really think about how to give direction concisely and effectively.

All in all the shoots were really fun – we had a really good crew and great actors and everyone seemed to be happy to be there which is always nice.

Here are some production stills for your viewing pleasure:

JEN

Script Idea

Alright apologies guys, I’ve been terrible at blogging so all my posts are coming at you all at once. Get ready for it. I will attempt some sort of chronological order.

I’ll admit, writing this script was the most difficult part of this whole project. Even when we were given our characters, I had a complete ideas-drought. I wrote scripts for different ideas and wasn’t happy with any of them. To cut a long story short, eventually the prospect that this film was not going to get done at all finally kicked my brain into auto-writing mode and Latch and I came up with a simple idea that actually worked. Although it is terrible to admit that failing this course was what finally motivated us to come up with something we were happy with, I’m glad we came up with what we did because I am genuinely happy with our final script. We came up with just a simple scene that we eventually expanded into a film idea.

Synopsis:

Kate, on her way to a job interview, gets lost and encounters a sweat-covered, dirt-smeared tramp in an alleyway. The pair have a fiery encounter with Kate taking out her flustered nerves at her impending job interview on the poor unsuspecting man. However, as Kate finds out later on, first impressions aren’t always what they seem.

Yeah, pretty straightfoward story, not really anything complicated in terms of the storyline. What I particularly enjoyed about writing this script was the banter between the two characters in the alleyway. Also, the way Latch and I co-wrote the script was to email it to each other with altercations. In the end we ended up with 7 drafts.  I found it quite easy to co-write the script with Latch, most probably because as friends, I don’t think Latch and I are afraid to make altercations to each others’ script and tell each other if we thought something didn’t work.

So all in all, the writing process which should’ve taken months ended up taking two weeks but funnily enough, it worked out pretty well.

JEN

SHOOTING DAY 2

Day 2 was much the same as day 1, except the sun was up. I think telling you how the day went would be “useless” so i’ll spare you. I would, however, like to point out that production time does reflect the quality of a film. Each film requires different production times, as some have more locations than others. 1.25 days didn’t cut it for ours.

LATCH

SHOOTING DAY 1

Day 1 was tough. My mind was elsewhere and i was distracted by my own thoughts. So many things were bothering me, but i managed to grasp what it really was that was bothering me: I had filmed my second year film in 2.5 days. This shoot was to reflect the equivalent of 1.25 days – half the time. Shooting Potato cakes was demanding enough and when I realized that I couldn’t allow my creative vision to dictate the flow of this film (because it would simply take too long to achieve the cinematography I had in mind) i must admit – it held me back. My mind was clouded and I became recluse.

The idea of having to step back in creativity was painful.

LATCH

PRE-SHOOTING

Prior to filming our short, I was to visualize the film. There are a number of ways I could have approached this, namely; writing a shot list, doing a storyboard or shooting it guerrilla style. In an ideal world, I would have done a hybrid of all three, but due to seen and unforeseen circumstances and absurd abundance of reflective reporting awaiting my attention, I could only pick one.

Guerrilla style, although rather appealing was much too risky and would look rather dodgy before professional actors. A storyboard, although incredibly useful, would have taken quite some time to re-draw when i would change my mind.

It had to be a shotlist. The way i write my shotlist, is with a clear edit in mind. I plan graphic matches and temporal relations as much as the parameters will allow. This way, Jen and i were able to approach production with an edit in mind .

LATCH

My vision

The way I see it, everything will be shot in wide shots, if not extra-wide and pretty much every set up will require a crane. I’ve used a crane before – and let me tell you now – WOW. The resultant shots are REMARKABLE.

I know that there are some moments in the film that will require a close-up or something of the sort particularly of the actors, but I don’t want the action to distract from my epic vision. And boy is it epic.

Basically – the camera is never going to stop for any reason whatsoever. The film will be several minutes of panoramic bliss. Trust me, it’ll be radical.

LATCH

Location scouting

Since we’ve expended a large portion of our funds on the first film, we’re keep to keep this one under-budget.

We’re basically filming everything within a block from campus, if not campus itself. We scouted an alleyway that is visually enticing and is well suited to the story.

LATCH