ACHIEVING YOUR CHALLENGE
Here I will keep a diary of events leading up to the production of my arts challenge. This will contain all the pre-production, actual production and post-production events that will occur in order for me to achieve and complete my arts challenge:
November 04
I am planning a film for my college coursework. I will use this film for my Arts Challenge as I plan on using special effects in a way that will drive a story and still keep a great emotional impact. The film will be about the sacrifice of a boyfriend in order to save his girlfriends life, the life of the girl will be represented through the light of the lamppost. My film will concentrate on visuals as well as special effects.
November 05
I am first searching for the main setting being a lamppost on a pathway. Everywhere I go I am making sure to have a quick look at surroundings to see if anything fits the desired location for my short film. I also checked my local area on Google Maps, using the street view to look at possible locations. In the end my friend mentioned to me about a suitable location very close to where they live which fit the specifications perfectly for the location I was looking for. I checked it out on Google Maps and it’s perfect.
November 06
I’ve been deciding what score I should use for my film. It is significance as the music is one of the most important things for driving emotions and setting the atmosphere for the audience. I needed this piece to be slow, beautiful but not too upbeat. The score should also change towards the mid point to suggest a change in situation making it more powerful and a surprise to the audience. After spending many nights listening to music, I finalised my decision with this album for it’s ambient, orchestral style:
Atmostra III – Buba Prodcutions
The single I have chosen for my film is:
November 08
These past few days I have been working on the shot list for my short film for college. This is the shot list that I will use when shooting my film on Thursday November 14.
November 11
I decided to purchase a new lens for my camera for the short film I am going to shoot for college. Knowing thy my film will be shot at night I knew that I was going to need a lens that was better in low light conditions. I researched how to get better image quality in low light and I found out that I needed a larger aperture lens. The lens that came with my Canon 550d/T2i had a largest aperture of f3.5 whereas the new lens I bought from Amazon had an aperture of f1.8 meaning that the lens has a larger hole which let’s in more light and means it can see more in low light conditions.
November 14
Today I shot my film. With the help of my friend as an assistant for the film and two if my friends playing the characters in my film, we started setting up the equipment at 4pm, including the jib, dolly and lighting which were provided for is by the college. We waited for it to get dark as that was the setting for my film and then started filming at 6pm to 11pm.
November 24
The past week I’ve been editing the short film, making sure to have the actions fit the music as well as pacing it well so that it doesn’t feel wrong and distracting at any point. The edit needed to consider that all the footage was slowed down so it couldn’t be fast paced plus it should feel quiet comfortable. it wasn’t too much of a problem, as you can see on the timeline which I have shown below, the shots are all around the same length. I made sure the cuts only happened when necessary and that there were less cuts at the end as I wanted to show significant importance to the ending events where the special effects will be.
* BLUE = Colour Grade, GREEN = Footage, RED = Special Effects, YELLOW = Music and Sounds
November 30
I have been researching through videos and tutorials about the best way to achieve the disintegration effect. The main part of my Arts Challenge was to learn how to use effect in a way which feel realistic and don’t distract from the rest of the film. I used many effects in conjunction to pull off the overall disintegration which all served a use in order to blend as realistic as possible into the scene and glow as you would expect light to. In order to further make the effects as realistic as possible, I set out doing some research into the physics of light and gravity, so that the light reacted in the scene as you would expect and the particles float up and react to the slight breeze that was present on the day of filming.
For this effect I used the shatter effect to shatter my actor slowly into pieces, which are the yellow tinted particles that I animated to float up. However, in the last screenshot I used natural glows and motion blur to fit into the scene more naturally which I learnt from research. This is the stage I would tend to miss out before I started this course but I have learnt a lot by setting myself this Arts challenge as I realise that small details can go a long way. I implicated this technique into all the future special effects shots.
December 14
I finalised everything for my film including tightening up the edit, tweaking the effects and then uploaded the final piece onto YouTube:
Steven Boden's Silver Arts Award 