Final short film - Elliott

It is here.

 

I have remastered this final version after feedback from our media tutor, to ensure there is no copyrighted material included. The main change is that the song featured in the very opening scene has been replaced with my (quite heavily) remixed version of a cover. While I was reworking this I also made a few changes:
Colour correction tweaked throughout, tracking shots stabilised (check the difference in the opening pan shot along the floor at 10 seconds in), got rid of camera whir when zooming and opening shot lengthened.

You can watch the video as it was meant to be (with original music) as well as see the feedback here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jivmQMncCXw

Was the hype real? leave a comment to let us know.



Sources for the soundtrack of High Stakes:

• Our blog post detailing how I chose the soundtrack - http://advancedportfolio201365.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/musical-tone-and-style-elliott.html
• Opening music (from 0:10) is my heavily remixed version of Gary Redick's practice performance of the original by Peter Wingfield - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phRCrbMZxhI
• Tension music and soundscapes featured throughout from Daniel James - http://hybridtwo.bandcamp.com/album/proximity-ost

This Screenshot shows that because Daniel James and Ryan Connolly are supporting the short film community they allow anybody who has bought the OST (at a bargain price) to use it, as long as they are not running a commercial project. I found this album through Ryan's film-making channel which I have been watching for a few years.

• Poker Jazz music (from 2:25) is a cover by Jose Tremontini of Frank Sinatra's original. He said that to use it as long as I accredited it, which I made sure to do in the credits for the short - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmZjRYN0A7g 
• Atmospheric Ending music (from 6:55) is an original from a user called artimybelov (he's French) the video says it is copyright and royalty free for any non-profit use - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBq0fagNe4Y

Final Film Review - Keelan

 

 

Alternative film poster - Zool

 We have tried our utmost to get the raw emotion, feisty, grittiness within one image, I hope we have done that. As you can also tell he has a sadistic stare with adds to the enigma we wanted to give out.This Is an alternative to the proper film poster but is everything we could have hoped for plus more.

The Most Compelling Shot In Our Short Film [K-Biggles]

One hour of pure fist bumping (fisting)

Film poster second drafts - Elliott

Having finally taken the actor photos for our short film, this is what my first poster draft looks like with our pics replacing the stock photos we used as placeholders, as well as a few other small changes. SWEEeeeeEEEEt. I think this came out insanely well so its a bit hard to be critical of myself but I'll give it a go.

Photo before being separated from backdrop

Unfortunately (for me of course) I couldn't afford to buy a professional green screen when we started shooting which meant that each of the three actor shots is taken against a normal wall.

This meant one (goddamn long) boring hour getting the photos rotoscoped and usable- one hour per photo that is. Whenever any photo is done like this there is always a white outline left around the edge of the pic, I tried to minimize this as much as possible, but then decided it could make an interesting design feature: Therefore I decided to leave the top-left outline to make the actors pop out from the black backing (especially because we all have dark hair) and this looks awesome.

I used a lot of colour correction (which I'm now getting nice and practiced at) because without it the pictures looked very amateur and, frankly, looked odd. By dropping saturation, brightness and upping contrast on different parts of the body I could create the very cool effect you see in the above photo. noice.

This is another draft I made (not based on of the first ideas.) I decided to bring this forward because of how cool the shot looked after filming and editing, and also because none of my groups posters were landscape (which apparently is easier to work with). Despite how cool the main photo looks in this poster I much prefer the overall design of my other poster so that is the one I will be taking forward.

I found it very hard to utilise the dead space on this layout which probably shows in the cramped quote in the top-right, and getting the bill block to stand out against black beard and white suit also proved impossible without making it two-tone (something that is never done in the industry) - despite that look at how DAMN COOL that shot looks.

Filming Diary #4 - Elliott

Sunday 3rd

(post delayed as I was working on getting the film finished before doing BTS videos)

November problems: these shots were 10 minutes apart

Today we aimed to film the beginning (and therefore end) of our cyclic narrative, but unfortunately Keelan was otherwise 'occupied' and this meant that me and Ziaul had to film without a proper camera. Luckily I have a very good camera on my phone and we were able to film on that (I had brought a tripod adapter for this exact situation).

Although we only had a few shots planned for today the short winter nights left us with only a couple of hours to shoot (after someone arriving an hour late, of course) and unfortunately the light dropped with two shots left to take. This leaves me with more annoying work to fix in post-production or having to re-film another day.

Showing yet more 'dangers' that can befall any unsuspecting media student

This video shows the set-up used for the setpiece shot involving Ziaul getting blown back by a shockwave. I have researched the effect of explosions in real life in the hopes of making a more realistic scene and to show that the 'shockwave' is scientifically proven, not just a Hollywood trope, so that just left the filming.

Sneak preview of the (super complicated) fire effect

These last few shots are the most VFX laden of the whole project which gives me both: ample room to show what I can do, and, hours of tedious mind-numbing hard work while the rest of the group gets to relax. YAY!

Here we have the exploding house effect, which I will show in more detail in a VFX breakdown post.

Refinement of my poster idea [Keelan]

After posting my poster idea on the blog, I have had feedback from my teachers and my peers. It has arisen that that title was not large enough to be noticeable. Also, the tagline may be misinterpreted as the title of the film. Therefore, I have moved the tagline to where the cast titles were, and moved the cast titles up. I have also enlarged the title.
I also noticed, that in comparison to most film posters, the billing block at the bottom is not long enough. Therefore, I stretched it out. We still have yet to take pictures of the characters, which we will do tomorrow.

Film Intro Credit Idea [Keelan]

Here is a mock up of a credits sequence that I created using Adobe After Effects. This isn't the final idea, this is just an addition to Elliott's credit mock up, therefore we will have a few to choose from.

However, after creating I did think that it would be better to super impose the credits into the film rather than using an actual credit sequence as it's not normal that is done in short films.

Film Poster Idea [Keelan]

My first poster design for the short film follows general conventions of the industry. For this one I decided to create a portrait poster. Even though both in class and during my own research I have found that it is harder to do so due to the fact there is less dead space to play with, I thought I'd still give it a go.

(The Bourne Legacy Movie Poster)

The idea, I got from another film poster I had previously seen, this being The Bourne Legacy. As you can see I have closely followed the way that the blank space has been used. However, The Bourne poster that I was using to get my idea from was not an the main advertisement for the movie, which we know as it contains no billing block.


The male character is an image from a royalty free stock image website, I have used this as we have not yet photographed the cast from out short film. When we do so, I intend to replace the image with the main character of our film (Ziaul Islam).

The font I decided on using was Nikodecs, which I gained access to via Dafont. I set the tracking on all of the text I created to -25, this allows all of the individual characters to be closer together, making it look even more like a real movie poster.
For the text containing the main cast member names I set the leading to 22.42pt. This brought the upper and lower lines of text closer together, showing that they were grouped together.

The billing block was a template produced by Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot. When it comes to creating our official poster I will create a specific one for it. I did not do this for the design idea as I do not currently have all the relevant information.

When actually creating the poster, I did not use a template or guide, which is probably noticeable from some shapes and pieces of text that may not be perfectly in place. When creating the official poster I will take extra time and attention to making sure everything is perfect.

Film Poster Draft - Ziaul

This is my poster for our film. This is not going to be the background picture because we haven't shot a legit photo as of yet. However we want a similar style photo for the actual poster in my opinion. The block production is random as well because we don't know all the music we have in our film. I chose to have just me as the poster background and the only name because I am the main character and the film is based on my character. I opted for this style mainly due to the fact of it being a dark scene, it is quite mysterious and can't see the man's face. I opted against using quotes and ratings for this poster. I used Paint.Net for this poster.

This was the movie poster before it got edited. I didn't know how to get rid of the random huge sign that took up most of the photo but fortunately Elliott helped me as he knew how to edit it out and this made a better, more improved poster because of it.

Conventions of Little White Lies (technical detail included) - Ziaul

Doc size: Height - 245 mm
                Width - 195mm

Each column is 52.4mm

Picture is anything within the film unaltered. It can be any realistic size the writer or whoever puts in the Little White Lies wants it to be.

Title: Century Gothic.

Film review research : - Elliott

Who is the target audience - Ziaul and Elliott

Ziaul

Little White Lies is for mature more upper class or educated people. The slick sophisticated design shows it might be for middle/upper class. In comparison to the more bold and loud design of Empire, which is for more average film watchers and less enthusiastic critics. It always writes about films some people never hear about, independent films, these are films which cannot afford to put themselves of cinemas. There are always in depth analysis and knowledge about the film.

This photo represents a LWL survey carried out for the general public to see who reads LWL and who don't read it as much. As you can tell males aged 25-25 are the people who seem to read the magazine the post compared to other age groups.

Elliott

The above infographic is very helpful in determining which classes of people read the magazine, especially the statistic that states exactly half of their sample readership earns over 20k a year (a high percentage compared to many other types of magazine) this would suggest- in theory- that a large chunk of LWL's readership is of an upper class, and this influences the type of vocabulary that would be used in writing my film review: for example saying 'vernacular' instead of 'vocabulary'. To this end it's been pretty much decided for me that I will be the one writing the actual text for the film review, because I write far too posh-ly at the best of times.

The 'Little White Lies' media pack (something given to potential writers/ contributors to help them match the magazines style) also helped by showing that LWL's primary means of UK distribution is in WHsmith's. This means that when writing the review no vulgar or controversial language/ideals can be used as this would violate the type of magazine genre that WHsmith stocks and would probably lead to the mag being unstocked. This would not be such a problem if LWL was primarily sold over the internet or through other distribution methods.

Conversely LWL is also part of the brilliant London art scene so it's very important to write in a way that doesn't alienate any potential readers who may be looking for a way to get entry-level access into the industry, and may not know lots of filming terminology/ conventions. Another important aspect of this scene is the young film-makers who come to participate in London's film screenings and festivals, who would appreciate a more detailed review on many of the films that would be showing on that day.

London Film Festival shows many of the best short films

Film review for little white lies

Film poster idea draft - Elliott

click to enlarge

My draft idea for the short film's movie poster, Showing some of the industry conventions. Because we have not yet taken high quality photos of our actors I instead used public domain images that were very similar to what the final pictures will look like. I could have used screenshots from the video footage but that would have involved rotoscoping (tracing) out each character and would have taken far to much time compared to the stock pics which show the idea just as well.

I have also not set up the billing block because I do not have all the details (such as music used or production company name) and rewriting it will be very easy when I do, thanks to the template produced by Video Copilot (they also do great AE plug-ins.)

As a base start for the poster- and, crucially, to get the correct poster dimensions- I started with this film poster for The Dark Knight. Hopefully there is not any visible influence from this in the completed draft. One poster I have taken influence from, however is the simple black on white text style from 'Submarine' which was one of the film posters I analysed for research. Unfortunately because this is a full length film and mine is not, I could not think of as many applicable review companies as Richard Ayoade's poster had (having 4 star reviews and one quote is, I think, the optimal amount for this poster idea) leaving an under-utilization of dead space at the top of my poster.

This was the guide I used, and which turned out to be very annoying to make. The lines helped in making sure that all components of the poster were justified correctly and that all text remained within the crucial 'safe zone' which can be cut off by printing/framing. The red guidelines show the side margins and the first split of the poster (into horizontal thirds.) This way I can keep all reviews in the top third and titling/billing block etc. in the bottom third. The purple and green guides help insure the reviews are central by cutting the review section into quarters. 

James Bond Casino Royale - Ziaul

This is the main poster of James Bonds Casino Royale. As you can tell their are two images but the more visible one is Daniel Craig. This is because he is the main character but also Daniel Craig attracts a fan base, many people watch James Bond because of him. The main audience is for males of the age of 12-15, it is an action/ thriller film which you would associate with this age group and gender. However this movie poster might attract females as well as most might see him as eye candy. The second main photo is that of a transparent female with smaller images within it. The women and the smaller images are what this film is all about but fitted it the transparent women because no more room wanted to be taken up. The background is a grey colour which means that all the other colours on it are quite visible including the title. The other most visible text is the date of release too show the audience when the film is coming out. Physiologically it is smart as people who read it will go to watch it mainly as it's second most visible text on the poster.
There is a lot of dead space in the top left which is not used by any images or other designs.. some may say it is a poor poster because of so much dead space in the corner.

#selfie #workinghard

 

This is to show our great teamwork whilst editing.

Poster Research (Awaydays) - Elliott

This movie wasn't super great but it has Stephen Graham from Snatch in it so all good

This poster features 6 different images of the main and secondary characters from the film composited into the top two-thirds of the poster with almost all of the text contained to the bottom third.

I actually think this is a terrible movie poster because of the huge amount of dead space and the way that the images look like they've been print-screened off the actual film footage (very bad job of cutting them from the background) the use of masses of bright yellow to give some impact is also a very cheap design choice.

Poster Research (Submarine) - Elliott

sick film bro

To match the type of film I am producing I have chosen to analyse the film posters of small or independent British films. Ideally I would examine the features of other short films, however in the industry it is very uncommon for films that aren't feature length to produce a poster.

Unusually for a small film the very top object on the poster is the names of actors. This is irregular because actors in this film type are usually little-known and therefore will not have a following that will see movies just because they are in it, This is especially true with the actors in this film who were uknowns cast in their first film roles.

"you Ayo-what mate?"

Poster Research - Fish Tank [Keelan]

The second poster that I have researched is 'Fish Tank', which was released in 2009.

Poster Research - The Disappearance of Alice Creed [Keelan]

For the Poster research we have to do research into film posters that fall into the category of film that we are making (British, independent and low budget). As a group we have to research into 12 film posters, working out to having a task of 4 each. In these posts we will have to discuss things such as the graphics, layout and conventions of the posters. As well as that we will also have to discuss how the poster applies the five main concepts.

My first piece of research into this is of the film poster 'The Disappearance of Alice Creed', this was released in 2009.

Previous post updates - Elliott

I've just finished editing and uploading the 'Behind the Scenes' video from the first day of filming as well as redoing my part of the group animatic commentary and adding some more research on short film research.

• Behind the Scenes video and risk assessment post
• Animatic Commentary
• Research posts

In preperation for making my group's movie poster, which will require a website on it, I have also created the redirect http://tinyurl.com/HighStakesfilm that will link to the group blog when visited. This will make the poster far more professional than if the website, either didn't work or was a blogspot site.

Credit Mock-up - Elliott

Here is a mock-up I have made for the end credits and title card sequence for our short film. It isn't the final idea yet but, as well as helping me get back into editing, it helps give an idea of what the credits may look like.



The awful drawings do seem to go well with the opening to Se7en,
so that's something.

Unfortunately, to help better tie in the film with the promotional poster I want to use the same photos of our actors in each. This means that until my group gets together to make the assets, I have had to bust out my 'mad-1' art skills and use some weird/creepy drawings as placeholders. They would probably fit right into some horror film about a mentally-challenged artist, but don't quite cut it for our film.

Although the use of my art degree was nice it did make it quite hard to gauge what the final piece would look like, despite finding the mock-up very useful for developing ideas. It also helped me to find 'bugs' such as this insanely annoying one that made the whole video jump around like a Jack Russel on meth.


There was no cause or reason for this glitch out and the only solution was to move to a different editing software and start all over again (First problem I have ever had with Sony Vegas 11.)

The audio can be found here and is from a very small Youtuber I know who does not mind anyone using his music yet produces some very good stuff. I picked it because, with some alteration, it started to sound like the music that is often used for the credits in recent action movies (the new Die Hard in particular) and because the somber start seems to compliment the ending shots of our film.

The black on white credits will also lend a great effect to the piece, contrasting it to the many that use the standard white on black slow crawl. When looking for a good credit font I also received some great advice about this from a VFX expert on one of the better film-making websites saying:

If white is to be seen over a large area, like a white background instead of a black background, or a large dominent shape is white, then bring it all the way down to around 75%. Yes, indeed, the big "white" bar on NTSC color bars is actually only 75%! 75% looks slightly gray on a computer screen, but quite pleasing (not blaring) on a video or film screen, when it is the dominant color.  

 I was unsure about this at first because the off-white colour looks pretty bad on a laptop screen but after watching back on a TV it turned out to be great advice, the brightness is not as annoying or uncomfortable as with a large amount of pure-white light and that way makes the credits much easier to read.

Thanks to Red Giant for their Unmult plugin which I used excessively when making this.

VFX Breakdown #3 Graphic-Match transitions - Elliott

This is a very rough test of a technique which would be useful in the final project (in eye-destroying quality as I was in a rush for college), which allows me to emphasise a transition between two scenes or locations in a very cool way like in several blockbuster shows. (Sherlock is a great example as they are a fan of this transition)

The first shot is a great example of what can be done with the very same effect I used.

The bed transition though (as seen here) requires a rather higher budget

The yellow shape in this picture is the mask I animated

To make this effect I filmed both shots (kitchen and bedroom) with an identical left-right panning motion and tried to make the colours of both doors match as closely as possible. Unfortunately this was hard to do due to lacking a thousand pound camera tracking kit (meaning I had to shoot by hand) and the different lighting in each area.

To combat the lighting difference I had to use my least favourite form of editing (because I'm terrible at it) - Colour Correction. I did this in After Effects 6 (a great program which I have got since last year's thriller opening) and adjusted the hues and hightone colours of both shots to match in the middle.

It's a graphic match. ahahaha no.

To make the effect I used a mask and keyframed it to move with the edge of the bedroom door, then feathered the hell out of it to make the edge between the footage less noticeable.

I then used slow-motion and time-stretching to make the kitchen shot move at a slower speed, all within AE, This was particularly challenging and made the editing take much longer than it otherwise would have but, luckily, I don't think I will have to do this with the other graphic transitions me and my group have filmed.

Filming Diary #3 [Keelan]

During our filming at Location 2, we had to be very careful to not break anything or trip on any wires such as the wire for the red head lights.

To prepare for filming, we had to move several pieces of furniture out of the way, such as a sofa, a large wall painting and several other items. 

(Shot of mid-filming)

(The smoke machine)

-As seen in the picture, we used a smoke machine to create an atmosphere of a room in which there had been heavy smoking going on.

-When using the smoke machine it did become very hot after a prolonged period of time, therefore we placed it on a pair of heavy duty fireproof gloves to prevent the carpet being burnt of damaged. We also used gloves to move it when needed and was very careful when near it to prevent any damage to a member of the group.

(Overhead shot of recording freehand)

-As well as using the tripod to film, we recorded parts of it freehand to gain some angles that we would not be able to obtain that easily using a tripod.


This evening of shooting our film was rather a long one as we started at around 9pm, and finished just past midnight. The reason for this is because we needed there to be no natural light at all, allowing us to communicate to the audience that it is clearly the night time.

James Bond Casino Royale Final Poker Scene - Ziaul

This is the exact scene we want to emulate during our film but shorter obviously. We want to emulate this in the sense of the tense atmosphere and the really high stakes that make this scene so tense. Our scene will have smoke surrounding the table and room with a light lingering above them and the table. It adds a more sinister effect to the scene.

Filming Diary #2 - Elliott

Wednesday 30th

Today was the day we could finally start filming after the disruption last time. We made sure to film on a clear day (the first one we got) so that we would be able to use natural light in the scene, if needed. (I can always make a shot look darker but it's never good to make it lighter)

Natural light looks pimp, yo

The first scene we decided to film was the interior beginning scenes (after the flashback ending) because it was possibly the most convenient, in terms of props needed, and because we started early (at around 12) it left the rest of the day to film some of the night scenes. Because we are using amateur actors, except for Matt who has some experience, filming in the order of the story also helped them put on a more convincing performance (I hope.)

Filming diary and rundown of 'dangers'

More pictures and a risk assessment for this location

Elliott's Epic Blog Headers

Like the Tibetan monks I am on a constant mission to better myself. while Monks shave their heads and sing Kung-Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas I choose to better myself with Tight Ass Blog Banners (and singing Kung-Fu Fighting.) As I've spent far too many hours making these things I've put up this post to chronicle the journey of that little bit at the top of the screen, from the shittest hype to the hypest shit.

The Original Gangsta - The first blog banner featured a boring name panel and low resolution photos cropped from our first group pic. Also subliminal spiral design. Nostalgic.

The Hat Trick - The photos got progressively weirder over the holidays and after deleting the crocodile we now have hats as well. Merry Christmas, yo.



The Dark Blog Rises -  Unfortunately I have now accidentally embedded the hats into the actual picture so no chance of getting rid of them for a while.

 The Gritty Reboot with some sweet effects captured as stills from Action Essentials 2.
The smoke assets and new name text came out great because of the way semi-transparent stuff can be edited in paint.net.

The Muzzle Flash - My first forray into prop making all for the sake of that one sweet shotgun picture. nice.
I've stuck in a muzzle flash and the title is screened on top of the gun to pull everything together.

The Frosted Flakes With the first day of filming comes the chance to eat Frosties in the name of cinema, we took the chance.

The Hype - Although it's a shame to see the amazing shotgun go, it's worth it to put the new photo center stage. I put out some new minimal titles and with some fancy rotoscoping gave the whole thing a 3D effect by putting some of the smoke and titles slightly behind the main pic AND I could finally get rid of the stupid hats.

Elliott Ridley

Filming Diary #1 - Elliott

Sunday 27th

Today is the first day we have scheduled to film our short film however, as is always expected, we have run into difficulties.

Hurricane 2K13 - we will rebuild!

Main filming location - Elliott

(Location 1)

Leylands Road, Burgess Hill, West Sussex

 Due to the state of my room the main danger is trip hazards. shit be trippin, literally.

no-one likes dubstep anymore and that makes me sad

Equipment - Elliott

I ordered the filming equipment from college on Friday and arranged for my driving instructor to pick me up from college so I could drive home instead of lugging the 2 tonne box onto the train at rush hour. 

(pictures to be added from phone)

The equipment we used:

• 1 HD DSLR camera
• 1 SD Video Camera (for BTS footage)
• 2 backup camera batteries
• 1 transfer lead
• 1 SD card
• 2 Giant spotlights/ Heaters
• 1 Charge lead
• 2 Light tripods
• 2 Metal diffusers
• 1 Tripod (phone/camera tripod head)
• 1 Smoke machine
• 1 Giant metal case for all of the above

Location 2 - [Keelan]

(Location 2)

Royal George Court, London Road, Burgess Hill, West Sussex, RH15 8LN

- As the property is on the second floor there is a hazard of a person falling out of the window if it were open.

- There is a potential hazard here of the floor lamp being knocked over from cameramen of lighting.

- We have to mind the TV as it is balanced on its stand, therefore would be rather easy to knock over and damage.

After assessing the area, I have come to the conclusion that there is a low level of risk and potential hazards here. As with any household area there are standard things that must be checked such as the electrics. This would be checked to prevent any potential fires or electrical incidents.

A short video clip of the owner of the property giving me permission to use his premises for the purpose of filming.