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.