Testing Testing

Timing was always going to be a problem, let's face it, it was obvious. When I first started this project I was a bit absorbed in the idea and quite excited with the whole thing, even when I was watching the performance it never really occurred to me how short the monologue actually is.  I mean I knew it was short but I was thinking of it in context which in some way made me think of it as being longer than it is.  I realised when I was animating the first section that I was dragging lines out so the image made sense narratively but it wasn't until I recored the voice over with my actress that I realised how short it actually is (around 1 min 50 sec if you're wondering). I managed to stretch it to around 3 minutes but other than that I'm still a bit stumped.

On Thursday I managed to get into W103 to start putting together the sound scape for the piece and it was there I got a better idea of how the words flow in my adaptation rather than that of Shakespeare's Globe. It's still very short. Which means that the video footage I filmed with my actress is also very short and to some extent out of time. Because it's a silhouette I have a bit of room to play with speed/cut wise but not much.

Organising all the tracks/clips so next time I can go straight into editing/arranging

I think right now I've hit the wall that most people doing creative projects hit - when everything is seemingly going wrong but you don't know how to stop it. But in my case I also can't really ask for help because I can't explain what it is that I want to make.

I feel like having this idea was a great step forward for me and if you'd asked me a month ago if I'd be in this position right now I wouldn't have believed it. Everything seemed to be going well and when it wasn't it simply meant a bit of trouble shooting, opening a new software but getting it done anyway. Now the deadline is very close I'm not sure it's as possible as I thought it was, maybe I did over complicate it not by size but simply over estimating my own skills in certain areas.

Planning this project (before the digital evolution that happened to my work) I had originally planned for it be a film based project using specifically filmed images and found footage, so when I changed my idea to a modern adaptation I got a bit carried away and didn't really stop to think of how much animation would actually be needed. Which is a lot, in fact most if not all of the project is animated. Kind of funny since GCSE Animation is the extent of my skill base. I had never opened illustrator before which meant a lot of time on Lynda figuring out how to design vectors to work in After Effects and my drawing skills are practically non-existent to the point I'm genuinely considering asking my Illustration student house mate to teach me.



I think right now the best thing I can do is just to try out different methods of making things, wether that be in Illustrator or After Effects or even importing individual pieces into Premier or Avid.

To give myself a bit of a motivation boost (I think that's good enough way of describing it) I went back to 59 Productions and started watching some of their videos, in this video they explain what they do and give many examples of it. It's an interesting watch if you have the time.

About 59 Productions - 2014 from 59 Productions on Vimeo.

Reverting to Old Habits

One of the things I like about Professional Toolkit is I get a sense of fulfilment out learning a specific skill. Another thing I've gotten out of the whole unit is - I'm fairly certain my 'niche', as Mirella would call it, is in post-production.

Editing in the Avid Suite during my 2nd to last Avid lesson.

Learning the Avid basics was hard and I found myself reverting to my Premier Pro habits (habits I didn't have this time last year so I guess that's progress) but getting myself out of the Adobe mindset was hard. It was then I realised how user friendly Adobe really is and how Avid is the exact opposite.

But once I got there and had that moment where things just 'clicked' I don't think there is any turning back. I went to edit my November Vlog at home and had to Google the Premier shortcuts because I was just at a loss as to how I could edit without the Avid shortcut keys, I simply couldn't remember.

Since then I've been reading a bit about editing, I've never been terrible at editing and I can always find a way out of the bad situations I've put myself in by rendering at the wrong time. I'd just never thought about how much editing has a huge effect on the narrative. Well, it's not even that I'm very aware of how it can effect the narrative I guess I've just never seen it in practice, making the sports drinks advert and seeing everyones interpretations was eye opening for me, even if I was slightly embarrassed about how cheesy mine actually was.

I was in the library the other day (for a completely unrelated reason) and I passed the book In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. What I've found recently is that when I'm in the library if a book catches my eye when I'm not looking for it it's probably a good call to check it out. Hence why I currently have 10 books on my desk that I will eventually read, honest. Anyway this book is really interesting, it's written in more of a conversational voice you feel like you're learning something rather than just being talked at with loads of jargon. They compare films to chimpanzee DNA, they make sure you know that the more complicated a sound mix doesn't make it good (Sidenote: The Martix had a 6 track orchestra, just how - how did they do that?), it also talks a bit about colour grading.

Colour grading is something that does interest me, especially the idea that there's an almost scientific approach to it but for now that's a bit far out of my league. I don't trust myself enough for that yet so I'll stick to colour correcting, sometimes, occasionally - I'll do my best to avoid it.

So for now I'll stick to my books and training videos, I'm currently making my way through the Avid Essential Training on Lynda.com but I think I might start looking into more specific effects and how I can use them in my studio edit.

Everything.

Photo from Jorn

When researching film roles I've found that most have very specific objectives they have to achieve in order to gain that title, with Producer however there doesn't seem to be a set answer other than - everything. You just oversee everything which in part makes you responsible for everything which is terrifying.  It's just absolutely terrifying when you leave something you've worked so hard on in the hands of other people, no matter how much you trust the other people, you can't help but worry.

That's what I'm experiencing right now just constant worry of things going wrong, seeing people not do their job right and using that as the way of stepping to regain control however I only have that control for the minute I'm talking to the person who isn't doing their job, after that it's right back to feeling, well feeling a bit useless. During the shoot if something seemed to be getting out of hand or going off track I would step in to bring everyone back but mostly everyone was doing their own thing - rather disjointedly for the most part. Yet because everyone was so wrapped up in the their job I took to making notes of things that simply weren't going to work tomorrow because we have a very intense work load. After we wrapped for the day I asked everyone to hang back for a few minutes whilst I gave them a few notes, the majority being around communication.

For a long time whilst producing this piece I didn't think I had to keep talking about the importance of communication because I thought it was common knowledge, however as time has gone on I've realised it really isn't. People and teams I thought were speaking to each other (and for the most time I was being told they were speaking together) just weren't communicating as much as I would have hoped. I thought that all changed 2 weeks ago when I all but demanded that all finalised paperwork/planning be sent to me and everything seemed to match up. But then things started changing, when we got on set we went from high-key to low-key lighting almost immediately meaning that other things then didn't fit so they had to change but because everyone was so hyped up they forgot to talk about it! It was just a bit confusing.

I'm not sure if it was confusing simply because they were using terminology that I still don't fully grasp or everyone was crowded around the camera talking at once but something was off. Not speaking properly to actors, people not fully engaging with their jobs, not listening to their team leader, letting others take over their role etc It's really hard to gauge how severe some of the actions are because this is the first time I've done this. I just hope that explaining my perspective on the shoot at the end of the day was enough to make people realise that tomorrow is going to be hard, doable but hard.

'I'm Gonna Build Me A Wall'

Set build, beginning, middle and end. Photo from Mirella

Is it wrong to be shocked when everything, well mostly everything, goes exactly the way you want it to?

For the majority of this project I feel like I've been pushing an uphill battle where everything and to some extent everyone has been against me. I guess that comes hand in hand with being a producer however sometimes it can't help but feel personal. That's exactly what I avoided for the majority of this project, I didn't want anyone to feel like anything I said to them was a personal attack but in making sure that didn't happen part of me just avoided the confrontation. I can handle things in formal situations such as production meetings but outside of that when someone Facebook messages me asking a question or texts me saying they're going to be late I feel like it's too much of an intimate situation to be blunt with them without sounding like I'm making things personal. Throughout the project, particularly in the beginning I pushed the use of email to avoid this type of thing but after a
while I just had to admit defeat to social media and texting. It came with it's own challenges but it was definitely the better way of communicating to everyone and getting a quick response.

I've done many things wrong during this production and I openly admit that, however I've recently realised that if I say anything with enough credence people will believe me. The same with if I act like nothings wrong people will also believe that nothing is wrong and continue with their work, even if that work is behind schedule.

I guess what I'm trying to say is acting like I knew what I was doing was the best decision I've made so far.

Out of me making decisions of pure instinct we got the script finalised, storyboards finished, set build approved, actors auditioned, set and props ordered, set built and dressed all in time for a tech rehearsal with camera and lights on Friday afternoon. That's the bit that still hasn't quite made sense in my head.

On Tuesday me, Emily and Tom went to buy the main building materials for the set - including a door that fit in Tom's car as long as me and Em were not also in the car so we called Lawrence to pick us up - although my dodgy calculations meant an extra 2 trips to Homebase (again thank you Tom and Lawrence!) we got everything done in 2 days. That's right, built, scraped, papered, 2 coats of paint and flooring down by 5pm Thursday. Come Friday all that was left to do was hang the doors and start dressing.

So yeah I'm still in a state of shock, the call sheets are now drawn up and ready to go all that's left to do is film and then it's over which is kind of insane. I'll have more of an insight into being a producer when everything has finished but now my main thought is this, I thought I was a good producer before I started this project and whilst the vast majority of this project has made me question those skills I'm back to thinking I'm not half bad at this. It's been a learning curve and it's been a hard one but I'm getting there.

Plus right now the budget stands at £99.56 - with only T-shirts left to buy (and possibly a bit of petrol money for the boys) I don't think that's bad going.

Perfect Timing

On Monday last week I once again went into W104 to work on the animation for my piece, as mentioned in my other post I has started playing around to see how I could best make the waves appear in the video. And whilst I actually rather like the way this looks it does take a while to get it up to a point it looks like an actual wave. It takes a lot of key framing and watching it over to make sure the lines work well together. However it takes a lot of patience, so I tend to work on it for a certain period of time and then go off and do something else before I loose my mind. I also had a meeting with my actress on this day meaning I had



On the Tuesday I sat down after speaking with my actress and tried to figure out timing, now I had overestimated how long this particular monologue would take to actually perform. So I started trying to figure out timing so when my actress came with me to record my voice over the following day I could slow/speed her up. I did this by matching each line to a section of the storyboard and saying each line in my head, I ended up assigning each section around 10 seconds of screen time. To get a better idea of this I made a 3 minute long composition in After Effects and re-wrote my subtitles with the timings included. Now some of it dragged,  I am very aware of that however I can't decide whether it will still drag when all the elements are put together and it's something I'm going to have to make a decision on fast. It did, however, give me a better idea of what I was working towards.

Also after speaking with Rosie and Tom I found that the rear projection screen in the University is actually in 4:3 ratio as apposed to 16:8 which I had been working in so I've simply transferred my exiting footage into a new composition that's in the correct ration. However I haven't adjusted the existing pre-comps so it still looks a bit odd until I go back into fix it.

Here is a preview of what I've been working on, it's nowhere near finished but it's what I had at the end of adding the correctly timed subtitles.

I also added the dots to represent those still on the island and a moving icon to represent the boat, I added multiple effects on the boat icon as well a tracking path and key-framing the scale to try and make it look like it's out of place and the only thing affected in this very still, controlled world that I've created.



On Thursday I also filmed my actress in front of a green screen - I will make a more detailed blog about that in the future - however just to make sure it worked I quickly put into After Effects and ran a quick test with Keylight. I still need to do a bit more research on the effect I want to create before I can say it's ready to be put into the composition but it's getting there.

The only thing that's worrying me right now is that I believe the work looks like student work - which is never a good thing to think when looking at work I'm proposing for a Gallery Exhibition. However what I'm trying to create is so obscure I need to keep powering through the amateur looking version before I ask for help because without that version I can't explain what it is I'm trying to make. And no my badly drawn storyboards are of no help.

Andre also took some picture whilst on set, here they are!

I'm OK at this?

Something I'm not proud of is that as a person I am absolutely terrified of failure to the point where it genuinely hinders my learning. One of the downsides to coming into a very technical course without any real technical background was then when it come to practical projects there is always someone better skilled than me at certain things, camera work and lighting included. So I never really tried to do those jobs because there are people who are better at it than me and if my camera work isn't very good then we'll all get marked down because of it.

But the major flaw in that plan is I
never learn how to do those things, this year I am a bit more confident with my work and I'm trying my hand and lighting for instance but in non-Uni based work. I also tried out the Glide-cam. Now this was terrifying to me, thousands of pounds worth of equipment on the end of a stick? Nope, not something I care to think about. It wasn't until I realised that dance training is actually useful in this case that I decided to have go. Dance training has never really came in handy for me since I stopped dancing however having a steady walk and centre of gravity whilst using a steady-cam is actually pretty useful. I wasn't as bad at it as I thought I would be and it was actually really fun.

I'm not saying I'm going to be transferring all my energy into being a cinematographer anytime soon but I'll be willing to give a shot, maybe not on Uni project yet but personal projects? Sure why not.

Filming with the Green Screen in G12

I also used the studio for my Maps and Journeys shoot - shot on a standard tripod, nothing that interesting if I'm being honest but the big studio isn't that scary anymore and I call that progress.

We're Nearly There!

My brainstorming for buy set build materials

So now we have a finalised set design and we start building on Wednesday I started making a list/pricing up everything we need for the set with the intention of going out with Emily tomorrow to buy everything so on Wednesday everything is there ready to go.  I spoke to Chris briefly the other day about sizing and how we came to the conclusion we could use around 8 flats with the set being 12ft by16ft (Actually make that 8ft by 12ft, I didn't realise how big the other was!).

I made the list of the B&Q website and tried to match up measurements to the best of my knowledge, I also looked at other suppliers in farnham but they were all a lot more expensive than B&Q. I also included equipment (everything except nails, I need to speak to Chris again first) but I remembered that a while back some of the class said they had a lot of painting equipment at home so I need to ask them first before I head out and buy everything new, I also need to check to see if the studio has dust sheets available.

The only problem I'm currently facing is transport, a lot of the class are using the self-directed days to work on their maps and journeys projects meaning that we don't have access to a car, something that's pretty important if we're buying a door. (I'm still trying to find a way of building a door frame instead of buying one, but I'll see how far I get with that). Jonny is holding auditions on Tuesday, meaning a decision will be made in time for Mirella to go out and buy costumes in the following days. I may be living in a bit of a dream world but I would like to have the main set built/wallpapered on the Wednesday in time for a coat of paint on the Thursday, have that dry over night then have a second coat done on the Friday morning so we can start dressing the set on Friday night ready to have final touches done on the Monday morning before we shoot.

Lots of organising once again but there seems to be an end in sight - which I am very grateful for!

Think Cisco Ramon meets R2D2

If you've seen my Youtube video for November you'll know that one of my goals for this year is make my work as accessible as possible. Whilst audio-description won't really work for this piece it doesn't mean that I have to make it boring for those who can't see the visuals. When I first came up with this idea I imagined the soundscape to just go hand in hand with the piece, especially when thinking of it as a gallery installation rather than a theatre piece.

I found this article with Ben Burtt  which I read to get some inspiration and I'm a bit of a Star Wars nerd so this is just really cool to me. I also watched some Youtube documentaries surrounding him, one of which can be found below.

I really do like working with sound and I finally got my hands on the book 'Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema' a book I've been trying to get out of the library since we started our sound project it was just never available! So I ordered it from Rochester instead. Anyway this book basically covers all bases including music in my original post for this project I said the soundscape will be a mixture of 'water sounds' and '8-bit Orchestrations' and that hasn't really changed. I have however realised how hard that would be in the time frame that I have so I'm scaling it down a little bit.

But before starting the project in After Effects I booked out a Zoom and made a list of all the sounds I could possibly need - however there weren't many. I actually recored the majority of them whilst cleaning the bathroom (I know, classy right?) I was experimenting with how water can sound in different situations, I thought I may as well do something practical at the same time.

After that I sat down at my desk and just started playing around with things since I knew what sounds I wanted to make I just wasn't sure how to make them. I wanted 'submarine tracker' sounds - rather specific I know. I started flicking my steel ruler against the table and really liked the reverb you got and how you could change it by adjusting it's position, so I recored that. The way my highlighter rocked on the table when I was simply moving it out the way sounded interesting, so I recorded that. I was  even just messing around with my piano when I realised that when I play the keys and it's not switched on it sounds like something making contact with the ground, just under water and muffled, so I recorded that too.

The only thing I have left to record is the sound of a keyboard typing, I'm hoping to use the typing as the 'keynote' (Which apparently is the sound design equivalent to a tonal centre). I'm thinking that if I have a general typing noise in the background I could layer different versions of the sound, each layer relating to something different. 1) General typing, diegetic in the fact the act will be typing on a keyboard during the performance 2) To show the beat 3) Possibly a pitched shift version of the beat to represent Ariels personality within the situation. I'm still deciding on the beat of the sound piece to go with the text, Ariels monologues are in iambic pentameter and my first instinct was to have the sound in 4/4 to match but then I started thinking that having it in a waltz would be more interesting to listen to juxtaposing the voice over since the voice over is actually quite light and care-free in comparison to the actual subject matter.

On Wednesday I also met with my actress to record the voice over in G21, we recorded a few versions of the voice over some going all the way through, then individual lines with specific direction. Over the next few days I will be putting together an edit of the voice over so I can finalise the timing of the piece and get a better idea of what parts of the film needs to be shortened/made longer etc. I'm also still reading loads of articles on the sound design side of things before I go into protools to have a go at making the soundscape itself.

It's fine.

As Producer I've found that a lot of my job is writing. Writing risk assessments, timetables, notes, minutes from meetings, emails.... just a lot of writing. Anyway at the start of the project we were all quite laid back about it and then we found out that the script that had been written wasn't plausible to make and wasn't as creative as we thought it was. So the synopsis went from this;

A 1-2 minute advert focusing on the hidden nature of domestic abuse, following a character watching TV in his home, oblivious to the abuse happening in the adjacent room. The advert will focus on the hidden nature of domestic abuse, how it can often go unnoticed and its direct impact on the victim. The goal is to raise awareness on how to spot the signs of domestic abuse, promote helplines, and most importantly encourage people not to ignore the issue when they notice the signs. This will be achieved by utilising skills developed in the professional toolkit units.

To this;

A 2 minute long campaign film focusing on the stigma against male domestic abuse victims. Based on the classic sitcom the campaign will open with the male lead entering the set talking to a friend about how how his partner has been hitting him. At this point you will hear a generic laugh track. This will continue often with his friend quipping in remarks about ‘manning up’ and ‘don’t be a wimp’. The laugh track will continue until the character notices it and address the fact that it’s not a funny subject, at this point the actor will look directly into the camera breaking the fourth wall. Tracking backwards the camera will reveal the set (eg lighting, other cameras sound equipment) showing the audience how the media control our perceptions of abuse alongside the actor who will be speaking about the importance of the stigma being dropped. And now to this;

A 2 minute long campaign film focusing on the stigma against male domestic abuse victims. Based on the classic sitcom the campaign will open with the male lead entering the set talking to a friend about his recent family holiday. Whilst talking the friend will leave the set and go to grab a beer from the kitchen, at this point the camera will zoom in on the male lead as he sits on the sofa. Sounds from the kitchen and object around the room will become more prominent and the character will be very much in his own world. Once the camera is in a close up a bottle will be heard smashing in the kitchen causing the male lead to jump, linking back to the story regarding his wife bottling him on holiday . At this point his friend will come back into the living room where he will be trying to remove a stain from his shirt before asking the male lead if everything is ok. The male lead will then say the smash made him jump to which his friend will reply that it was only a bottle smash. At this point the male lead will look at his hands saying 'Yeah, man up'. And if I have any say in the matter it won't be changing again. After some very tense meetings I finally feel comfortable saying that we will get everything done on time as long as everyone works together as, to be quite frank, we don't have any time left. So far we've had around 7 production meetings (some of which the minutes from the meetings can be found here, here and here). I will say I'm quite comfortable leading meetings of this size as it's something I've done a lot of in the past, so I'd like to say I'm pretty good at it although some people may disagree. In the past week since the idea change around I have found myself becoming stricter with people regarding deadlines and changing ideas simply because when you look at the timetable (found here) you can clearly see that time isn't on our side. We also had a move around with the job roles (found here) to make sure everyone had a job to do during the shoot. In the past few days we've had a script drawn up (here is one of the later drafts of the script) and after meeting with Anne we made some changes as a group to make the script easier to work with on a creative level, the final version of the script will be ready by Tuesday. Once the script is finalised that means the Director/Storyboard Artist can work with the D.O.P on the shot types and storyboards of which I hope to have by Thursday to look over and finalised by Friday so that the Ast. Director can figure out our shoot schedule and the Lighting director can get started on plans for the shoot. I guess what I'm trying to say is, we're getting there. I'm working my way down a checklist from last year and it's working in my favour I mean look - the risk assessment is almost done and everything. Just hang in there, everything is going to be fine.

Accessible Art

My Vlog for November talking a bit about my Maps and Journey's Project - below is also an interesting TED Talk around the subject I found after filming.

256 layers later.

When I started this project I'm not sure why but in my head it was a lot simpler. Maybe it was just my nerdy excitement but I have found out that there is a lot more frame by frame animation than I anticipated - which is fine. I mean would be better without but it is fine.

For the past week I've been working a lot in W104 just powering through, having things go wrong, freaking out for a bit, going back and fixing whatever went wrong and powering through again. After the first night of working I realised quite quickly that the effect I wanted to use wasn't going to work the way I thought it was. In my head mapping the binary text around a 'wave' shape was going to look good, however just trust me when I say it didn't. The shape was off, it moved funny - it just didn't look the way I wanted it to. So I started playing around with After Effects, I had the idea of animating the code in it's own composition and then mapping out the layer shape from that and seeing what happend.

I found a binary translator online and started translating the monologue the actor will be saying into binary, from there I then changed the colours of each number and started layering them and animating them to look like waves. 256 layers later this is what I had. And whilst the fact the computer wasn't even flinching to preview it (Something my laptop just couldn't handle) it still looked a bit off.

That's when I remember something, I remembered when I was trying to come up with an idea for Time Art last year I spent far too much time on Video CoPilot and one of there tutorials was how to make cool sound waves in After Effects. Now I just wanted the wave part but a stylised sound wave, coloured blue and instead of showing sound showing binary code, that could work. So that's what I did 

This took a lot longer than I expected in all honesty but having previewed it I think it's going to work. Hopefully once I've built up more waves they will move across the screen and 'take out' the island with a splash leaving the screen blank ready for the next part of the scene.

Now I had worked out that problem I went back to my first one. In one of my scenes when Ariel is first conducting the storm I wanted to show it through hacking, to this I wanted sot to appear on a world map one by one and then change colour to green as if Ariel has gained access to them. However once I got over my image vector problems with the world map and returned to After Effects I was face with the problem of having another 250 layers individually timed to appear, change colour and track with the image as it zooms in all without pixelating - I'm not even sure that it's possible.

So after googling for solutions and coming up dry I decided to work in Illustrator again and just create loads of vector images containing more and more dots, then another set of vector images containing the same dots just a different colour. I then put them into After Effects as if they were drawn animations. They look good in preview for now but I'm not sure how they are going to look when they are blown up bigger so I'm classing this as a temporary solution whilst I get the rest of the base down.





Other than the technical side of things I also reached out to Acting and Performance and the UCA Freshers Pages to search for an actor.



'Hi guys, I'm casting for my 2nd year project a modernised performance piece of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I'm looking for a male actor to play Ariel (a computer genius in my version of the show) to say a short monologue and interact with a projected computer based background. Whilst it is a performance piece there is a chance that the project could be exhibited in the James Hockey Gallery after christmas so there will be some filming/Voice over work next week (VO Wednesday 11th/ Filming Thursday 12th).  I can work around class schedules and will pay expenses for the days of the actual performances, other than that you will be paid in chocolate :)

If anyones interested just message me, thank you! :)

PS The monologue will be said true to text so if you've worked with Shakespeare before that would be great but not necessary.'

However after realising that most of the actors here at UCA are actually female I started thinking about switching the roles because - why not? There is nothing in the script that says Ariel has to be Male and there is nothing in my adaption that's gendered, so why not? After that I had an actress message me about the role and I'm hopefully setting up a meeting her for Monday, after which I'm hopefully recording voice over on Wednesday and filming in the studio on Thursday.

It's been a bust week, but hopefully once the bulk of this is out the way it will be smooth sailing.

However it is me and it is my project let's not speak too soon.