This has been a very tiring experience. Over the last ten week I have had the chance to direct and produce my own film, the only reason why behind it is that I enjoy making films. I had an idea and locations and was on schedule. I managed to film all the footage I needed against green screen for the clips that I intended for the monitors in about two days so I was really pleased with myself that I was moving so quickly. By about week four I was already filming on location in Swanage at a friend’s house and on the first day of filming it was very tiring and I didn’t get as much filming done as I had hoped but in managed to get it done in the next couple of days.

The plan was to get all the filming at my friend’s house in one week and then film at the coast in the second week. I had planned out everything that we were going to do, however we needed to load all the equipment and monitors along with a second table into a car to take down to the coast. We were hoping to get a van to do it in one trip but we couldn’t get one so we had to use my friend’s car and it took about three trips. Then also I thought the table was a fold out but it turned out that it needed bolts. So once we had finally everything set up, it was about 5 o’clock and I thought it would have been ok but it was too dark to film. The next time we would be able to film would be on the same day a week later, so because of weather conditions I did lose quite a lot of time.

The week between I started on the editing of the footage that I had and at that point even though I had lost a week I thought I was still on target and a week later was able to film all the footage I needed and I was finished and on to editing. I had a rough edit of my final film without all the footage tracked to monitors so I made a quick start on editing that footage. What I wanted to do was to pick out only the t-shirt and leave the rest of the character very de-saturated making the shirt and emotion so to speak stand out. I had to go through all the clips I liked and use the new rotobrush tool to pick out the shirt colour on each clip which admittedly took longer than I thought but still was achievable.

When it finally came to tracking the footage this was my number one priority and should have been a quick an easy job because of the greens markers that I had placed on monitors. The first part worked fairly well with some minor hiccups but after the scene at Swanage coast when my character arrives back in the room that where it all started to fall apart. For some unknown reason for the simplest of close ups where you could plainly see markers, the footage wouldn’t track. For whatever reason I don’t know but it wouldn’t do it. As a result of this one twenty second scene it put everything else on hold. The main bits that needed to be done were the motion tracking, colour correction and sound editing. Out of all three the first one is almost complete but because I didn’t anticipate how long it would take or how many problems arise it has made my film in complete, which is quite disappointing after such a great high energy start.
Looking back it comes down to the fact I think that I didn’t light the shots very well apart from placing the markers on the tv screen itself as opposed to the outside barrier, but at the time I thought that was the right thing to do. However even still some of the shots that didn’t work you could still see the markers perfectly, so why it didn’t track correctly I’m not exactly sure. I was disappointed that I couldn’t get tracking for the first scene so it meant I had to do it handheld in the end, the shot still looked ok but not as smooth and also as result I couldn’t track my main title sequence. If I was to do it again I would definitely research into how to film footage for tracking, one method I’ve learnt since is using a symbol of some kind. Altogether I used 100 motion trackers on the film and if I could have done the final scene correctly without any problems then it probably would have been more. I have another theory in why it might not have worked on some of the scenes, and that is the there is already so much tracking data being processed on one clip that maybe there wasn’t enough space to use another clip. Initially I had left myself two weeks for editing but of course this had been cut down because of the delay on filming, and also of planning permission to film on the coast.

The reason for me choosing that location was when I was doing about that particular scene I knew I wanted to do by the beach and I had seen a picture of a monument in Swanage that I thought would look brilliant in one of my shots, but because it was in Swanage there was a lot of problems with trying to get equipment up to set when my friend couldn’t collect me, so most times I was on the bus for about 2 hours to get there since I don’t drive myself. I had to do things differently I would try and choose a location more local to me to make it easier for myself or organize a crew to help me if I still wanted to go to Swanage because at the end of the day I still got some great shots.

Most of it was filmed on my own with my one actor and my friend so I didn’t really have a huge crew to help me and in some cases had to get all the equipment from Bournemouth to Swanage by myself. I was told by a friend that if you really want to get good marks for a project then you have to challenge yourself, however I may have set the bar to high for myself in this case. Altogether the footage turned out really well, and I have been told that the edit that I had put together looked nice as well. So for the parts that went right it still looks ok, but I will make sure afterwards that I get full edit of the film and at the end of the day, I was on time with my work and all it took was one hiccup in motion tracking that was unforeseeable for me to run out of time to finish my work.

I think with the whole idea itself I was too ambitious there was a lot to do make the film complete and I thought I could do it, and made the mistake to think that motion tracking is easy, so if there is one thing I could change it would be to on filming make sure that all my shots are lit correctly and possibly use bigger markers to make tracking a lot easier. The colour in the film wasn’t too bad in some places but again could have been lit better, and because it was dark I couldn’t figure out how to put a fake glow in to make it look like the light from the monitors was shinning on to his face. The reason I decided to motion track it all was because of continuity.

Originally the plan was to only track footage to the monitors at the coast because of health risks, so in the end I decided to motion track all of it which proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought. Ironically all the motion tracking on the coast was easy, and it would have probably be easier to get the right timing if I had just played back the footage on the monitors in real time, that way it would have solved the lighting problem because of the natural glow and the audio problem as well. Overall this has definitely been a great learning experience, and hopefully after the critique has passed I will try and use the Christmas holidays to get the full edit done that I wanted, but this has taught me some valuable lessons for my Extended Major Project.

Rough Cut without monitors

Partial Cut with Motion Tracking

Final Report

During the crit I showed the work I had done but was unable to show the music that I had my friend Chris produce for the film. The idea that we had was almost scatty and jazz type music which then evolved into a Hans Zimmer style of music, specifically used in ‘The Dark Knight’ directed by Christopher Nolan, whereby a lot of the sound effects used were him scratching knives against cellos for the Joker’s soundtrack. Similar effects are used in the music that Chris made for me but obviously to fit my theme for my film. The use of scratching a fork against a plate and random whispering would have been used for the final scene for example. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use it in the final piece because Adobe Premiere wouldn’t let me import the files and due to time constraints and the amount of students that still needed to show their work, I was unable to show my soundtracks to the class.

I had two tracks produced by my friend Chris, mainly for use at the beginning and end of the film, but like I said the sound effects of Chris whispering would have been great for the end scene, so I may have broken the tracks down myself and added in some sound effects here and there in the middle of the film. Altogether they sound fantastic and I’m a bit upset that I couldn’t use it with the final film.

I have spent most of today motion tracking the finished monitor footage to the main edit of the film by importing into After Effects. So far its been harder than I first anticipated this is dew to the fact that the markers I used whilst still effective for the most part some of them weren’t very lit well. The opening title sequence is a prime example but the most important thing is finishing all the main tracking. I will continue with it tomorrow and hopefully be finished by Friday.

So by the time everything was set up it was about 5:00pm which I thought would have been fine for lighting but it was to dark. I could have shot some footage but I wanted it to look how I envisioned the final piece to look like. So reluctantly, we packed everything away and got it by to Paul’s house. Luckily the day wasn’t a complete waste of time and we managed to shoot the final couple of shots I needed at Paul’s house, including the tracking for Paul’s forehead for the monitor.  I returned the equipment Wednesday afternoon and re booked it for Tuesday next week so hopefully that wil be the last of the filming and in the mean time I can get down to work on the main edit.

We got quite a lot of shots done but we still have a few more to do this week so we can focus on the scene down by the Swanage Coastline, which at the moment I’m in the process of getting permission to film, not really to film there but to give written permission to the film store because where off sight. Technically where we’re filming is a public place and I did ask next door to where we want to film at the Lifeboat Association if it was OK to film and they said it’s fine, but we need to give written permission from the council to the store, so hopefully I should get an email later. Apart from that everything is on time and the rest of filming at Paul’s house should be done on Saturday.

Here is a test I made today after I capture all my footage. I chose a clip and tried using the roto-brush to select his t-shirt, and then I increased the contrast and made the red brighter also adding a cartoon effect to highlight the detail in the shirt, then desaturated the rest of Paul to make him stand out. I then added some noise and grain to the footage to make it look like it was being played back on a monitor, also adding a venetian blind effect to give it those lines across it that you see on monitors. I took the footage home and motion tracked it to a monitor also adding the twitch effect as well.