The Opening Credits

Today we had a double lesson on how to create opening credits in Adobe After Effects CS4, it was really good just to have software like this and tuition on it to produce some really professional looking animations with shapes that we had made and font that we could edit ourselves.

Whilst doing all this it really gave me some info on how I could make my own titling look unique and have a style similar to that of what I would want the film to have. I constantly had an image of the 1995 film se7en by David Fincher. The titling was one of the most memorable for me, and I would really like to mix that style of font with some animation like on Terminator. I'm not sure how this would mix together, but I think that the crazy CRT blurring on the se7en would look good with some images moving slowly in the background also with a TV signal distortion aswell.

Here's both se7en's and Terminator's opening credits:

se7en [1995]

Terminator [1984]

Filters and Effects

I've been experimenting around with different effects that give a Watchmen look. I didn't really get anywhere for a while and eventually came up with a look that I liked and wasn't too hard to get to, I logged all the adjustments I had done to keep track of what was changed. I started with the basics of what I could pick out from the shots of Watchmen.

The shot is quite moody and sad. This is made by the contrast being very high, the saturation being quite low, and a photo filter which in this shot is a light brown. Although the background in this shot is probably a image laid over a blue screen, which would give the director an infinite choice of the mood of the shot in post production. The choice made was to have the shot reflecting the character, and made it a very depressing and bland shot. The focus is also drawn to a badge the character is holding, this is done by selecting a colour that isn't affecting by the filter. In other shots there is no focus and everything in the shot is drab. 

I tried reaching the same effects by applying what I thought would achieve the same effects. I started out with one tester image of what I was trying to get to:

I applied a full contrast, took away half the saturation of the image, sharpened the edges three times and an overall sharpen effect. Then I chose a filter to apply to all of the image, which I chose as a very dark blue with a density of about 30%.

I think that this effect worked well, although there was a bit too much noise created by the sharpening effects, also because the shot was outdoors looking into a dark area with an overexposed area to the left of it, the over exposed portion was blurred and wiped away by the high contrast.

This is the original photo, I did attempt to changed the over-exposed part but it only ended with one area being too exposed or the entire image losing it's contrast and detail.

I also experimented with layers that pronounced the edges more clearly, this worked but again it created noise on the edges.

Here are some more shots that I used a perfected the shot overall shot effect:

   Above: Edited. Below: Original

   Above: Edited. Below: Original

When I get the chance I will set up some sort of shot that will be similar to one that I plan to get in the final coursework I will apply the effects and tweak them to suit the shot.

The Coursework Is Here...

Yeh, that time has come. But on the other hand it is Media coursework, so if anything it's enjoyable. Yeeeeeeehaaa. Ever since I started this course I knew what coursework would be involved, so I began thinking about a story for the movie intro that I would eventually make. Ideas went through my mind, I had a few ideas in mind that I waited to have my full judgement on after my first experience on a movie set, and an experience about how to work with other people on set.

Most of the ideas I had were just wiped out by what would be possible as a student. I have a few left, but I'll see what the deadline is for the task.

The main things I've been playing around with are trying to get the right look of the overall visuals of the shots. I've been watching Zack Snyder's The Watchmen recently and I really like the way his shots have a high contrast & sharpness, and most of the shots have very low saturation.

The high sharpness and moody saturation really gives an overall emotion of depression and sadness of the entire film. I'm going to experiment with a few different effects and document them on das Blog.

I also wanted to use some really smooth camera movements, like we used in the Hangover project, but a lot more slower. Some form of dolly system that doesn't have have rails, as I wanted to use it to zoom in on a character to produce tension and curiosity, and if the rails are placed in front in the same direction as camera angle, then they'll be in shot. So something that can hold a camera at around sitting height and doesn't show it's railings in shots.

I'm going to go ahead with some, experimentation...

Evaluation Time.

Come along children I'm going to read you an interesting story of what went good or bad with an AS Media Studies project.

So basically I'm gonna go through all of the main focus shots and say how I think it could have been better.

This shot was lined up really well, we didn't have a decent amount of people to have like in the original, but we lengthened the shot by spacing the to people out. The props were also limited, we were going to have some real flowers, but we were stressed out from the rest of the organisation, I think that the replacements of fake greenery still did well. We borrowed the van from one of Bill's Dad's Friends, who coincidentally was in Las Vegas. We haven't heard much from him. The font for the titling was a very close match, and the placement was pretty easy. A well duplicated shot.

This shot wasn't that tricky to set up, but on our first day of shooting, the camera we were using was low on battery towards the end of the day, it produced some really weird streaking black lines to appear horizontally on the shot. We couldn't get rid of them in editing, but we re shot all the other shots from that day. So it all went well. The cake was made for us by Evie and her Mum, which, for a home made cake was brilliant, it looked a bit wedding-y, but we didn't have a budget. So wedding cake was probably out of reach for us. The shots are mirrored, which isn't a big deal. Also the lighting in our shot was a lot darker, this was because we were getting towards the end of our shooting day, and 4 o'clock was about when Jake's house got too dark to avoid continuity errors. This was also another reason why we re-shot some of the other shots. We lit the cake with a desk lamp being held by me to focus the shot on the cake.

This is my favourite shot that we did, it was done on a wooden dolly system that Jake made in his youth and hasn't been used since. It made a really smooth shot. The lighting in this shot was perfect, it was bright, with some artificial light, but it isn't really noticeable in the short time of the shot. The layout on screen is twinned between the two shots. Our best work yet.

This shot was another great layout of the shots, with the people in the right place. Although more of the make-up girl can be seen. Not to mention the script and shot-by-shot guide left on the table. Soz. The lighting in the room made it more orange, which could have been dealt with in editing, but as this project wasn't part of our overall grade, I think we slacked a smidge. The actors didn't have to do much, but we wanted to get the weird hand thingy that the bride does in.

We were limited on the amount of room that we had, so everything was a bit more squished in, but we had to work with what we had. We got everything in frame where it should be in this shot. Including the bride in the little mirror, I thought that was a nice touch. The original shot had less zoom on, but we couldn't have made the shot perfect with the amount of room we had, this made the mirror a lot smaller and the mum a lot bigger unfortunately. Also Jake's mum in this shot is wearing my mum's scarf. Detail or what!

This shot was lined up pretty well, it wasn't particularly hard to do the second time as we'd already done this shot the weekend before and the film went all skewiff. The plant was still in roughly the right position, but because of the geography of the room, the only way we could get the flower in shot would mean that it had to be out of focus. The costume we left for the actors to decide on, so long as they wore clothes similar style to that of the original characters.

This back shot was easy to line up, but along with the area of the room again, it couldn't be matched up perfectly. We still got all the characters in frame, along with the sofa being at the same angle with the bottom of the frame.

Phil's first position shot was the first shot we did, shot in a field at the back of Tuttles Lane. We got Bill's dad to bring a very nice car to this field and we began to set up the shot. Each character was related back to the original sequence. We couldn't have someone sitting on the car, because the bonnet would most likely buckle under the weight, so we improvised. Jamie at the back did a great job of peeing in a bush for about 15 or so minutes. Luckily he wasn't method acting. Phil's costume wasn't the same, it wasn't very dirty, although we had just come straight from school. And also it wasn't a low-cut top, like the original. But in my defense it was bloody freezing.

The second position in Phil's shots was also easy, we re-aligned the shot so that something that wasn't Tuttles Lane was in the background and shot the entire conversation again. The make-up was byro, it wasn't very tasty. The alignment on this shot again was great. Although because I'm not as muscular as Bradley Cooper my feeble arms didn't stretch the same distance.

As I said the previous post, the titling wasn't perfect and could have been better, but we still did a good job on it. The original titling was small and slightly more in focus, but I still that for a AS Media project we did damn well to match it up.

My opinion of our finished work; 

Editing The Hangover

So this was our first try at editing something on this strange new piece of software called 'Adobe Premiere Pro'. I've been using Sony Vegas 9 for a couple years every now and then, so I found switching to Premiere quite easy. I found the new software absolutely amazing. It catered for all the needs in our post production, and I look forward to using it in the future. We were able to set edit the audio and video in the way we needed, and it also covered the little things we needed to do, like putting effects on the audio and color correction.

The use of it can vary from the really basic, with just creating a title and editing shots, but we wanted to get the best edit of our shots and used Premiere to the fullest extent. We were able to have as many video and audio tracks as we wanted, so we put either; opposite shots on alternating tracks or, with Phil and Tracy's phone conversation, we used alternating tracks for each of the characters. The audio for some of the tracks was a real hazard for us novices, sometimes the audio of another shot would overlay the video of another shot in the original hangover cut. We had to move around this and find a way to easily do this. It turned to be quite simple, but it just took a bit of brain work. Which we were lacking on a Monday morning. All we had to do on these was get the shots lined up, unlink each of them, remove the audio on the previous and extend the audio on the second shot. And the opposite for the video. This occurred a few times, but after the first time we had it laid out.

The audio effects were pretty easy, to get the sound of a mobile signal and phone we used a high pass filter and the volume control. Basics. We used color correction on the Phil shots, which was also pretty easy, after a technician had shown us a useful tri-wheel color correction effect, we were pretty confident on the look we wanted and saved it as a preset, then all we had to do on the other shots was to drag and drop the preset and BOOM! it was done.

The music was easy, all it needed was to be dragged into it's own audio track, then volume key points were logged in, and BOOM! another one bites the dust. The titles and credits were on Bill's part and were also pretty easy, just a quick Photoshop job on the font, dragged and dropped into the project on our computer, then placed on the shot at the right time, with the right additive dissolve added and BOOM-BANG-A-RANG another one's gone. The title of the hangover wasn't quite what we wanted, but it still showed that we had tried to copy the title's and got the effect that displays them done pretty well. It still matched up with the original well, even if it did look a bit cheesy.

:)

So that thing we did, well it's finished...

We have finished the Hangover Opening Sequence and I only have one thought.

Yes. It was very fun and really interesting to find what it's like on a 'movie set', but it also feels like a real achievement. To be able to recreate a hollywood movie introduction, with pretty close relation, only without the huge budget. I think we did an amazing job, it matches the original pretty well, even if the small details couldn't be met with a budget consisting of our own will it is still possible to tell that the finished product is definitely a remake of the Hangover.

Here's the finished product:

Omg.

WOOH!

Today we finished the production of our Hangover Introduction remake. Everything is now done besides the editing. It went pretty well, a few slip ups here and there. But, we managed to get through it.

Our main objective for today was to finish the rest of the shooting and record the audio for the overdubbing that was needed,  and some of the background ambiance that we are going to put in during post-production.

So the shooting that we needed to do was all of the people shots, as the footage on the dad shot that we had already shot had some funny lines on it, that even a technician who came into help with editing didn't know anything about. So we did all the shots of the people. The set-up we used was just the basic, with a camera and a neon head tripod for the smooth movements we were looking for. This shot was of the bride, Nicole, who did a very good job at the cheesy american accent.

We had the laptop handy throughout the entire shoot to check up on the shots of the original. Along with a paper copy of the shots and a script. The usual.

We got my parents to come along again and play the dad and a bridesmaid, we asked them to keep their costume the same, even though it didn't matter as we re-shot the old shots of them. We didn't want any continuity errors! Unfortunately we couldn't find the magazine that the dad was reading, but Jake didn't have many bikini magazines lying around.

We also did all the outside shots that were of the wedding. This was only a shot of people taking flowers out of a van, and people laying out chairs, but still needs to be in there. We borrowed a van from Bill's Dad, who seems to be a dealer of vehicles for AS Media work now or something. And we just got loads of different chairs from around Jake's house and arranged them to look wedding-y.

We also did the sound recording that we needed, which somehow ended up as Jake making random noises down the microphone to sound like background animals, and also almost ended up making my bladder empty. We overdubbed Phil's side of the conversation, because the sound was muffled by wind buzz, and also every 10 seconds there was the sound of a lorry passing by. It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and was over in under half an hour. All we had left to do was to edit everything together.

WHAT YOU SAYIN' BILL!

Cake & Hangover

On Sunday, 9th October we were planning to shoot all of the other shots that we needed to get for the rest of the Hangover Project. In didn't really go to plan, people had broken noses, were grounded or were just stuck at work. Very frustrating for when we had everything planned out and we couldn't do anything because of these reasons. Still we did what we could, and got shots of my parents (The bride's father and one of the brides). Shots of the cake, and the shot of the bride's dress. Here are some of the shots.

 This is our recreation of the living room for the shot. We used Jake's house because it was the biggest and stuff could be moved around easily to recreate the shot, however we had to change some of the object placements to fit the shots that were needed into the room. I found the setting up bit pretty easy, with a little brainstorming between us we managed to get everything together pretty easily. It didn't match perfectly but we got there.

 To get the smooth shots of the cake, dress and flowers, we had a fortunate and awesome technique that we used, much like the professional dolly cart, Jake made a skateboard and a load of wooden planks into a steady car which could be used to slowly move the camera in a direction that was needed. This was really cool. It gave a very sleek shot that mimicked the pros, Jake made the dolly when he was 12 and said that he had never used it properly.

Until now.

 The dolly made the shots we got from Jake's Step-dad's Canon 5D perfect, it really recreated the effects that the original shot has.

 This is us in awe of how awesome the dolly really was. Also, we tested the shots on our tea.

 These people are my parents. My dad was playing the brides dad, although we haven't really had a chance to direct our actors properly, unless cake counts as an actor. When we next shoot I think that we'll be able to get an idea of what it's like to direct actors to get the shots we need.

 Yet another beautiful shot of the amazing dolly-rack-cart thing.

This was the cake that we had specially brought in by our caterer. Unfortunately because of Evie's work commitments, it was dark by the time we got the cake and had set up. We were very impressed with the cake. Although it wasn't an exact replica of the original, I think it still captures the fact that it is for a wedding pretty well. I was most disappointed on finding that the flower wasn't edible.

It was an awesome cake. We enjoyed eating it very much, we will also be making a short behind the scenes video, in which we will eat the cake. It was delicious.

Phil

So we started shooting for our Hangover remake. We started with Phil's side of the phone conversation, not gonna lie, but for our first ever shoot, it was awesome. Got some exclusive behind the scenes snapshots, I'll just explain them as I go along.

This was one of our preparations; make-up. I was playing Phil, we were going to use fake blood. Yeh. We forgot it, so we improvised with byro. Went pretty successfully.

Looks like I had been punched in the face. Bill's Dad did suggest we just use method acting ways, I wasn't completely enthusiastic on that. We were trying to get the closest relation to the original shots, we got the costume and make-up pretty close to the original with these shots, we didn't really get the costume as dirty and as worn as the it could have been, but it was the same clothing style that we went for.

We had the script of the intro on the set, I was actually holding while doing the shots, I think  it would have been better if I didn't have it; I would've been able to use my other hand, but we had a casting change at the last moment because of the fact that it was quite windy when we did the shoot. And Bill's hair would have got in a right mess.

Nicole and Evie were behind the scenes checking with Jake, who was the cinematographer, on how the shots were matching up to the originals. They were also giving tips on how to make it look better, and there just to make us look pro.

We were fortunate enough to have Bill's Dad's car along with us, which was a real bonus as it was the same shape and colour as the car they have in the original shot. We were very grateful to Bill's Dad. And we turning a few heads on the edge of Tuttle's Lane.

We have had another day of shooting, unfortunately it wasn't very productive as people didn't show up, and Evie was being held back at work by a very ignorant boss. We are going to have another day of shooting as the daylight ran out on Sunday and so did the camera battery. We have only got the rest of the people shots to get, which shouldn't take too long and we can get on with the editing.