CONSTRUCTION OF THE PRODUCT

Trauma

PROBLEMS FACED WITH AUDIO Me and my sound guy, Bruno Gillick faced a lot of problems with audio:The sound and the audio quality were hindered by the fact that neither Bruno or I had powerful enough computers to be able to cope high quality audio. This meant that we were forced to record into a compressed format, which hindered audio quality. This is not really noticeable through normal speakers, but in a large surround sound speaker system, the cracks would begin to show. Another one of the main problems with the audio was that all the sound had to be done in post production, which meant trying to recreate every noise with household items and then finding the best way to mic them, then trying to sync them up to the video on scene - a hugely tedious job which was not very gratifying, as nothing seemed to work. The reason I decided to do sound in post was weather conditions, in terms of dialogue, we only had one word that needed to be said, so it was more practical to do it using ADR, but the results were not believable.

RESOLVING THE PROBLEMS

To fix the problem of bad ADR we added a lot of post production effects, such as reverb and other such effects, this in its turn lead to the sound becoming more believable, but still sounding rather amateurish. In the future we could improve the audio by micing more on set,

rather than leaving it to post production, and us doing a little more acoustic research into the location for the film before shooting it, so the audio can sound good.

THE SCORE the music attempts to follow the film, Bruno did unfortunately

have to rely on playing instruments himself, record them to the pace of the film, and then add effects. This lead to a more indy sound scape, rather than the percussion driven one that we are so used to in a Hans Zimmer world. This is just a matter of personal preference.

for A2 Bruno will be capable of generating entire orchestras using synths and therefore my A2 piece will have a traditional cinematic score to it.

FILMING GEAR

MY CAMERA RIG For hardware, I used my morphing shoulder rig, this was incredibly

useful, as it enabled me to get stable shots. And when i required a low angled shot, for scenes such as 'waking up in reality', it would morph into a spider rig, which means that i could get low angled shots without having to lie down.

Shoulder rig for the higher shots

Spider rig for lower shots

CAMERA

For cameras I used my Nikon D3500, I used this camera due to the fact that it was my own. I have had experience with editing with it, so i know its quality, framing and general feel so, it is also compatible with all the other software (and hardware) i use. So there was no way of me running into unexpected errors.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

In terms of cinematography, in reality, I used two red top lights, combined with a hazer and reflector. The reflector meant that i could take the edge of the light, to create a darker lit screen. The haze gave the alleyway a dark, windy atmosphere. Also it meant that you could see the individual beams of light.

HEAVEN

For the long shot of 'heaven', I used a pop up green screen, this was really useful as when compositing oneself into green scene footage, one needs to match the lighting of the footage that you are adding yourself into. Since 'heaven' was out doors, it would have been impractical to mimic outdoor lighting in a studio, and taking the studio green screen outside was impractical, therefore my pop-up green screen was useful because of its portability and speed, setting up the studio would have taken half and hour, and longer with the lights, whereas the pop up took a second. This was a more effective use of my time.

HEAVEN PHOTOS

AN IMPRACTICAL STUDIO SET UP

WHAT I SET UP

SOFTWARESoftware wise, I used Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects. Premier was use for editing the footage, After Effects was used for colour grading and compositing the effects. The reason I used Adobe instead of Final Cut, was the interlinking between the two programs. Adobe gives me more control over individual clips, and I can send that directly to Premier Pro without having to export it. This massively sped up the editing process.

EDITS

Firstly, I wanted to mimic depth of field, to do this I used the masking tool in After Effects. Here I would mask out my subject, frame by frame, and then add a blur to the background. This brought my subject into the foreground, and served to hide the background, to maintain the illusion that one was in a heavenly place.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Colour grading was very important, as it was the main tool I used to highlight the contrast between heaven and reality. The main tool for this was 'photo filter', which meant i could change how 'warm' or 'cold' my clip was. For the rest, i would just change the brightness and contrast, add vignetting which darkens the edges. On top of this, I added a 'letter box effect', this served to create a cinematic wide screen feel, by cropping out the top and bottom. This extra cropping meant that i could adjust framing in post production.

Finally to pull off my long shot of heaven, I used keylight ( to remove the green from the green screen) and then masked around that to prevent it from removing green from anywhere else. I then used rotoscoping, which is a program that automatically masks out a subject frame by frame, on the parts of the actor that weren't covered by the green screen. Once i had had added my background to the composition I used colour grading to match subject to the background, added lens flairs, to create a sense of realism, and used a light plugin to simulate light rays from the sun, which the birds would then block out. The birds were royalty free stock footage, added by me.