Short Film | Day 5

Short Film | Day 5 by bearjohnstone

Preparation For Film Day 5

Alex and I have been thoroughly organising our filming equipment and gear ready for the final scenes of this short film, the car escape. The footage for our short film so far looks fantastic and is really beginning to look like a genuine film for the big screen according to the audience feedback we have received. We are really excited to show the final cut of our short film to our audiences at our School Oscars Ceremony, however we firstly need to make sure we film the car escape scene before we have finished the completion of our film.

As the stunt driver for our car escape scene, Alex and I have been in contact with a friend of Alex called Oliver who as far we know is a very good driver and is comfortable of driving his vehicle up to high speeds. For the car escape, we expect him to arrive at the location at around 12:00 to give me and Alex plenty of time to film the last bits of footage of Luke running after Morgan before the car escape scene begins. We plan to use a variety of close up shots, GoPro shots and even Drone shots of the car escaping from the interrogation into the distance. As the filming for this scene is relatively quick, we will not require the actors to put in as much effort as previous film dates where we were up in East Hill for around 3-4 hours. I am planning to bring tomorrow the DSLR camera, the GoPro and the sound equipment, but leave behind the tripod as we will not be shooting any still shots for the car escape.

Poster Draft Feedback

Having made a rough draft of my short film poster, Alex and I had the opportunity to display our initial designs for our posters to our secondary audience in order to gain additional feedback to help improve the pieces. Prior to showing my draft to my secondary audience, I knew that there were plenty of improvements required before I presented my final display of my short film poster. For example, I needed to add the film titles and text credits into the poster which deliver the key information to the audience about the details of the film. In addition, the photograph of Luke and Morgan is currently very flat and I therefore wish to increase the contrast of these photos to make the poster more aesthetically pleasing and rememberable.

The fact is, I am having a lot of trouble organising where to position the text since the photograph is taking up a large proportion of the poster layout, so I will therefore have to adjust these around later once I have received the feedback from my secondary audience.

Whilst showing our short film poster to the rest of the secondary audience members, I also took a look around the display areas for the other previous examples of successful film posters from previous years as well as the current poster ideas other students have currently designed.

As we went around the room, we wrote on a piece of paper underneath each film poster the pros and cons which would hopefully motivate the creators to improve on these posters whenever they get the opportunity to.

After several minutes of assessing other people's work, I eventually received some helpful feedback from the other audience members. The screenshot below shows the information sheet that displayed the pros and cons of my current film poster. The feedback in general showed that the audience liked the idea of the characters holding the gun to their faces to show the "paradox" between the two characters. They were also very critical about the colouring of the photo since the saturation levels on the print were very high although this problem was mostly an issue coming from the printer and the printing quality of the poster.

In addition, I thought that it would be useful to record some feedback from an audience member about my current poster design to upload onto my blog to prove how excited they were to see the final outcome of the piece.

Based on the feedback received by my secondary audience, I now have to continue working on the suggested improvements made for my film poster and eventually upload to my blog the final version of my film poster alongside continuing to work through finishing the rest of the short film too.

Propp's Theory of Character Types

Despite having created all of these characters for my film, I thought that it would be appropriate for me to create a quick Prezi presentation explaining Vladimir Propp's character types theory since different characters in any media product have a specific role to play according to Propp's theory. Not all of the character types are attributed in many feature films such as Lassie and Big Fish which don't have any villain characters at all throughout the film. It is more common for short films to be missing out on some of the character types listed by Propp's due to the shortness of these films and so therefore lack enough screen time for them to fully develop their story properly, hence why they all called "short films".

Dubbing Sound Effects

During the editing stages of the footage, there have been multiple occasions when I have to re-create some sound effects for actors' clothes rubbing against other objects, the sounds of footsteps and even the punching sounds during the fight scene later on in the short film. Luckily, I was able to find many of the sound effects on YouTube or the internet in general. However, for sounds such as footsteps and clothing movements, I had to attempt to re-create these sound effects in a recording booth. Using the RODE Microphone we have been using so far in our short film, I used this to help record some more enhanced sounds and make our short film's sound levels more consistent.

The screenshot below is the sound effects folder which I have stored in my hard drive. These are currently all of the sound effects which we have been using in this short film so far.

The video clip below shows Alex and I in the recording booth dubbing over the clothing movement sound effects for when our antagonist villain helper "Crimson" approaches Jack in the short film. I watched the clip back on Alex's laptop whilst mimicking the sound effects using a cloth jacket and a leather belt. 

Using these sound effects will hopefully increase the richness of the sound quality to our short film and make certain scenes more believable with the additions of HD sound effects.

Poster Draft

After photographing our actors during a photo shoot, I immediately went ahead and experimented with making a draft of my film poster using the photographs I had taken from the shoot. My initial ideas before I began to make the poster was to follow a minimalist style since these posters which follow this format are generally very aesthetically pleasing in my opinion and there is often a limited margin for error when making these posters, since the background is mostly blank and there isn't as much editing required to the photographs to fit with the surroundings. The poster to "Lincoln" is one which I particularly admire for its simplicity but powerful outlook on the promotion of the film. The way that Daniel Day-Lewis is holding the pose looking down in despair is also an immediate signifier to the audience as to what the film would be about.

These photographs below are the shots which I took during the photo shoot when I wanted to follow the style of the "Lincoln" poster.

Using these photographs which were the best shots from the whole photo shoot in my opinion, I went onto Photoshop to begin playing around with the ideas from the "Lincoln" poster of an actors dramatic face. I had an idea of merging Morgan and Luke's faces together to create a paradox effect since that is the title and overarching theme of our film. The two faces will immediately create easy connotations for our audiences to pick up about the genre and messages of our short film.

In addition, I decided to completely desaturate the photographs making them into black and white as well as bumping up the contrast levels to increase the dramatic look in the actors faces. The draft result is overall stunning and I am so far very pleased with the outcome.

 In order to further improve on my design, I need to gain some audience feedback about my poster so that the final product looks professional and presentable to the audience. My first initial critique would be to consider where I would add the text to my poster as the photograph so far is taking up the entire space of the poster.