Memory Refresher: Human Modelling

I figured I might as well toss this up here.  I haven't modeled a human character since 2nd year so was feeling a bit rusty and thought I better get in a little practice.

5 min Base model in Maya

This was just a 5 min job in Maya to practice getting the basic topography correct when modelling people.  There are a couple of reasons behind this. 

1) 48 Hours is coming up this weekend and our animation team has been entertaining the idea of tackling a 3D project. 

2) John is currently learning to model people, and seeing him working on his character makes me want to do it too.  Plus this way I can make sure any guidance I offer him is actually correct. 

3) Some of the upcoming modules in my Game development course cover 3D modelling, but I figured with the reasons above in play that I might as well get a slight head start.     

The Script Read Through

For Screenwriting last week we spent some time reading each others scripts.  Out loud.  To say it's a bit cringe-worthy to hear your own work read back to you is a bit of an understatement.  All the little mistakes, or big mistakes, that you wanted to forget about brought to your attention.

But then, I guess that's how we get better at something.  Hearing my script didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about it.  But it could have.  There might have been some part of it that I was blind to, or that I had swept under the rug; refusing to see.

It was really nice to hear everyone else's screenplays though.  Not for the same reason that it was good to hear your own but simply because it's fun to see what other people have come up with and to see the different ideas and styles of writing.

I'm looking forward to hearing the last few this week. 

Filming Week: Day 3, Thursday

(images to be added)

After arriving home on Tuesday night I found out some sad news.  We have had a bit of a family situation.  Due to this, I wasn't in the right state to deal with call sheets.  I needed to be there for my family.

Lee kindly offered to get the callsheets done for me, which I'm really grateful for.  I tried to give her an overview of how things needed to go, but unfortunately didn't get everything across. Sorry Lee!

For our third day on set we had the Crash Site scene to film.  Our day started with a jib shot, but they were set up before the rest of the crew, including the director and art department actually got there.  So unfortunately they had to wait around again. 

Jib shot's also mean long set ups, and unfortunately we had a bit of negativity creeping into the set around this point, some of it built up from the day before.

Due to a discussion the week before with VFX, we decided to lock off the jib, and put in some subtle movement in post production.  However on the day we had to compromise on the jib shot even more.

We could only go so wide and so high because of the limitations from the camera lens and jib height.  This meant that we had to go closer into the shot then intended- which caused some annoyance to certain crew members.

Unfortunately, we can only do what we can do.  We can only work with what we have to work with.  And NO!  We cannot move the equipment and our crew into a potentially unsafe location just to get a wider shot.

I got a bit sick of explaining, if I must be honest; although my personal circumstances probably didn't help.  There's no point in complaining or being negative about what we can't do, we just have to move on with what we can, and the majority of the crew did just that. 

I would hate you to think that I don't have positive things to say about our time filming.  Truthfully I do.  Our team works well together, for the most part.  Our volunteers are amazingly good sports.  We had beautiful weather on our last two days.  But it's so much easier to reflect on the things that go wrong.  Those are the things I WANT to reflect on, not because I wish to dwell on the negatives, but because these are the things that can be better.  These are the things that I want to do better, going forward.

And on this day, our last day of filming for now, we were simply dealing with a tired crew and a build up of minor annoyances from the last few days.



 

Filming Week: Day 2, Wednesday

(images to be added)

Wednesday's film shoot was full of promise.  We actually had a good day of filming, and manged to spring back despite some issues and get a lot of filming done.  As my own worse critic though, I have to look at the areas where the day could have gone better and part of that was in the planning.

On Tuesday, after we had packed up, headed home and reviewed the footage I got stuck into the call-sheets.  I wanted to get them out as quick as I could, but I still spent a bit of time tweaking some details to try and make sure that people weren't being called to early or too late.  I reviewed the movement order as well.  I felt quite confident that some of the scheduling issues from the day before had been sorted.  I clearly have much to learn.  Notably that no matter how good things look on paper, something will always go wrong in practice.



Once again I took the equipment van out early.  We were meant to arrive on set at around the same time as the other van load, except we started early to give us time to get packed up.

The other Van was a bit late, and since they had the tent and gazebos we really couldn't do anything but wait.  Once they arrived we had the extra hands so we got stuck in getting set up.  Lee was a bit too helpful, and almost forgot to leave and pick up the next lot of people :)  So I decided to go to unit and get the food started while she went back to town.  I was worried that we would have a repeat of the late lunch situation.


Camera and Lighting were all ready to go at 10:00am, our scheduled filming time.  We had caught up after our delay that morning.  Our actor had arrived, our crew was mostly there... except for the art department.  They were meant to have arrived on set just before 9am, along with the costume.

We made the best of the situation and decided to film plates for VFX while we waited.

A bit after 9:30 we manged to get some reception to find out what was going on.

It turned out that our transport for them was late that morning, and then on top of that couldn't find one of the people they were meant to bring to set.  It turned out that there had been an unavoidable family situation, but those of us on set had no way of knowing this.

By the time the remaining Art Department got on set, we were well behind schedule again.  To make matters worse, it was discovered after they got to set that half the costume had been left behind.  Luckily our other actor was on set now and her costume was complete so we managed to get more filming done during the time it took to fix our costume issues.



All things considered, we worked well together to get things back on track.  I was really happy at how the crew worked together to get us back on track in the morning and then again with all the other hiccups of the day.

But lunch was still very late... and it was reaffirmed to me that it is really hard to keep crew morale up when there is so much waiting around and people are hungry.

I actually think that this was a big factor in the growing tensions on set towards the end of the day (just before we FINALLY went for lunch), that spilled over onto our third day of filming.  When people no longer have their own jobs to do, they tend to start getting in the way of other people's.

  

Filming Week: Day 1, Tuesday

From the 13th- 17th of April was our scheduled shooting week for our group project.  We had planned to film two of the scenes from our teaser 'The Beast of Fawkes' on location at Sandy Point, across three of these days.  It was a very busy few days, but I also learnt a lot over them.   
As it turned out, we could only film three of the days anyway.  While the week before and the week after were beautiful we ended up with a hail storm our first intended shooting day.  Our Monday started with an attempt to tie down a tarp over the trailer.  With just tangled pieces of string. In the rain. And the wind and hail.  On the side of a road.  Needless to say, we decided to call off the shoot.

This actually worked out quite well.  It turned out that Art Department wasn't quite as ready with the costumes as they had thought, and this also gave me a little extra time to make my call-sheets a bit easier to understand.


Going into our filming week, there were two points I felt very strongly about.  Firstly, we would film according to the storyboards and animatic.  I didn't want any extra shots being filmed 'just because' and us then running out of time to get the shots scheduled for that day. 

While I know that film makers often go on set and then see shots they think would look cool and want to film them, I wanted our crew to realize the importance of the storyboards and animatic in our pipeline. 

We had two days unscheduled, so if there were 'cool' shots or other things needed this would be the time.  What I would allow though, was slight changes in angle or composition where I knew that these were issues that had been brought up previously about a shot, or if they were related to the set or equipment limitations.
 
Secondly, I didn't want to be 'that' person.  The one who sends out call-sheets for the next day at 1am, when crew members should be sleeping.  This is one area that I wish I could have done better in.  While things never got so bad as that, I realized quickly why a 2nd AD often helps out with getting call-sheets ready during the day.  


We rescheduled our first day of shoot for Tuesday.  Our first day was always one that I knew would have moments of greatness and times where things simply didn't work out as planned.  It was a day where we would see how things would fall into place, or not.  It was also a day where we had been very loose with our scheduling.

We planned to shoot as much as we could at the location, with anything else rescheduled for the next day.  Originally I had intended to schedule the day across two days right from the start, however I am quite inexperienced when it comes to guessing how long things will take to film.  At the urging of crew members I decided that the flexible approach to the day was the best way to get as much done as we could, without making us feel over pressured.        



On Tuesday morning we didn't quite trust the weather but we went ahead anyway.  When we got out to Sandy Point it was quite dark under the trees, but also quite sheltered and we ended up getting quite a lot done.

We had a few moments of the normal stumbling around, everyone trying to figure out their roles and how to work together with the others but I think this was actually one of our better days for group dynamics.  A few things that didn't work out so well was some delay's on the second van trip which was meant to get everyone out to set, and also some delays with my equipment Van in the morning as I had to pack the trailer by myself at the Tin Shed, and there had also been a communication breakdown to the Gaff team as they hadn't been told what the lighting plans were.



The other thing that didn't work out was lunch and, unfortunately, this would become a common theme across our shooting days.  I still don't know what went wrong, as I was never told, so I can only assume that it simply wasn't ready on time.  Lunch was scheduled for 1:30pm.  After our late start for the reasons mentioned above, we decided to push it back an hour, until 2:30pm.

A group left to go pick up some things and check on lunch.  They didn't come back. At around 3:00pm I decided to send the first two people, who would need to stay with the gear while the rest of us were gone, back to unit.  The rest of us decided to keep at it, and film what we could.  

Finally, the Van returned.  By the time we had finished our lunch it was getting late.  We were losing the light, and honestly I would have been happy to call it a day.  As it was, people wanted to push on; to try to get some more out of the day while the weather held.  In hindsight I should have gone with my gut.  As it was, our actor was tired; she had been on set all day with out actually appearing in a shot (a bad move on my part for scheduling), it was getting so dark by the time we had set up we had to film fast, and in the end we decided after reviewing the footage that we wanted to re-shoot it anyway.  It was the one major point I had conceded all day, and one of those moments where I wished I hadn't.   



          

Cinematography: Light Meter Exercise

Last week in Cinematography we looked at Exposure and a few tools that could be used to help you get it right.  In this exercise we experimented with Auto-Iris, Zebras and Light meters. 
Our in class exercise had us position our subject in front of a window, with daylight directly behind them.  We set up a light in front with a blue gel and then white balanced our camera.

1) In this first shot we used Manual Iris and set our Exposure by what was acceptable to our own eyes.  My F-Stop in this shot was 4.

2) Next we set the camera to Auto-Iris.  When we expose for a shot, getting a good exposure on the subjects face is our priority.  As you can see in the screenshot below Auto-Iris wasn't ideal when it came to this as it took all of the background and surrounding light in the frame into consideration.

3) In Auto-Iris still we zoomed into the subjects face, switched the camera to Manual, and then reframed.  This gave a much nicer exposure to our subject.

4) For our fourth shot we turned on Zebra's on the camera.  In Manual Iris we overexposed our subject to show Zebras, then closed the aperture until the zebras had disappeared.

5) This shot was exposed using the Light Meter.  We took a reading of our subject, then set our exposure accordingly.

6) For our final shot we opened our F-stop 1/3 above the previous exposure.  On the Sony we had to open to 3.4 as it could not open 1/3 stop. 

Unity Module 2: 3D Game Development

This week I got started on Module 2 of my Unity course.  This is where things begin getting more interesting and we actually started creating some stuff.

The first video tutorial is:

3D Level Design  18.03 min

This tutorial talks you through creating a basic level using primitives (basic 3D objects from within Unity).  The benefits of this are that you can quickly block out and plan a level for your game, with basic elements which could be replaced later by more intricate models. 

This tutorial uses 3D cubes to create a basic level of ramps and platforms.  Here's some screen grabs of mine:

Unfortunately my internet is being particularly slow at the moment and I've been trying to load the next tutorial for half an hour I'll have to carry on with the others later on!

Non- Dialogue Films

I've made a point of trying to watch some non-dialogue films over the last month.  Here's a few that I've seen recently.  It's kind of difficult to find films without dialogue unless they are animations (which often don't have dialogue), as often this isn't something a film is tagged by. 




Visually beautiful. Even as someone new to film I noticed the nice camera work and compositions.   The story is quite abstract, but is emotionally effective- in no small part due to the score.




Heartstrings from Rhiannon Evans on Vimeo.


This is a simple story about relationships and forgiveness. I thought that the simple stylistic choices suited the story well, and I was really impressed by the smoothness of the stop-motion animation. In the absence of dialogue, the music was used to portray the emotional context of each scene. While heartstrings is a neat little film, I felt that the story and solution is pretty cliched.


The Windmill Farmer from Joaquin Baldwin on Vimeo.

I really enjoyed the visual style, and thought that the idea was really creative!

The Week Before Filming: Belated Update!

The week leading up to filming was a busy time for us as we attempted to get everything ready to go.  At this point we still hadn't cast our main lead, we hadn't sourced any materials yet for our Art Team to work with, the previs was still incomplete and ultimately we were very behind on schedule.
For me, this meant jumping into a lot of departments to try and help out and take some of the pressure off.

I spent Monday trying to source Materials, but since my group was based in town we didn't have a lot of luck.  Fortunately some of the other groups ended up with much better hauls than us, and the Art Team was able to get started.  I didn't have much to do with prop making etc this year, aside from doing some painting of a set and sewing patches onto jackets for costuming.  I also took measurements of the cast for the art team, as I have a couple of years experience with that kind of thing.


We would have been pretty stuck without a main lead so one of the other tasks I took on was to look through all of the casting call footage for any actors that could be cast as a brother or sister alternative.  Luckily we managed to find someone, and he was cast as Thai- in this case Mia's brother.


Over the rest of the week I talked with our director to go over the storyboards.  We had found that in some scenes there were simply not enough shots to cover the action and the dialogue, and that there were some continuity issues which needed to be sorted.  I then sat down with the previs team to talk through the changes and go over each shot with them.


Finally, I got stuck into my own jobs.  I finished off the risk assessment and hazard management for our shoot, went on a test shoot to suss out any other hazards that might arise due to the intended camera placements etc, and got stuck into scheduling and call sheets. 

Scene breakdowns using Scenechronize

Short Film Research: '7 Rules' by Stéphanie Joalland

Recently we have looked into a number of film writing paradigms, however they seem mostly geared towards the feature length film.  Because of this I decided I needed to do some more research, specific to short film.   I came across an article by Stéphanie Joalland on the Raindance Festival website.  Stéphanie presents 7 'rules' for writing a short film and gives some examples. 

I decided it would be worth watching these suggested films to get a bit more context into what she was talking about.  The seven points she brings up are:  

1) The shorter the better

Stéphanie suggests that creating shorter films is a good idea, not just because many festivals look for films that are under 10 minutes but also because a shorter film will keep production costs down.  A shorter film will mean you can spend more time making the film look amazing, rather than having to film quickly and ending up with a cheap looking film.  She gives the example of Sebastian's Voodoo which is a 4 minute long animation.    



4 minutes is actually quite long for an animated short, so I don't really think that this was the best example of this point.  However Sebastian's Voodoo is a good film, which is really emotionally engaging.  The main character has a clear dilemma and sacrifices himself to save the other voodoo dolls.  My only criticism it that the character and his relationship with the other dolls could have benefited from a bit more development to make his sacrifice more personal, rather then simply choosing to save the lives of strangers over his own.


2) Keep the practicalities of filming in mind

This could include thinking about the setting of the film as well as being practical about what sequences are in a script.  Examples given are Apricot (2010) and Just a Love Story (2010) which take place at a table in cafe and in an elevator respectively.







This is something we need to consider when writing for our assignments.  As part of our assignment we need to be able to deliver whatever we have written into our screenplays.


3) Make it Visual

Show don't tell.  For this point Stéphanie talks about creating a visual back story for your characters through their actions.  She suggests that you can tell a lot about a characters temperament from small details, such as how in The Lunch Date the main character polishes her fork before eating.  



I had mixed feelings about this film personally as I felt quite disengaged during the introduction.  I had to watch it a second time after I had gotten used to the visual style.  Once we got to the main part of the film (when she returns to 'her' table) I found myself drawn back into the story, probably partly because of the predictability and the additional comedy that the film gained from that.  The story was handled quite well with a clear message.

I feel like having a non-dialogue film as an example for 'Make it Visual' would have been more to the point, but I do see what is meant by building the visual back-story, even if your characters do talk. 



4) Find single moments.

Stéphanie suggests that the best short films explore a single moment, but with a story, conflict or dilemma at its heart.  This ties in to what we have talked about in Screenwriting class, and what we explored during the in class exercises.

This is something I struggle with in my writing.  I normally write for 1-2.5 minute long films, so when trying to write a  4-8 minute long film a single moment often doesn't seem long enough.  Because I am used to condensing these moments I haven't quite figured out how to extend a film without adding too much or not enough detail.  This is probably also an issue of pacing.

A deadline or ticking clock can help with building the conflict in a single moment, such as in On Time (2011).


On Time from Ted Chung on Vimeo.



5) Tell a Story

Make that a compelling story.  The film should have a hero with a goal and an obstacle/antagonist in the way.  Be aware that while short films can push the boundaries that they must still be emotionally engaging.  Concept-driven ideas or breaking the rules for the sake of breaking them isn't going to help you to tell a good story.  Stéphanie offers I Love Sarah Jane (2010) as a good example to watch, because despite it's unusual setting it contains at its core a love story which an audience can connect with.



I Love Sarah Jane from Qoob TV on Vimeo.


6) Engage the Reader

Or the audience!  A short film needs to hook it's audience right from the start, the first page of the screenplay.  There is little time to make an impression, and also to develop a satisfying ending. 


7) Beware of Clichés

Stéphanie says that short films are often filled with clichés and navel gazing.  She suggests that many stereotypes are overused, commonly: hit men for hire, heists, people seeing themselves die, children representing innocence, incestuous relationships.   Write about what you are familiar with- not what you have borrowed from other films.  Stereotypes should be avoided unless you have a new slant on the idea.

Getting ready to Film, Pledgeme, and Sporadic Blogging

The last few weeks seem to have flown past in the blink of an eye.  Over the past few weeks I have been busy with preparing for our film shoot which we have been out on location filming for the past week.

The last week of term (30 March- 5 April) was spent in preparation of this, securing equipment and location permissions.  I helped out the production team with the location release and hazard management for Sandy Point, and provided an extra set of hands for transporting equipment (just don't ask me what it all is or how to use it!).

 I also ended up writing the 'script' for our PledgeMe video and created some of the basic animation for it.  I wanted them to be kind of quirky, so I went with soft, messy colouring and messy linework.

This is a still of my favourite, where I put in more time:

Too much render time...

We have decided on our PledgeMe rewards and are just waiting for our campaign to be approved/

I also created our pamphlet for Material Sourcing, which we had all forgotten about until the night before XD.