Michael did an amazing job of organising every scene on FCP into bins. He even wrote a description of the shot, like “good take”, “Pretty funny” etc. This was SO helpful when putting together the rough cut. Getting a really good coverage on the day was a great idea as it meant that we had heaps of options when editing. We could pretty much cut to any angle whenever we wanted. Michael created some amazing sound FX, including manipulating Trevor’s work as VOICE to be a booming, echoing scream without sounding childish or humorous. The final cut is awesome, we’re all looking forward to the screening and seeing where else “Conscience” can go.

Love all my group members. Hope to work with you all again next semester!

The shoot actually went really well. After shooting “Pipe Dream” for nearly eleven hours I was concerned that this would be yet another long and stressful day. Luckily, it wasn’t. We had one actor, one scene, one location and very very little camera movement. To begin, we set up the lighting and made sure Trevor, our actor, looked good. We did a few takes of the whole script in a wide angle to get him engaged with the script. He was able to quickly and easily get immersed in the script. We then just did a few run-throughs of the script from different angles- a mid shot, and from Trevor’s front left and right. Hashim’s pocket dolly allowed us to have smooth and steady movement that looked awesome. After doing the main run throughs we had a break for lunch before doing the close ups. Strangely, Trevor did not go out of character during the break, and wouldn’t even go outside! This was very professional, I thought, and he acted really well.

The hardest shot to do was the final over-the-shoulder reveal shot. This wasn’t originally in the script. Basically, we changed it so that at the end of the film, we have this tracking shot over Vince’s shoulder that reveals a MIRROR with Trevor looking into it. This is supposed to explain that Trevor has been looking at himself the whole time. Getting this right was extremely hard. The camera kept getting in the shot (in the mirror) and we had to do it over and over. I felt really bad for Trevor who was stuck in this bad head space and was getting more and more frustrated and angry. When Jo offered him a break he started yelling that “IF WE TAKE A BREAK NOW IT WILL TAKE ME FORTY MINUTES TO GET BACK TO WHERE I AM!”. This was just a little bit dramatic and it shocked us all. We decided that we would never get the perfect take and just took some OK ones and then stopped, for all our safety.

All in all, the shoot only took about 6 hours. At around 4pm, we recorded some ATMOS, packed everything up, thanked Hunter, and got out of there. Very relieving! Thanks to everyone who helped out: Nelson, Zac, Ruth, Rikki and of course my own group. Couldn’t have done it without you.

After a long day shooting “Pipe Dream”, I took all of their gear home in my car so that we could bring it to Hunter’s today to rehearse some stuff for our shoot. When we got there, the rest of the group were able to check the location out properly and we all decided to change the spot where the chair is going to be. Check out some photos of the space here. We’re now going to have the chair in the corner where ‘SUGLO” is graffitied. The graff isn’t there anymore. There is another garage door there which isn’t visible in the photos and some cool railings hanging from the roof of which we’ll take some cutaways.

Today, to our surprise, the space was much cleaner, meaning that there wasn’t as much junk lying around. The floors were painted grey and everything else white. It basically looked like a gallery which isn’t very grungy and doesn’t look great for our shoot but we will just work with it.

It took AGES to get the lighting the way we wanted it. As we want a blue tinge to the picture, we naturally got out the blue light. We decided this looked stupid, and that we would add the blue wash in post, so we would just focus on lighting our subject “well”. This is easier said than done. We tried to find the lighting that was somewhere in between having the subject look like he had been well lit by a camera crew, and looking like he was trapped in a dungeon with one light shone on him by his captor. I think we landed a little closer to the former, though we didn’t include a back light because it would have been in the shot (as we are taking a long shot of a guy sitting against a wall). This may mean that the subject looks a little 2D. God this lighting thing is hard. More troubles came when we realised that we had been trusting that what we saw on the monitor was exactly what we were shooting onto the tape. A BIG MISTAKE which we will not make again. Will keep you posted.

At 6.45am on Saturday morning I arrived in Footscray at Zach’s dad’s office, the first location for Zach’s group’s film, “Pipe Dream”. The group also included Ruth, Rikki and Nelson. The role I had been assigned was ‘ Continuity’. This basically meant that I had to make sure that everything visual remained the same. This can range from really obvious things, like in one shot there might be a glass on the table, then between shots a crew member moves the glass and I have to remind the director or First AD to put it back in the position that it was in, or subtle changes made, like a woman’s hair being pushed over her ears or pushed forward, and that needing to look the same throughout the whole scene. In order to keep track of these things I took photos of everything, especially the two actresses, in every shot using Zach’s 7D camera.

As you can probably imagine, this got a little boring after 11 hours. BUT, I still had a great time. It made me remember how fun making a movie is. I hadn’t really made a movie since the film I made for Year 12 Media and some of the experiences yesterday felt very similar. Trying hard to get everything perfect, thinking creatively, annoying your actors by doing take after take, getting the lighting perfect, and finally getting it right. It’s made me look forward to my shoot next week so much.

“Pipe Dream” had multiple locations, multiple characters, different costumes, and comical acting. Compared to it, I was thinking all day about how our film seems a little bit…nothing. We have one location. One actor. Almost no actor movement. Just as I was beginning to think that it seemed more than a little bit boring, I decided that we could make the film great BECAUSE OF this. I thought, ours could be, no, ours WILL be that awesome psychological thriller set in one room with one guy who sits in a chair and talks to himself. We don’t need all the stuff that “Pipe Dream” (and, seemingly, almost every other movie ever made) has to make a great film. very Excited

Forgot about this old chestnut for quite a while but here it is! I formatted it to be very small so that it would load on my blog. This means that the frames aren’t as wide so a lot is cut out. However, I don’t think this really matters, as whoever is assessing it will know what the frame is supposed to look like.

I had loads of trouble with the sound on this one. I had no idea how hard it would be to cut atmos sounds together. It’s so obvious where the shot changes but I wasn’t sure what else I could do other than play one whole track of audio and edit around it, but this was too hard as some lines couldn’t be heard, or the timing was what I wanted or they would say the lines differently. I ended up just laying some atmos I cut from one of the clips over the top of everything and this helped to hide the cuts, but it still isn’t perfect. Ah well…

“The Interrogation Scene” Basic Instinct (dir. Paul Verhoeven; 1992)

A scene which I appreciate greatly is the interrogation scene from the 1992 film “Basic Instinct”. In this scene, Michael Douglas and several other detectives are interviewing Sharon Stone about a murder for which she is a suspect.

The scene begins with a shot tracking over the shoulder of Catherine (Stone) walking from a light room into the darkly lit interrogation room. The room is lit mostly from above by dim lights in the ceiling which shine through some stylized slits, creating a rectangles of light on the actors. There is also blue light shone from below onto the walls surrounding the room. On Catherine’s face, as she is stopped and says “I have nothing to hide”, there is both light and shade on her face. This represents the fact that she cannot truly be trusted- she is possibly a character whose true personality is unknown.

Eventually Catherine sits down at the end of the room, facing the detectives. Despite it being a small room with a lot of people in it, the director does a great job of framing everyone into the shots as you can see below.

As Catherine answers the detectives’ questions she is shot from below. She knows that they have no-where near enough evidence to arrest her and that she can use her looks and her wit to get out of the situation. She has all the power in room. As she coolly and calmly answers the questions, the camera coolly and calmly pans from one table of detectives to another and tracks in to the actors as they speak. Her character is totally in control of the scene and the detectives are left intimidated and confused as to what to do. As soon as Nick (Douglas) attempts to catch her out on something she said, she is somewhat taken aback and the camera movement stops briefly, with static close ups of Nick and Catherine staring each other down.

The camera movement begins again as she retrieves her cool and confidently answers the questions again. A perfect example is when she asks Nick “Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick?” The camera frames her on the right of the frame, asking her question towards the left of the frame. Once it is asked, the next shot is a slow track in to Nick as he is somewhat taken aback by the inappropriate question, as if she is controlling it. We will attempt to use this approach when filming our own film: when Vince is calm at the beginning, we will use slow, cool tracking shots using our pocket dolly. When he is fighting and screaming and trying to escape, the camera will be mostly static.

After this question Nick is fed up. He stands and walks over to the water dispenser with the camera tracking with him. He is now attempting to regain control over her. And, like clockwork, the shots of her awkwardly and unconfidently answering his questions are static!

The room is very quiet for most of the scene. Dialogue is loud and easy to hear, as are the footsteps of detectives slowly walking around, and the flick of the cigarette lighter that Catherine uses. When Catherine begins to single out Nick, something which the audience cannot really explain, creepy non-diegetic orchestrated music starts to play. This slow music continues for the rest of the scene and accentuates the curiosity that Catherine and her strange confidence bring to the scene.

The Directing Actors lecture was the lecture that I have so far found to be the most useful, not only because I was chosen to be the Director in my group project.

Directing actors has always interested me, and it was great to get some practical tips about how it all works.

Darcy Yuille, the guest lecturer and film director, first talked about the mindset the actor needs to be in, outlining Overall Objective and Scene Objective.

The OVERALL OBJECTIVE of the actor is about what the character wants in the story, for example, they want to find a girlfriend.

The SCENE OBJECTIVE of the actor is about what the character wants in that particular scene, for example, they want to start speaking to a girl.

(In our group film, there is really only one scene, which would cause one to think that the overall objective and the scene objective will be the same. HOWEVER, if you check out the script, you will notice that the objective of Vince is, at first, to deny that he has done anything wrong, and then later on switches to him wanting to finally admit everything and free himself, therefore his OBJECTIVE changes and the way he ACTS changes.)

In order to help your actor through these objectives you give them very simple actions. Giving the actor a simple VERB to follow is the most coherent way to communicate with them, and is a whole lot better than acting out the scene for them. For example, you might say that their action should be “to convince” or “to flirt”.

A character’s action changes throughout a scene, and the moment that they change is known as the beat. According to Darcy, this is the moment that you want to have the camera on the actor. If you didn’t show this change, then it may be hard for the audience to understand how the actor changed their action so suddenly, and wouldn’t seem very realistic at all.

Finally, Darcy talked about giving your actors a set of circumstances; the who, what, when, where and how of their character and their character’s situation. Also give them an explanation of their character’s personality and HOW THEY WOULD CARRY OUT THE ACTION GIVEN TO THEM via a system created by movement theorist Rudolf von Laban. Laban said that characters were heavy or light, hard or soft, direct or indirect, fast or slow and many other descriptors.

After a little concern my mind is now at ease as I have checked out the location where we’ll be filming, a friend’s warehouse in Richmond, where he now lives. Hunter, the friend, let me drop by yesterday to take a few pictures and generally suss-it-out. The place looks great and will be perfect for our shoot. I was able to ask him all about the shoot, like whether or not we could use lights and smoke machines and everything seems fine! Here are a few photos:

Yesterday we held our auditions for the roles of Vince and Voice for our film- see script for more info about the characters- in building 9. We put out an ad on starnow.com.au, an Australian talent website, and got around 30 expressions of interest. We decided that only two of them were worth auditioning, Brian Klys and Trevor Vaughan.

Brian Klys

Trevor Vaughan

Here is Brian’s showreel and Trevor’s showreel

Though we had in fact done the directing actors lecture yesterday morning and been told exactly what to do and say to deal with the actor, I still found it quite nerve-racking. I knew that neither of the actors were saying the lines the way we wanted them to be done, but I just couldn’t articulate how I wanted them to do it. I’m sure I will grow into this.

Both actors actually both did good work nonetheless, and HERE ARE THERE AUDITION TAPES – BRIAN’S and TREVOR’S.

Michael, the sound guy, recorded the audio on an H2 Zoom and Hashim brought in a camera from the techs. Eli and I fed the actor’s lines. As soon as I remembered to, I asked Brian if he worked using Scene Objectives and Overall Objectives, things we had just learnt that morning in the lecture. He claimed he “usually just wings it”, so I didn’t bother asking Trevor.

We will discuss the auditions and make a decision as a group as to who we will hire.