moving-amoeba

[moving-amoeba]

[moving-amoeba]

I’VE WRITTEN MY FIRST SCRIPT!

Can’t tell you how excited I am about this one. Still far from perfect, but I have all the time to polish it and make what it deserves to be ^^

Inspired by the Slavic celebration called forefathers’ day.

A young succesful woman is haunted by the ghost of her ex-girfriend set on the revenge.

Tell me what do you think!

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Location scouting

Location For this assignment, I chose the cemetery next to The Parish of St Mary and Christ Church in Hendon. Although a bit hidden, it’s located in great proximity to the Middlesex University and I believe it has a great potential to serve as a film location. 

Differentiated in the terrain, full of old stone graves, shaped in different styles, from richly ornamented with floral patterns, through angel statues to celtic crosses. From two sides it’s surrounded by lawns of the Sunny Hill Park, so if desired, hiding that it is located in London would be easy to achieve. 

The church built in English Gothic style guards the land since XI century, and although the church itself is completely renovated, the place still has an intense atmosphere of the ages that passed.

Facilities Electricity and toilets are easily accessible in the church building. I’m sure that it would be possible to arrange preparing hot drinks and place for actors to rest. Directly next to the church, there’s a functioning pub so catering wouldn’t be a problem.

Transport The parish doesn’t own any parking space, but there are a couple of possible solutions. A few cars can fit on the street behind the graveyard. I presume it would be possible to use the nearby parkings for residents. Additionally, there always is the university parking just round the corner. The nearest bus stop is located 5min away.

Inconveniences The biggest inconvenience will create the elementary school on the opposite side of the road. Especially in mornings, afternoons and during periods, the kids are getting very noisy, so it may be necessary to film during the weekends or school holidays. From a certain angle, from time to time, it is possible to spot a plane in the sky, so it’s something to pay attention for. However, the distance is big enough, so the sound of engines is practically inaudible.

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The Raven Boys adaptation

The scene we adapted was from chapter 36 of the Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. This is a University project. All the rights are owned by Maggie Stiefvater. We do not make any money with this.

Do not share outside of tumblr!

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Adaptation assignment - problem solving

Three days before the shoot, we got an official refusal from the police, saying that we are not allowed to shoot in the front of our house, as our production involves a fight and actors dressed up as policemen. Such scene require to have an actual officer on the set, and arranging that would take a lot of time and money we didn't have. So we moved the set to our backyard. The only problems were stress and lack of space. I was afraid I won’t be able to adjust the action to the new scenery in such short time (I had to go to work in the meantime), but in the end, it worked out. Now we only have a small logical clash, as the friend was supposed to come in as he notices the father abusing his son, but now we have a fence in the way, so there is no explanation as to how would he now something was going on…

But the most problematic stage was the postproduction.

The postproduction was cursed. At first, everything looked alright; the day after the shoot, we reviewed all the shots. It seemed like we have covered the whole story, the shots looked good, we had enough to give it the right pace and the right look. But then the files starts disappearing. Every time we would open the folder, there would be less and less files. And so, from almost 100 files we were left with barely 30. That’s the worst scenario, we could encounter. We couldn’t reshoot - in few days everybody would leave for Xmas break, the media loan store and costume department would be closed, so no option of getting the equipment and the police uniforms. Our amazing editor found a software that recovered the missing files, the issue was that it wouldn’t recover them completely. The sound in most of the files was messed up, but that was alright - we had the separate sound recordings. The complicated part was that the recovered file would be just a part of the original. In some cases, there was one-third of the material missing, in some we would just hear the call for action and the recording would end. And we had to work with this. So we did what we could. I have a strong belief that the editor is a wizard after he managed to put everything together and it still made sense. There might be more blackouts, the shots aren’t always perfect (sometimes I wouldn’t even call them good) - one of them wasn’t supposed to make his way into the final work at all! The mother was supposed to be shouting in the background of the fight and be barely visible, so as a courtesy for the actress we shot one more take only of her, so she could use it in her portfolio. But all the other shots end up being unusable, so we had to put that one in. As if that was not enough, when we tried to render the film, it wouldn’t let us - no matter what extension would we choose - until we deleted one more shot, that was apparently still corrupted and was stopping the whole process. Which made us putting in some extra black screen… So, as much as a part of me is crying about how good the scene could be, I am greatly impressed with what we managed to create in spite of everything. And I sincerely wish no-one will ever have to endure this pressure as we did. Couldn’t be more proud of my team! I hope we’ll get to work together again.

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The muddiest production ever! But we made it! Couldn’t be more proud. Managing so many people, filming an emotionally heavy scene and a fight scene in one day is exhausting, but at the same time very satisfying. It’ s been great fun and a privilege to work with these lovely faces.

Thank you guys!

Raven Boys Adaptation - Production

Look at all those people who made it possible for me to adapt a scene from one of my favourite books. The shooting day was a challenge because already getting our equipment turned into a difficulty because the person who had it before us hadn’t given it back in time. We started the shoot with a bit of a delay and finished quite late, at around midnight if I remember correctly (and then I had to clean the house which got VERY messy!!) All said and done I was very happy with the performances that we had received from the actors. We got every shot that we wanted and we were sure that we had enough shots for everything in the script. There were no real issues on the shooting day because we were well prepared so there is no use to make this post longer than necessary but I’ll update you on the Post-Production (which was quite a hassle) in the next post.

I’ll leave you pictures of our amazing cast and crew.

So I’ll see you in the next post!

 San

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Adaptation assignment, part three

We got incredibly lucky and met a stage combat instructor willing to help us out with the fight sequence. He’s been of great help, because although we had a rough idea what the character should be doing thanks to the description in the book, it is not very detailed and for every action bit like “brought him down”, we needed to imagine how exactly would the character do that, so it would look believable and wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the fight. Our actors were very eager to work and seemed to enjoy the rehearsal and our instructor was bursting with energy and new ideas. I’d rather not even try to imagine how bad the scene would turn out without his help.

Here is a clip from the rehearsal

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Adaptation assignment, first problems

There’s always something. This time our main actor got a proposition to act in a major production. No way he would say no to such opportunity, and we wish him best of luck! But there’s always the tiny feeling of loss and fear we won’t find a replacement in time. Fortunately, we got lucky and one of our friends send us the contact details of an actor she was working with on the previous production. And he was absolutely amazing! He looked like we wanted our character to look and his acting was on spot. The only drawback was, that he was a foreigner and there was not enough time to perfect his accent to fit in. Nevertheless, he’s doing a great job.

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Adaptation assignment, in between

We had a great workshop for drawing storyboards. It was pure fun. First, we wrote what we knew about the characters already from the book and then... Then just imagining the characters, deciding what were their most important traits, how to represent who they are through what they wear, how we would imagine they would look. Shall the hair be blond and curly, raven black or maybe the character is getting bald? We laughed a lot (mostly at impressive drawing skills) and in the end we got a bit better with drawing faces. Need to make time to go to the drawing classes regularly.

Then we chose a part of our script that we wanted to work on and drew every single action in at least three possible shot options. Put these on the wall and decided which ones will look the best. A bit too time consuming to do on every short project, but I think it’s a great idea when the big money is at stake and you really want to get things right.

In the meantime, we prepared the iron-on stickers for the shirts of our characters. Adam will be wearing a coca-cola t-shirt as he did in the books and we decided that Ronan should wear his school uniform with raven emblem on it to show clearly the class difference, which is one of the main reasons why Ronan and Adam’s father (who’s a mechanic) wouldn’t get along.

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Adaptation assignment, extra paperwork

Including linear script, floor plans and fight sequence.

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Adaptation assignment, part two

I can’t draw. I haven’t done it in a very long while, so getting the storyboard right was excruciating. Especially the perspective was frustrating, but I’m pretty glad about the outcome. Some shots have an alternative version. Before deciding exactly which way I want the scene to be filmed, I wanted to ask some of my friends about their opinion and organise a trouble shoot.

Creating a storyboard for the fight was far above my abilities, so I just prepared a list of punches and kicks the actors will be performing and on rehearsal day decide along with our cinematographer and editor which angles will look the best.

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Adaptation assignment, part one

The task given to us was to create a three minutes long adaptation of a scene from a novel, drama or poem. It’s surprisingly hard to find a scene so short that can work on its own, taken out from the whole. After a few long discussions with San - the project’s producer, we decided to give a go of part from The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater.

Although it’s a fantasy book, we chose to focus on Adam’s relationship with his abusive father. Out of the two scenes we were considering, the first involved a fight, the second was a reunion. We decided to take up the challenge and try ourselves by filming the fight scene. And so we read the chapter couple of times, and after numerous redrafts we cut the script to be three page long and still conway what we thought was important.

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Here it goes again

Although the contact with the producer wasn’t great, the three of us were enough of a team to get the job going forward. Some things didn’t work out like we planned to: we didn’t manage to get the drone shots from Greece or get a permission to shoot on an actual rooftop. Some things we couldn’t help - like the foggy weather on the shoot day or the delay caused by the shortage of the crew members, but I still feel proud of what we achieved. Not only did we manage to get a perfect cast, commute between locations (Uber!), get the balloons freshly filled up with helium on the day, but most of all, we achieved the comprehensible for audience effect of an upside down world. 

Some shots I really like, some I know could be better if we had more time. I agree that the scenes on the balcony look flat and it would be nice to have a better lighting, but I think that we still created the right atmosphere of the video - mostly thanks to Zack’s great directions and brilliant prop ideas.

I hope that the future projects will be even better and this is just a start of a promising collaboration.

https://vimeo.com/191344591

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^ Tonal Separation

^ Colour Separation

^ Intersection of plans

^ Linear line/shape dominance

^ Edge

^ Deep Space

^ Difference of Sizes

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^ Soft, neutral light

^ Warm light

^ Cold light

^ Hard light

^ Spotlight/hard light/single source

^ Multiple sources of light