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[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

End of Production Check In

Hi!! We’re barreling towards the end and I am in a pretty good shape! I’ve done two edits so far and i’m going to do one more over the weekend before locking picture and passing it off to sound.

I’m going to stick with the music I have even though it was a first draft because I think it’s working really well. Knight’s been assembling all of the sound effects we need to round out to soundscape too so i’m feeling good.

On a technical level, we have one last component to get working before we get the deep dream program running, so hopefully that will be done by beginning to middle of next week! I want to start compositing as soon as possible.

That’s all!!

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week Eleven(?) Update

Hi :) Time has no meaning anymore so it could be week eleven or it could be week thirteen I have no idea at this point. Anyways, I shot the freaking movie!!!!! And I even edited the first draft! There were certainly some growing pains involved but I’m overall feeling very positive about the whole affair. I’ll be showing the draft in class.

This happened like right before class last week, but I found a software engineer that is willing to help me out on the project!! She’s been testing the code this whole week and getting feedback from professors on it and by her own estimate will be ready to try and processing footage Friday or this weekend. Very exciting!!

I don’t really have much else to say for once but we’re doing good :)

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week 11 Check-in

It’s shoot week!!!!!!! It’s hard to believe it’s here but I guess we’ll just have to go for it. Because of that, a lot of this week has been preparing all of the camera materials. I’m confident in what I have and the crew that I have, but since so much of this set has been so atypical compared to the production of my other films, I am nervous that things can go off the rails really quickly.

First off, here’s my finalized kind of... script?? Story plan? Beat board? Who knows, but this is how the whole thing is gonna play out.

Yeah, it’s rough, but sometimes you’ve just gotta throw up information onto a whiteboard.

Secondly, here’s my shotlist (based off of the outline above.) I know there’s a lot, but there’s basically only three locations just repeated over 3-4 repetitions. I’m confident that my team is going to be able to move fast enough to get everything done.

Finally, I’ve been preparing all of my lighting plans as well. Here they are:

It’s a bit messy but the ideas are there. Chiefly, very little lighting coming from inside the house and much of the lighting coming from outside. I’m sticking with my orange/green color contrast, using a lot of sodium vapor lighting outside and some green-tinted fluorescent lighting inside where applicable. They’re not typically the kinds of lights you’d motivate off of for a domestic scene, but I think you can get real wacky with this story.

As an addendum to that, I have some references for lighting and camera stuff. Here’s all that:

Anyways, that’s all for this week! We’ll see how everything goes :)

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Mid Semester (Week 10) Update!!

Hello!! It’s week 10 (somehow.)

Here’s my mid-semester checkin. I think I have everything here?? I’m a little bit behind in my schedule for my tastes but I haven’t been able to work as much as I would’ve wanted the past few weeks.

Anyways!! Here ya go: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1486B-HKZhI7dnUZ0FsL_An7WPgIds74Xir4BmdIG28Q/edit?usp=sharing

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week 7 Update

Hiya. I uh... I have a bit of a disjointed update for you all this week. I wanted to do more finalizing before today’s update, but uh--

yeah. So needless to say most of my day was spent dealing with that, and I wasn’t able to finalize most of my stuff. I do have some broad updates, but they’re all kind of like... half baked.

Technical Stuff

we venture pretty far into the weeds in this one so you can skim if you want

1. I’ve been working a lot on my camera specifications and build. There are a bunch of different things to consider, especially considering I am basically the first person shooting on this camera in like... multiple years. So I’m kind of writing the book as I’m going along. A part of this includes shooting lots of test footage. I already had some from a few weeks back, but I also shot more footage this week with a different build and in more light. I’ve since uploaded them both to youtube.

Here’s the old stuff and the new stuff.

I’ve finalized a much more solid build for my camera and that includes using the Cooke lenses! I shot four different takes with three different shooting formats (more on that later) and 2 different lenses, with those being the Zeiss CP2/3 and the Cooke Century Primes. Surprisingly, the Cooke’s actually shifted the color pretty significantly (you can probably tell by their yellowish tint.) But I really liked the way the vintage glass interacted with the grainy sensor of the D-21.

2. Recording format!! I tested out the three main formats on my camera, ProRes 4444 and XQ, and DPX files. The difference between ProRes and DPX is a lossless format that individually stores every frame, while ProRes is a video package that uses chroma subsampling to keep file size down. So ProRes is always going to have less quality, but it is objectively easier to work with AND can be used very easily with the deep dream programs I’m looking at. DPX files objectively look better but from my research, it quickly becomes a game of diminishing returns where I’m trading quality for significantly larger and harder to use files.

3. VQGAN+Optical Flow. This is a pretty quick one, but I tried to finally process my .mov test footage in the program. I spent about four hours the other night trying to get the code to work with my roommate, but sadly we weren’t able to actually get it to process any footage yet. More debugging is needed, but I hope I’ll be able to figure it out for the mid-semester check-in next week. I found an alternative program, but it’s way more coding heavy. (Also a very different aesthetic. Definitely something that needs more research.)

Narrative Stuff

1. I’ve been storyboarding :) I’ve been splitting my time between rough outlines, storyboarding, and a quasi-script, but I think that I’m going to try and stick to boarding this film the most, since it’s a very visual concept to me. Here’s the outline for the first cycle though:

Here’s the first page of the story boards:

(storyboarding in a busted car when you’re stranded downtown is a really fun experience btw if you ever want to try it.)

I’m not great with perspective but I’ve got a pretty dang good idea of what I’m looking to do with everything. These will be good enough for now and I know how to translate them into their final versions.

2. Eyeballs and dialogue. I don’t think I want much of them. Perception is a big part of this story for me, and I think it’s more important for the story to be wordless and focus on the visuals and sound design (shoutout to Knight for beginning to come up with Big Sound Ideas!) I think we won’t see the protagonist’s eyes until the end of the first cycle.

3. I am attempting to cast the main character. I simply do not know what I am doing. I don’t necessarily think I want to do someone who is super established in SOFA films, mainly because I think this kind of film is a completely different character and story structure. I guess I’m just gonna keep plucking away at it.

4. I AM SHOOTING MARCH 25-28. THAT IS ALL.

Anyways thanks for reading :)

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week 6 Update

It’s been another week of me not doing much again, mainly from my having to film my capstone re-shoots this weekend. I did have a few important moments of inspiration, however:

1. I think doors are going to play a big part of this story. The paranoia and fear of what can be behind them is really something I want to play off of, and I think I might want to program in a jump scare or two behind one of them. I don’t know doors just kind of terrify me lmao

2. I suddenly recalled this scene late one night. It’s an incredibly effective scare but I think so much of it is built on the start of it and the uncertainty of if she’s actually there or not.

3. For the real climax of the scene, I think the main character will retreat to their room to hide from the things that are invading their house, shutting the door behind them and covering their eyes. When they think things have settled, they open them to reveal the shadow-y figure right above them :) (think of the bent-neck lady from Hill House.)

4. I think I might play with lighting near the end of the story. A lot of the feedback I’ve gotten has been related to biblically accurate angels, which... hell yeah they’re like textbook eldritch beings. I don’t know if I can explain this correctly but the title of Episode 7 of Watchmen is “An Almost Religious Awe,” and while I don’t think this is a religious experience there is something about this all that makes me feel like it is.

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week 5 Update

This might seem like a cop out but I really don’t have much to say for this week. I’ve been searching for a computer engineer that knows python to help me do all the image processing, but no one’s been available/interested.

In other news, I have been ironing out the exact details of what objects and sensory experiences I’ll be focusing on during the film and honing in on what the cycles themselves will contain (think of it as like a loose story outline.) Nothing is final but hey, it’s a start.

I’ve also tentatively got some people agreed to do post sound and music, so that’s neat :)

Anyways, that’s all for this week!

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Week Four Update

Hi! This is gonna be a bit of a rambling update but I’ll try my best to walk through it all in a semi-concise manner.

The biggest work that I’ve done was shooting some test footage over the weekend for the purpose of testing a usable camera setup. It was mostly successful, other than my breaking of a handle on the tripod case. I still have a lot to consider in regards to whether this will be my final setup, but I’ll probably dedicate a separate post to that. (Here’s the setup I was working with though)

However, I was able to take stills from that footage and do brief tests of a deep dream algorithm in a publicly available, browser based program. I used a variety of different depths and smoothing options to try and find a good middle ground for what I thought would work best for the project, and from my tests I’d conclude that a depth of 5 and auto-generated smoothing produced the most... successful results (read as: terrifying)

For a point of reference, my roommate was doing laundry and I just pointed the camera at him, and he smiled back. When I put his smile through the algorithm, it spat out....

probably gonna see that in my dreams tonight.

Some other interesting results were with different textures, like when i filmed tin foil under a bright light, the grate above it, and boiling water.

Weirdly enough, so much of the texture in the tin foil wasn’t lost in the conversion process, and the same settings on the boiling water resulted in significantly less drastic results. The grate was really interesting, because this was the deepest I went (with a depth of 15.) It has a subtle but very distinct effect on the surrounding area while still retaining a lot of the detail. While I didn’t save any of my attempts at a depth 15 dream of a face, needless to say it was nigh-incomprehensible (and not in a good way.)

I’m going to try and run some of the actual footage (read as: video files) through the program I’m aiming to use over the next week, but to do that, I need a computer engineer familiar with Python and a not-insignificant amount of processing power. We’ll see how that works out.

I’ll leave you with some wacky variations of my own face.

Not gonna talk too much about these but I think I do think I look kind of nice in that second one :)

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Proposal Draft #1

Hiya :)

For this week’s update, I present the very first draft of my proposal! It’s nothing too fancy, but I tried to touch on everything I could think of from the technical to the creative.

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Idea #3: “Time to Shower!!”

I’m going to start off and say that this is definitely my least developed idea. The central premise is to have the “character” be recording herself a la snapchat video before stopping the video and throwing her phone onto her bed. However, it doesn’t actually stop-- the phone falls onto the floor and keeps recording.

The character goes on with her nightly routine, brushing her teeth and going to take a shower. The audience witnesses all of this even though we shouldn’t be and we’re forced to commit this voyeuristic act until the ending of the film, when the character notices us. Not the phone, but the audience. Whether it’s just a glance or her actually saying something, I want to make the audience feel the shame of being so curious about her private life.

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Idea #2: “Eye of God”

My second idea is the most narrative focused, and it would follow someone after or leading up to them making contact with... something. As far as how or why this happens, I don’t have much other than the possible ideas of just being so damn sleep deprived they accidentally see it or having artist’s block and thinking that making a pact with an elder god would fix it.

The central mechanic of this story would be depicting their descent into madness would be using deep dream algorithms to represent their fracturing psyche and the world around them melting and distorting.

Basically, I would want to use deep dream selectively in the out-of-focus regions of the frame to get some (hopefully) terrifying results. There’s something unique about the way the algorithm looks for eyes and faces where there aren’t necessarily any that I think fits really well for the style and theme of what I want to do.

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Idea #1: “Why Deathcore is the only true way to represent Cosmic Horror.”

Okay bear with me here.

Metal music is pretty expansive-- the wikipedia article on subgenres lists more than 50 distinct styles. One of them, called deathcore, is on the more... aggressive end, and is very hard to understand. Within that there’s a smaller movement colloquially called aliencore, which is differentiated by the subject matter rather than the tone or style. Aliencore is about, well... aliens. Bands like Rings of Saturn, Enterprise Earth, and Aversions Crown use this brutal combination of nigh-incomprehensible vocals and loud music to scream about warring elder gods, the fragility of mankind, you name it.

You could make the argument that this is an incredibly way to depict lovecraftian-style cosmic horror, considering both the medium/tone and the actual content of the music.

Explaining all of this would be the premise of the film: An ungodly mix of a Rod Sterling monologue and a youtube video essay explaining aliencore and it’s relation to Lovecraftian themes whilst madness slowly creeps in and kills the film crew making it, save for the presenter/host. (I guess they don’t ask if you’re an ungodly deity hiding in human skin when they interview you for jobs nowadays.)

I have no idea if this makes sense but that’s sort of my plan.

[cantspellcharlottewithoutart]

Intro

Hi! Welcome to my blog for my semester radical film. I’ll post updates from time to time and sometimes include pre-production materials or any other wacky ramblings I have :)

No matter what, I want to do a cosmic horror film centered on the blurring lines between reality and nightmares. I’ve got three main derivations so far that I’ll dedicate individual posts to, but here’s something I drafted up in the meantime.

I also started my moodboard for this project, which is a bit of a mess but it’s something to get me started. You can find it here.