CCR Planning: Challenge Conventions and Representation

Our film challenges conventions by being a comedy with a traditionally horror-esque plot. In order to reflect on this while being creative, I could make a video about how to make a story that subverts expectations, like a video essay. 

When thinking about representation, I first had a hard thinking of how I could talk about it in a meaningful way. This is because when creating the story and casting the parts I neglected to think about social groups or issues. 

The antagonists are all men which can speak to how usually mad scientist and their henchmen are usually men, but a key difference is that the scientist is a person of color as opposed to a traditional white person. 

As for the zombies, it's mostly women with one guy and they're all people of color. This was definitely not intentional as I just casted them because these people were available. 

In fact, almost all the cast are people of color with the only white presenting person being mixed so I can probably do something with that. 

CCR Planning: How does your project engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

The way the product engages with audiences is through visuals and being(hopefully) funny. Visually, the film is mostly in black and white, but the pops of green and blue via the zombie virus and cure will surely catch the audiences' attention. Me and Frankie also made sure to block the shots in such a way that whatever is most important is what the audience looks at. We did this through various techniques like the Rule of Thirds, Frontality, Distance, and as previously stated, Color.

The second way it engages with audiences is through it's jokes. The absurdity of The Doctor's antics and his henchmen along with the actors performances will surely get a chuckle. The visual jokes will also engage the audiences through Bartholomew's characterization and the use of the super soakers.

As for distribution, it would most likely be through online services like YouTube. Although, I could submit it for a film festival.

A creative way I can reflect on this is have people react to the movie and then ask them what caught their attention and why. Their responses will be the answers to the question. An example of this would the typical reaction videos you see on YouTube. 

CCR Planning: How Did My Skills Develop?

Reflecting back on production, I can see how I developed as a director and writer. 

First as a writer, I learned the format of a professional screenplay both for myself and to look good on the Production Proposal. I learned about the different amount of tabs for different parts of the script and about things like inserts.

As a director, figuring out all the elements of the film and how to put it together was a difficult challenge, but I was able to get it done.  Being in charge of the making of all the props and casting was also a first time for me, but it was pretty fun. This leaves me with tons of material to work with.

As an editor this would be my first time using Premiere Pro. I had to learn the layout and the short cuts, which seemed daunting at first but I adapted pretty quickly. Using the Lumetri Color to achieve my vision was a difficult task as it was my first time using masks to change certain parts of the frame. Not to mention, keyframing the masks was very tedious.

Where I grew the most would be as an editor, but I shouldn't neglect the other two roles I had. I think the best way to reflect on all of this would be through a commentary that recounts the entire thing. Perhaps over the film.

CCR Planning: How Did You Integrate Technologies?

With this question I first need to know what the technologies I used were. So I made a list to see what I have to work with. 

Hardware

• iPhone(Ask Frankie for model)
• Tripod
• Microphone equipment from the teacher
• Legion laptop for editing
• Power tools
• Flash drive
• Macbook Pro

I am unsure if the wood and makeup would count as hardware technology, I feel like it could but I would have to clarify with the teacher.

Software

• Blackmagic Cam
• Premiere Pro
• Premiere Rush
• Google Docs
• Google Drive
• Photos
• iCloud storage
• iMessages

Online

• YouTube

There's a couple things I could do with this. A how to video on how to make a movie with only your phone comes to mind. You can have almost all the software mentioned on your phone so it could work. Or if the wood counts as hardware I could interview my dad about helping us make the props, same thing with the makeup and my designer. There's a ton of ideas that can spring from the technologies integrated so I am not worried about being unable to figure out what to do.

The Rough Cut

I put in the last shot and made the first rough cut of the film and it looks pretty good. I used Rush on my phone because I don't have access to Premiere at home so there's no effects or color grading added in, so when I say rough cut I mean ROUGH cut. 

Most glaring issue is the 13 seconds over run time. Although I like everything in the film and thing it won't flow as well if I cut some footage, there is some stuff that isn't entirely necessary and will have to be cut out the film. The pacing of the film could also use some working though I fear it will not be how I want it considering how tight it will be crammed into with the two minute time limit. I still think the comedy will land regardless which is the most important part.  

At the end of the day, the film doesn't have to be perfect and I can always have a little director's cut for myself and to share with others.

The Final Shot

 With the table made we could finally finish filming. As opposed to going to the pathway that would be a fifteen minute walk, we decided to go to the woods behind my neighborhood as it was much closer, we didn't need to see the pathway, and a streetlamp had the same warm lighting that the electrical tower provided anyways. Frankie and our actor set up the table and tripod while I went back to the house to grab the super soaker we needed. When I came back I opened up the bag of soil, Frankie adjusted the tripod as needed, and we blocked the scene with our actor. We were finally ready to finish shooting.

The setup

The actor under the table

It took a couple of takes, and running back to my house for water, but we finally got the last shot done. To celebrate, I played the only song appropriate for the walk back, "We're All In This Together" from High School Musical. Because it was truly a group effort that made this possible.

Nerds vs Zombies: Return of the Table

As previously mentioned the table needed for the final shot we needed broke at the 11th hour so we had to rebuild it.  This time we used plywood instead of dry wall for a more stable prop. To make this we simply traced the hole in the dry wall onto the plywood and repeated the process for the original table. Our previous experience with the power tools made this time a little quicker and we did so without my dad's supervision(mostly). 

Removing the drywall from the legs

Reattaching the legs

With the table made we were finally able to film the last shot and wrap up production. 

Fixing Noise

 

When looking at some of the footage I noticed some of it was more noisy then others. I wanted to look at how to fix this, if ther was any, and lo and behold there was. There's an effect called VR De-noise which is exactly what I needed. I don't have access to Premiere at the time of writing this post but I will implemeting it once I get back into the editing suite.

Editing from Mel Brooks

We're moving into post-production and as I move into the editing suite, I need to think first think about is the pacing of the film and getting it to fit into to two minutes. I immediatley looked to how the films of Mel Brooks are edited because our scene is directly inspired by his film Young Frankenstein. 

A part of my research was this video of how Mel Brooks would keep things long as opposed to the quick cuts we usually see in comedies. This was made further true by the average length of a shot that our teacher said. I can't exactly remember but it was 2 to 5 seconds I'm pretty sure. I knew immediatley that would not be the average for my film, or at least I would try for it not to be save for the more Edgar Wright inspired shots. 

Brooks would prefer a shot to last about 8 to 12 seconds as it was the perfect amount of time for a setup and punchline. I took this into consideration when planning the length of the shots during filming. While our shots were always under Brooks preferred 8 to 12, reaching 5 to 7 most of times, it's the same principle. This is something I forgot to mention to our teacher when he suggested adding more shots to fill in the run time. What we lacked in shot amount would be made up in shot duration. 

And it worked, perhaps too well as we got over the run time not accounting for missing shots, but always better to have to cut shots than to go back to production add. 

Nothing Goes According to Plan

The third time was unfortunatley, not the charm. First problem was we underestimated how much toilet paper we needed to wrap our actors head. Second, the dry wall table we made for the shot of the hand rising out of the dirt broke on us. Luckily, we used had some parchment paper to wrap around the top of The Doctor's head. It didn't look the best but it did the trick. 

The improvised Doctor look

What could not be fixed was the broken table. It was just that one thing that prevented us from completeing shooting which was very frustrating. 

The legs broke off the table

Because of this a solution had to quickly be created. So this week, me and my dad will make a new table out of wood for better stability and since we have to finish shooting, we might as well reshoot The Doctor's final scenes with his head completely wrapped. In the meanwhile, this will not impead the editing of the rest of the film and CCR planning. 

Keyframing the Green In

I previously mentioned how I would use Lumetri Color to change the color of the smoke in one of the shots using the Hue vs Hue feature. Unfortunately, that did not work as the white smoke was not a color that registered. So, I had to use another method and looked elsewhere in Lumetri color. I went searching on YouTube and found this video that taught me about the HSL Secondary which was much more specific in what you can change. I played around with it and unfortunately I ran into the same problem. At this point I started to look myself as to what I could do. I figured a packed editing software like Premiere was bound to have something.

Turns out I didn't have to look past Lumetri Color like I thought I had to. I found a slider that could adjust the tint of the footage ranging from green to blue which turned out to be just what I needed. In the same video I learned how to create a mask around objects I want changed so I did that and changed the tint of that part of the footage. 

At first, I was meticulosly keyframing the mask around the hand the moves into it frame by frame. Safe to say I was going insane. When trying to find a work around I just started skipping frames and adding key frames during big changes. Turns out thats all I needed to do as the mask started moving by itself to those positions.

While it's not as clean as I want it to be it got the job done and I'm still pretty satisfied with it.