One Shot Split Screen

It’s been a long while since the last update…

This year in my design class I’ve been given the task to create a one shot. For those of you unfamiliar with the term it is essentially what the name implies: one continuous long shot. The camera starts, action occurs, and the camera cuts, usually many minutes later. There are plenty of examples in cinema, and many films have tried to top each preceding film with the sheer complexity of their one-shots.

When I first read the script for 3x I was stuck by the possibility for the inclusion of such a thing. Not only that, since I was watching a lot of ReGenesis I also had the idea of doing lots of split screens. And since, afterall, we were trying to win a Charlie I thought what better way to show off than to not only have a split screen but a one shot split screen — two contiuous one shots that meet up at the end.

It was ambitious.

It was difficult.

It was beautiful.

It was cut.

Sort of.

The entire scene made it into the first cut of the film, which was viewed by a select few. However for timing purposes it was truncated for the final “awards” version.  While elements of it remain, a lot of the magic wore off since it no longer appeared to be TWO continuous 3 minute shots that matched up in the end.

But because of this project, and the numerous examples we’d been watching it got me thinking back to our one shot and I wanted to share it with some friends.

So here it is the complete sequence, the way it was in the original cut.

Enjoy.

TWO INTERESTING NOTES:

We knew from the get-go that we essentially had one shot (no pun intended) to do the scene. Robin had to burn a hole in her shirt, and cover it with blood. The first take had to be perfect or else we were screwed. We rehearsed the scene at least 8 times (in full, from start to finish) before we went ahead and shot it. However, believe it or not, we actually had to do a second take. Robin didn’t put enough blood on the shirt for it to be noticeable to the camera and as such we had to re-do the scene. Luckily for us, the hole she burnt was on a black stripe (which meant it was virtually unnoticeable) and since the camera couldn’t see the blood anyways we knew we could do the scene again without any issues. We did, and it went over flawlessly.

Also, this was one of the very first sequences I edited. After we wrapped our first weekend of shooting I immediately began capturing and editing scene together. Since not all the film was shot I had only a few select scenes to work with. The split screen was one of them and so it was among those first completed scenes which I showed to the cast/crew a week later. It is also one of the only scenes that by and large wasn’t changed from that very first version (the only difference then was the music played).

Please, sound off in the comments about what you think!

A Day at the Charlies

Our producer Mitch put together this video from our recent trip to the 2008 Charlie Awards.

The Charlies.

Just wanted to make an official announcement that on Thursday April 19th 3x took home first place at the Charlie Awards along with merits for direction, editing, and cinematography. Congratulations to the cast and crew (and all the friends who put up with everything!). All that hard work finally has paid off.

Three of the Finest Student Filmmakers in Waterloo Region
(and the greatest teacher on the face of the planet!)

Surprise Screening.

Well today we were in for quite a surprise. I had been editing in the Radio room first period because I was too lazy to get off my butt and move into the editing room, and so when period 2 rolled around I decided to see how crowded the video editing room was and go move in again.

When I got there I was told by Alex that Douglas was showing his grade 10 class 3x and that Nate was in there as well.

Naturally we ran over to see what was going down.

We were only a few seconds late, and we sat down and watched the film… again.

When the film finished, once again, no one did a thing until the film was completely over.

We then had an incredibly constructive discussion with the whole class. I was shocked with how well this grade 10 class managed to grasp the film and were able to deconstruct it. The most shocking thing was how all the women in the class understood it completely and the only people who had real troubles with it were the boys… who all wanted action movies. When I thought about it I wasn’t all that surprised, but I never thought that these young 15 year olds would fully understand the film.

The general consensus was the class was confused, but not in the same was as Douglas was. They all thought (or at least said that) everything came together in the end and the film was wrapped up.

It also gave us a real fresh look at where the film is flawed and where we need to go back and fix things.

Special thanks to “Mandy” who offered a lot of insight into just what exactly was going on inside of people during the film, even if she hated Paris with a fiery passion.

We also had Charlie selections today. The two films that will be going are 3x and The Day After the Night Before (Martina and Alex’s film). We both have a lot of work to do, but I think it will be a good showing. Congratulations ladies.

Oh and for the record: I do feel bad for Paris.

A Success.

Today we showed the film to the class.

We were all so incredibly nervous. We didn’t know how people were going to react.

When we got to the end credits and no one said a word or made a sound until the film was finally fully completed (and the title rolled up) that’s when I knew we did it. We pulled it off.

Alex and Kay had tears in their eyes. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I may go into cardiac arrest.

We still have a lot of work to do before next week but all in all it was an incredible success.

Congratulations.

Thanks to everyone who made the film a success. We couldn’t have done it without everyone’s help.

But alas, I have to run as I’ve got some editing to do…

I will try and post the soundtrack as soon as possible for everyone’s listening pleasure.

The Rough Cut.

Well you’ll notice that there hasn’t been an update in a while, and with good reason.

This entire week was dedicated to getting our final rough cut of the film completed. I promised our producer to have the film done by the original due date of April 2nd, to ensure we would be finished by the official due date of April 10th.

And so Wednesday was my full day off for editing which allowed me to get most of the picture cut, and to get all our foley in. That night we went back to do reshoots for the darkroom sequence (funny story about that…) and then the rest of the week was spent getting the rest cut.

And so, here we are on Saturday and we have our entire rough cut complete. Now, admitedly we are missing a few shots, mostly inserts, however if need be we could show this version and be very happy… even if it is 19 minutes.

We also have been discussing how to cut the film down for the upcoming Charlie awards, and I made a decision on what we would do. This version is drastically different from the original but also incredible. I’ll be sure to post it once it’s completed… but that will not be until we finish the actual original version of the film.

I have to get back to work, we still have titles and credits to do, however I will keep everyone up to date with our progress.

The Music of 3x.

One of the most important elements of a film is its musical score. When Nathan first delivered to me the script for 3x it featured a number of musical cues that he intended to be used in the film. Originally these cues were all “needle drops” which is a term meaning songs taken from albums (since you would have to drop a needle on a record) rather than songs written specifically for the film. While I have no idea who actually coined the phrase, I first heard it used by Stanley Kubrick… but that’s not important.

As we got further and further into pre-production, Nathan and I spent a good deal of time looking at and discussing music that we would eventually use. As the script went through numerous revisions it became clear that the film was generating a far darker tone and that many of the songs that were originally intended for the film were no longer going to work out. Not only that, many of them featured vocals which I strongly felt would be out of place in a film that had no dialogue (I felt that it would cause the audience to analyse the lyrics which would be a bad thing because they had absolutely nothing to do with the film).

So we started a brand new music-bank. We both agreed that what we really liked was string quartet music, as we were trying to make a very operatic film. Some of Nathan’s brothers music was an option, and there were quite a few pieces that I felt would work. I also went and collected as much string quartet music as I could. Through this I managed to discover The Tallywood String Quartet who produce string quartet tribute albums for rock/pop bands. I went and got a hold of as much of it as possible and started listening to all of these tracks trying to find stuff that would fit.

In the meantime we kept working on the script and the film and started talking with Bill. He said that he could probably write some stuff for us which would allow us to have more original music crafted for just this film. This really excited me, because if we were able to get an entirely original score, and use open source sound effects we could ship the film off to just about any festival and not have to worry about any rights clearances.

Eventually we rolled into production and had a pretty good idea of what music would be used where, and where we were still looking for tracks.

Once we got to the editing process the fun began. I started placing in tracks that I liked some as temp. tracks, others as final. I gave Bill a rough workprint which he was then able to write music to and he came up with a few cues. We even got Robin in on the process, adapting a song that she had previously written for a scene in the film.

All in all, I am very excited about the music and sound of 3x. We are putting as much time and effort into these two elements as the actual edit of the film itself because when your film has no dialogue it is what is going to hold everything together.

I hope to release a soundtrack (most likely for download possibly bundled with the DVD) eventually. I’ll be posting an update very shortly about all the music we ended up using so be sure to stay tuned to that.

In the meantime here is the list of songs from the original script and the scene in which they were to play.

Scene 1
Postcards from Purgatory – The Dears

Scene 3
Remember (Part 1) - Nick Storring

Scene 6
Many Lives -> 49 MP – Final Fantasy

Scene 9
Track 05 - Nick Storring

Scene 10
I’m Afraid of Japan - Final Fantasy

Credits
Calling on Blue - Kevin Fox

Day Five.

During our shoot we watched an episode of The Simpsons which featured a line that we more or less feels sums up our feelings about the shoot.

Director: Milhouse, we have to do the “Jiminy-Jillikers” scene again!
Milhouse: We did it. It took seven hours but we did it, it’s done.
Director: Yes, but we’ve got to do it from different angles, again and again, and again and again and again.

Little did we realize how much it was going to apply.

Monday we got back to school and we had all watched the rough-cut. We all discussed our thoughts and Mitch and Nate thought it was necessary to return to the park and re-shoot the park scene however to do it at night. After our insanely long shoot, and our subsequent re-shoot on the Thursday I was less than pleased at the idea of returning to do everything over again, not only that but to return to it at night (remember the white car?).

However when your producer tells you to do something, you can’t exactly say no. So it was decided that Wednesday after school (and after a long day of performing with Troupe) we would go and shoot the final dark-room scene, and then following that we would meet up at the park after Robin was done her vocal lesson.

The Dark Room.
The first hour in the dark room was spent developing photos. This was a fairly successful process, and the photos that Mitch took look absolutely fantastic!

At about 5.00 Mitch had to take off to go to work, and Nathan, Bill, and myself were left to ourselves to shoot.

The shoot went pretty well. Highlights included me wailing my head off the shelf, me looking like I had been hit by a bus, and Bill tucking while developing photos.

After about 4 hours in the dark room Reid came up to check on us. It was 7.00 and we were just wrapping up in there. We managed to get just about everything (excluding some stuff involving Robin and the lipstick on the neck – which turned out looking more like a welt). We packed up, and headed out for Pitas.

Return to The Park.
The park. We were back. The third time. If we didn’t pull this off this time, I was going to scream so I told everyone that we were not leaving until we got everything.

We arrived and things looked like they were going to be okay. Robin was nervous about the crying scene and I told her to stay in the car and prepare while we all went and dressed the set and got our lighting all ready.

Once the set was prepared, we had to get into costume. It was at this point I had a mini heart attack when we couldn’t find half the stuff (we did eventually track it down), and then when we discovered how few matches we had.

Then I realized I left the charged battery at school. I had another mini-break down. Everyone assured me we could fix it and that it wasn’t going to be an issue (they were right) and so after hitting my head a few times on the concrete box, I was ready.

Everything went off without a hitch. Robin’s break down was heart wrenching… Bill’s death scene was gorgeous… the cigarette in the ring box looked like an art project. Things went so smoothly – probably one of the smoothest shoots yet… although also a very long one. Robin did also almost set Bill on fire… but thankfully he was fine. And best of all, it didn’t pour rain like it was supposed to, so we managed to get every single shot we needed without having to worry.

The highlight however had to be when Bill ran the scene whilst doing the tuck. This caused Robin and I (who were holding the light behind the concrete box) to burst into laughter… and the best part is, we caught it all on film.

We’re almost done shooting. Hopefully by the end of the week we will be wrapped. I have my edit day on Wednesday and hopefully that will go really well and allow me to get a lot done. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh and for all you tuck fans, let me present to you the genius of Bill Watterson doing The Tuck.

So Begins Another…

Today marks the beginning of yet another project from Moving Pictures.

Nathan has come up with a great idea for another project which ironically was inspired by a gathering of the “3x” cast and crew around the dinner table, combined with elements from the film “Hard Candy“.

So what better way to introduce a new project then with a quote from a wise Greek man.

“Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, according to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense for their injustice in conformity with the ordinance of Time.”
–Anaximander

Here is just a taste of what is to come…

The Dinner Party

“A dysfunctional family falls apart.

The abusive Father leaves,
The pissed off older son leaves to become a priest,
The pissed off younger son is left behind to take care of his dying mother.

In order to pay the bills and keep food in his mother’s mouth, the younger brother becomes a hired gun…

Now, years later, the younger brother, Caspian, invades the house of the older brother, Gibson…

…in order to make him his last meal.”

That’s all for now folks, stay tuned to the Moving Pictures production blog for further information.

Catch Ya Later
-Mitch

Rotoscope Hell.

Today has been a somewhat productive day. This weekend I haven’t been much in the mood to edit as I was more interested in just relaxing and enjoying the “break”, after all I think we all deserve a bit of a break.

However never one to just sit back and accomplish nothing I decided that today was going to be the day that I start testing out the ability to make changes to our film using Photoshop and After Effects.

It didn’t go so well at first. Took me a while to get things working, to figure out what frame size I was supposed to use in photoshop and the like (turns out it doesn’t matter if the footage is in widescreen or not – Final Cut can make that compensation, but if you make the compensation in Photoshop then Final Cut doesn’t know what to do… yeah. Like that makes sense).

Anyways, since it took me a while to figure out how to get it to actually work I decided to try and do something a little simpler… at least something I thought was going to be somewhat simpler.

The task: to isolate the footage of a plastic bag which revealed the killer.

Basically I had to take the shot, and digitally paint out everything but the bag (the sky, and the killer). The first few tests were… unsuccessful. The next few went better but they looked pretty shitty. So by the third try and used a couple different techniques and managed to get it down pretty well. Thank god the shot was so short that it only ended up being about 10 frames that had to be edited (yes, that’s less than a second of footage and it took me an hour… not looking forward to some of those longer shots).

Then I had to re-import all the frames back into Final Cut (and pray that I did everything properly… I did) and then cut them all down to be one frame long and create our image.

The result is actually quite catching. Because the bag is created by each individual frame rather than using interlaced video the bag has a very crisp and eerie quality to it (if you compare it to the original video it looks considerably different… but in a much better way).

I am very proud of the result.

However I got to say, rotoscoping is a hideous bitch goddess… kudos to those visual effects artists you make their living doing this… I know I sure as hell couldn’t put up with it.

[current music: Head Turner from the album "Introducing Joss Stone" by Joss Stone]
(I highly recommend you pick this album up when it is released later this week. It is fantastic, very funky and jazzy. Great to roto to!)