It is titled “Inspiration” and I co wrote this short film and did the lighting on it. This was done in the third semester and at this point I didnt know if I wanted to get into visual effects, I think I was more into 3d work at that point. Now that I have finished and know that I want to get into post production, I have decided to take the footage and do my own take on it, and this blog is just to let you all know where I am at with it.

We shot this video as a group and we decided to go pretty professional. We used an actual lighting kit, a dolly track and we shot the entire thing on a canon 5d with a 50mm f1.8 lens. Some of the shots look really amazing and when we handed in the video everything worked out really well, but it wasnt until I opened up all the footage and tried to put it back together that I found some of the problems.

The first problem is that the guys who were shooting the footage were not really experienced in using a dolly track and majority of the shots, although they appear to move smoothly are actually very bumpy and jerky. An untrained eye would not pick it up, but I was trying to motion track the footage to put some text ontop, and I found it extremely hard to track- the footage was jumping, very subtly and quickly, all around the place. Overall the track was used well but a bit more practice on the dolly track would have ensured that the footage was really smooth and flow-ie.

The second problem was a focus issue. Because the guys were using a dolly track and the camera was moving, some of the shots go out of focus and then back into focus rather slowly and that is because we did not use a follow focus, but also because one person was operation the camera, if there were two people- one pushing the camera along on the dolly and the other operating the focus, we would have got the shots to be allot crisper and cleaner and we could have even used the focus more creatively.

What needs to be said is that this was our first short film and if I had known the things I know now, the footage would not look the way that it does, but for a first attempt, it turned out pretty well. Original video can be viewed at

As you can see from the original video, we intended to make the whole film seem like one long shot. When I started to do my own edit I found problems with this because many of the shots didnt line up exactly- they were close but there was a difference in framing which meant that it looked really weird and disjointed going from one shot to the other.

The other thing is that when my friend and I wrote this piece we were really indecisive as to whether to show the letters or to form the letters out of objects and have the audience guess which letter was what. We went for the latter and the thing about this was that not only did the production crew have to work hard to make, for example the letter S out of water, but had to put allot of faith in the audience that they would watch the video and pick up on the fact that the objects formed letters.

What I have tried to do with my edit is to make a hybrid of this- I am trying to make actual letters float in and fade in and out over the already physically formed letters. the major problem that I have found is the aforementioned camera shake and this is making the motion tracking pretty hard- to the point that some shots are untrackable. So I think what I am going to do is to do an edit of the footage and just leave it as is, with the letters formed by random physical objects. I would really like to do it my way, and reflecting upon this I might give it another go, but for the moment that is where I am at.

Early in the project, I was put onto colour grading the griffin launch party invite. From the outset of this project it was evident that time was something that we didnt have allot of, and on the day that it was supposed to be due, johnny and I were still working on it. I think the whole thing was completed in under 2 weeks, which is a big project for students who have other classes with assignments due. But non the less, we completed the piece and even though Griffin didnt use it, we still all ended up with a good, professional piece that we could use in our portfolio.

Here is an example of a screen shot examples of the grading that I did :

Original

graded

and here is the link to the final video:http://vimeo.com/30315251

So that was the first thing that I did with Griffin. The next stage was to propose to Griffin a trailer for the play “this year’s ashes”. We had a meeting with the heads of Interbrand and the marketing manager of Griffin at billy blue. What they and we proposed was a whole campaign where we made the main character of the play “Ellen” into a real character, gave her a facebook and a twitter account and got people to follow her, coupled with this was a trailer for the play. The process of us coming to this result was many classes of brain storming and mainly thinking about the target market and how we could reach them. After 3 weeks we were ready to present what we had to griffin. My role here was to propose a preliminary idea, look and feel of what the trailer was going to look like.  My basic idea was to have “Ellen” on a walk home in the morning after a big night out carrying her shows along with her. She would walk down various roads in the darlinghurst/kings cross region and eventually she would end up back at her house. I also talked to my lecturer about adding a competition part into it whereby we would place small objects from the play into the backgrounds and then would get the audience to try and find them all to win a prize. All of the shots would also be taken from low angles, only showing the character legs which would add a mystery and wonder, an enigma to the character. Here are some screen shots of what I proposed:

In the end, when the proposal was over, Interbrand and Griffin loved the other stuff, but they didnt really like the trailer because it didnt intergrate the social media aspect that the rest of the campaign had. So it was pretty much back to the drawing board, and for about 2 weeks the video team just kept coming up with ideas and proposing them to griffin, all of which got knocked back, or we were told to work on these ideas more. Eventually it was about 5 weeks out from delivery when we were told that we were to make a trailer based on the “5 rules” which were a big aspect in the play. So what happened from here was that we had a meeting at the griffin head office to talk about it, and prior to this there was some discussion in class about how to make this video. At the head office, everything from ideas to logistics and equipment was organized. We then took a few days to make a story board which was approved and then we set about making the video, which had to be completed in about 1 and a half weeks. Ilia and myself went back to the Griffin head office and scouted out some shots to work out the framing and lighting. We planned to get 3 of the 5 rules at the griffin office and get the other shots from various places around. When Ilia and myself shot the trailer, we started at 8 am at the kings cross griffin head office, and what I liked about this was for the first time I had a professional actress to direct. Getting these 3 shots took about 2ish hours and from there, Ilia and I went back to his place where we downloaded all the footage and then began to do a really basic edit and think about how we were going to get the other 2 shots.

1 of the shots was “never more than three shags” and what we proposed in the story board was a shot of a bed shaking and objects falling off a table to show that people were having “rough” sex and moving the furniture around. So what I did was that I went to Alex chapman’s place and used his bed, I framed the shot so that the viewer would only see the beams of the bed, and a little bit of the sheets moving. For the objects falling of the table, Alex attached some fishing wire to a vase and then pulled it off the table, and the effect that we got was pretty real looking.

The second shot that I had to get was “never tell them your real name” and this shot comprised of a girl sliding pieces of paper towards the camera with a different name on each, and the setting was a bar or pub. I initially took this shot at my house, using my sister’s hand, a couple of glasses and some coins, but this was not approved for the fact that it didnt look enough like a club. At this stage as well, the 1st edit was almost complete and it was pretty much due the next day, so what I decided to do was to go to billy blue early in the morning with an empty beer bottle, a wine glass and film the “never tell them your real name” shot upstairs in the common area, and it worked. I framed everything so that it was really close in and tight, I used different backdrops and I moved the bottles and glass around to make it more believable. There was also a packet of borrowed cigarettes in there. So I took this shot, put it back into the edit and what I was told was that the entire duration of the video had to be halved. At that time it was about a minute and 20 seconds, and I was told that it had to be at the most about 40 seconds.

What endured was a pretty intensive editing session of about 3-4 hours of me cutting it down, showing it to my lecturer and then going back in, cutting more parts, extending some and generally just doing a really tight edit. When we were happy with it we sent it away to griffin and interbrand for approval, and after 2 days it was approved and now appears on the “this year’s ashes” main web site. Also locate at :http://vimeo.com/30015227

What this project taught me was about liaising with clients and people and to put it bluntly how to deal with people when making something for them. I had always known the steps to take when taking on a client job, but I had never really seen it in action, and it gave me the opportunity to not only ask the client questions, but have the client ask questions of me- to do more and to push my ideas and work further. This project was pretty time intense as well, and it showed me just how much I can do in a little amount of time when I am totally dedicated to it. Things that I would have liked would to have more information and meetings with the client and for faster feed back, but overall I am happy with the subject and how it ran, it not only taught me allot about the industry, but left me with some good pieces that I could put into my portfolio as some of my first professional work for a real world client.

I went to bunnings in the morning and bought a couple of flood lights, they were really cheap, which I thought was kinda surprising. So I then picked up my mate, and went back to my place for some trial shooting.

After setting up all the lights and green screen in my garage, we were finally ready to shoot. This was also the first time that I had really put my 7D into use, so i was kinda  excited. So the first thing that I noticed was the I had to move the lights heaps further back than I had anticipated because the way that I had them, there were too bright and making the green look white on the camera. It is worth mentioning that I have 5 500w flood lights, so they are pretty powerful. So through trial and error, we pulled the lights back to the correct distance. The next issue was with the actor- he had to sit a considerable distance away from the green screen, so as to avoid any green spilling onto him, and also to reduce any shadows that might occur. Being that  I was shooting this all in my garage, and it is not the biggest of spaces, it was kinda cramped, because the lights had to be a far way back from the screen, and the actor then had to be further away from those lights so he wouldnt cause any shadows.

This was something that I had not really taken into consideration for the final shoot, but I am thinking now that the place where I am going to shoot it in is pretty big (about 5 times bigger than my garage) so all the lighting and distancing issues should be too bad.

OK, so I shoot a couple of test shots of my actor sitting down, reading a book, looking up, just general stuff, no wear dancing or flying arms or anything. So I send him home, then take the footage, put in into after effects, and go to key it out, only to find THAT THE GREEN SCREEN IS THIS REALLY WEIRD LIGHT GREEN/YELLOW. I was reallllly both angry and worried. I thought that I had bought the wrong shade of green, or that the wall behind the green was effecting the colour. I tried so many things to fix it, I tried to bring the green level up in after effects, and this worked on the green screen, but it made my actor green. I spent at least an hour mucking around with key light, clipping black and white all over the place trying to get it to work.

I had to go to work, So I went, and as I was working, I thought to myself that the only reason that it wasnt working was becasue I had simply bought the wrong shade of green- It must have been too light, and when I shone the strong lights upon it, it turned lighter. On my break I called up the local fabric store, and inquired about the green fabrics that they had, and the prices. I was pretty much prepared to go to the fabric store and buy darker cloth.

When I got home, I decided to give the footage one more go, to see if there was anything that I had missed, or forgot to tick when I was keying. The result was the same, nothing was working. I was very disheartened. I turned my camera on, and i dont know why I did it, but my eye went to the picture style on the camera. IT WAS SET TO SUNLIGHT. This meant that the camera would take pictures as if it was out in the bright sun. I switched the dial on the camera from sunlight to normal, and all the colours in my room equaled out….I had shot my footage on the wrong picture style!!!!

So I went back into my garage, set up the lights and the green screen, shot some quick clips, put it into after effects, and with about 5 clicks, I had a really good key. The next problem was the I was wearing a gray jumper, and on the jumper there was this weird noise, like noise you get when your ISO is too high, but I had shot this at 100 ISO. So I went back and did another shot, but this time I wore a black jumper, and this seemed to fix the problem. I thought this was a bit weird, but I dont know- maybe gray just picks up noise in this environment.

So from this, I have learnt to check the picture style your are shooting on, more about the spacing of lighting in relation to the green screen, and spacing of the actors in relation to the screen. Phew, its been a long day, and at times I was really worried, but I’m now glad that I’ve got things working. The next step I am currently up to is texturing my 3d animation, and then ill be going out to shoot everything, and then creating the CG backgrounds from there. Fun times ahead i think hahaha……

I first went to the warehouse were I checked out the position that I was going to film in, and also took measurements for the green screen. It ended up being 4.2 meters across and because I wanted the cloth to be against the wall, and then drape down onto the floor, I had to make it extra longer, so the length was 6 meters, so 4.2 x 6 meters. I took some test shots of the particular wall, with some gas canisters in place of actors to judge how they would look against the wall with the camera. I’m quite confident that the green screen will be big enough, my only qualm is that because I wanted a piece of cloth that was so big, I had to get it in 3 pieces.

To account for this, I told the fabricator to make the middle piece a little bit bigger, so that when the 3 pieces are against the wall, the middle piece will overlap. The other concern that I have is with the lighting, and I am considering using Billy Blue’s lighting. If I cannot obtain their lights, I will either have to rent flood lights, or find some alternative method of gaining them. I did some research and I found that most green screen’s colour is simply called “chroma green” and the colour that I got is pret

ty close to it, so if I hang the cloth up correctly, and light it well, I should get a pretty good key.

With the Industrial unit, I am planning to shoot at night, so it will be quite, the only thing is that when I was there today, it was raining, and the roof is a thick corrugated iron, so the rain made a really loud noise, so fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain on the night im going to shoot. I will also be using the mic from Billy blue, it will plug straight into my 7d, but seeing as i only have 1 mic, with 2 characters saying dialogue, i think that for some shots i will have to re shoot just for sound’s sake, and that should be alright because there wont be allot of gear movement, and the other advantage is shooting it behind the green screen, so cutting and pasting different shots of the actors together won’t be difficult.

After watching the intro to sin city, of which my piece is based, i took a look at mine in terms of the dialogue, and realised that I needed to work on it further to create deeper layers for the audience. Tarintino is really, really good at this, the way he makes his characters talk, and how he gives them depth really forces the audience to be drawn in. I’m going to have to ponder on this for a while. I know the basic actions that I want to happen, its pretty much girl pulls up in car to meet a man, they talk for a bit, then girl shoots man. But all the inbetween stuff, why she shoots him, what did he do? what did she do? do they know each other etc I have to work out and work into the story.

I know that I’m going to have to work hard on the post, but what I’m thinking at the moment is that I dont want this to be a piece that is only visually stunning, I think for me as a movie goer, a part of the audience, I want my piece to be deeper, to not only be visually stunning, but to have substance, meaning and layers that, once again, draw the audience in.

I’ll leave you with some shots I took of the Industrial Unit, and you’ll be able to see where I will be placing the green screen, how i will place the actors etc.

What Ive been up to for ages is nutting out the camera animation in the pipe fly through. What I did was create a camera with an aim and an up, and I did this for the primary reason that I wanted the camera to do 360 degree spins in places, and this would have not been possible ( or heaps harder) just using a camera with aim. BUT because I used the camera with aim and up, it made it some what more difficult to animate in some parts because of the fact that I had to key 3 separate things, and make sure that they relate, and what this resulted in what allot of trial and error, in the way that I would key a the camera, then aim, then up, and go back and watch it through. Then when I found a mistake, I would have to go through, and frame by frame smooth it out.

I asked my Lecturer if there was an easier way, and apparently there was, and this was to create a character set, and parent the camera to this. What that would do was instead of moving the aim, up and camera separately, the “camera set” would combine all of them, and all you would have to do was to key frame the character set. Sounded heaps simple, and heaps good, and I think I would have really benefitted from it, but the thing was that I had already invested too much time into the way that I was going- I was almost done by this stage….But I know for next time…

What I’ve also been doing is working on my story. I knew from the beginning that I wanted this to be based on Sin City, and Sky Captian, but one thing that I didnt take into consideration was the dialogue. I knew that I wanted a bit of it in my piece, but I didnt give allot of thought to it. It was only when I sat down and concentrated on writing the script that I understood just how much I had underestimated this part. What followed was me thinking long and hard about what the actors are going to say, how they are going to say it, and how I could get the audience down the rabbit hole without shoving them down there.

I took inspiration from Tarintino and the way that he uses his dialogue and characters. In his movies, you are often thrown into the scene, sometimes mid conversation, and you are drawn in by the characters- it is often through their dialogue, and not fancy action sequences, that the story is told. So what I tried to do was to have my characters tell a small part of the story, and then have the audience make up the rest for themselves- not so much leave it open ended, but lead them on a path, and then let them walk the rest of the way by themselves.

This type of thinking served the theme well, which is “the Secret” which in itself is open ended. I am really hoping that with the combination of my dialogue and the actors skills, that the story can really be brought to life, and that the audience will not only be impressed by the visuals, but by the story as well…

Some details on the project that I know at the moment are that I want this to be a noir piece, so I want it to be grayscale in colour, but following the style of sin city, some parts on characters are highlighted in colour, like a girl’s hair, or a person’s eyes. I think that the thing that will really bring this piece to life is the storyline, or the dialogue between the two characters at the beginning of the piece. This dialogue will have to be good, as it has to draw the audience in and keep them guessing, and I think for this part, I will take inspiration from Tarantino, in the way that he gets his characters to talk, but it is what they are talking about, and how they are talking they give the audience a small idea of what is going on, but don’t tell the audience the whole story. This forces the audience to think and use their own imagination and try to work out what is going on.

The posts to follow this will be updates on how the animation is going, and inspiration images, mood boards and further ideas…

The one thing that I have found with ALL of these articles is that there is major potential for growth, but the one thing that each social issue needs is funding- eg funding from the government to make re-newable energy work, funding from local government to save wombat, funding from the private sector for research into alternative energies.

And this is not to say the it is funding that is holding everything back, it is also education, and the fact that the average person doesnt know most of this information, nor is it readily available to them, this type of news doesnt appear each night on the 6 oclock news, rather it can be found on the ABC or SBS, but non the less, the “average” person wouldnt be concerned with this stuff- though they need to be.

The other thing that I found with all these articles, other than the potential for growth, is that there are allot of avenues that scientists and researchers are exploiting for alternative engeries and ways of living, so in that way, I am pretty confident that sooner or later, investors will wake up and realize that these ideas might be worth giving a go. And I must say that I am impressed with what some of the scientists have done, namely the research into the bee parasites, and the algae DNA programme.

This was a good excersise, and it forced me into researching things that I didn’t know too much about, but it also educated me, and forced me to become more aware of the world around me, and how it is ever changing, and how it can be forever changed by little steps in the right direction…

This article is REALLLLY interesting. The basic premise is that on any given day, Sydney is hotter than it is predicted to be, for example, if the weather is predicted to be 22 degrees, in the city center, it will actually be somewhere close to 28-29 degrees, and the main reason for the is the bitumen, the spacing of the buildings, and the lack of plants in the city.

Bitumen is a good insulator of heat, and this means that on a hot day, it will take in some heat, and then slowly excrecte the rest up- remember the term hot hair rises? AND have you ever looked out onto the road on a hot day, and seen the air rising? Think of this happening, but on every street in the city- and there are hundreds of streets. Also with tall skyscrapers preventing winds blowing in, the heat stays there, while winds from the sea push the hot air into the buildings, causing offices and buildings to use more air conditions to cool themselves down. This is what is known as “heat sink”, and it is more concentrated in areas where there are roads, high rise towers and large amounts of traffic, which is most of Sydney.

The city of Sydney comishioned a thermal photograph to be taken of Sydney, and from it, you can really see the effects.

One year ago, the City of Sydney council, keenly aware we are cooking ourselves in our cities, commissioned a thermal-image map of the CBD. The mapping flight took place in the early morning of February 6 last year. The maximum temperature that day was 29 degrees and the minimum 22 degrees. The thermal map, however, showed something else.

The streets, glowing red in the image taken, recorded a maximum temperature of 33 degrees. The bitumen surrounded by concrete were fully 4 degrees hotter than the maximum temperature recorded at Observatory Hill that day

Bascially, what this means is that the predicted tempreature was around 25 degrees ( middle of the predicted tempreature), yet the tempreature of the streets was 33 degrees- which is pretty frightening.

Ways in which this issue could be curbed would be the introduction of plants and trees onto side walks, which would soak in some of the hot hair from the ground, but also give the ground some natural moisture back. Coupled witht he plants would have to be a re-fitted water system that ran storm water past the plants, so they could grow, but also ran the water through the roads, which would cool them down considerably.

The social issue here is wether the government wants to make these changes, because if they do, the effect will be that every building in Sydney would use less aircondition to keep their buildings cool, and thus lessen electricity used, which means cheaps electrical bills for businesses. None of these issues are being considered, and with the population of people in cities rising, and new projects planned for Borangaroo ( the red-est part on the thermal map), it looks like the city will continue to swealter in the summer, which will not be a good thing for the inhabitants within…

Article located at: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/lifes-a-bitumen-nightmare-as-cities-get-hotter-than-hell-20100215-o05t.html

and written by Paul Sheehan, written on February 15th 2010.

When I read the headline of this story, I was like wtf??

Bascially, what this short article is about, is how in some parts of Australia, there are old mine sites, where people now live, and they have been extensively cleaned up, and now the only harm that it does to the children living in these areas, is that they are effects with low levels of arsenic, which is not enough to damage them. In earlier times, before the “clean up” children would have been suffereing from more serious conditions, like asthema, or sking diesases.

This article, I think, shows how good these areas are, by the fact that they once used to be industrial zones, and now people are living safely in them. The impact here is that it is good work by the government to clean up these areas and make them livable for people. If it had not been cleaned up, it would have been a major social issue, and one that could have deeply effect the lives of many living in the area- so props to the government for cleaning up.

Article located at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/11/2842881.htm 

and was posted on Thu Mar 11, 2010 12:28pm AEDT

live sheep being put onto a ship.

Many Australians aren’t aware that millions of livestock are exported to other countries for slaughter, while they are still alive. Australia is the largest exporter of livestock in the world, with over 4 million live sheep to the middle east alone. There are some people who believe that sending the animals while they are still alive is cruel, one such person is Clover Moore, who the is mayor of Sydney.

“During the harrowing four-week journey animals crammed on boats commonly suffer heat stress and diseases such as scabby mouth, pink eye and salmonellosis.

Each year thousands die during the journey; more than 40,000 died last year.

Those animals that do survive the trip are cruelly dealt with in countries that either lack animal welfare laws, or else do not enforce them.”

This is one example of how it is curel. The one factor of difference here is that the Australian live stock industry is one of the largest in the country, and it is controlled by many powerful farming companies, so making them change their practises might be a large job, which would be left up to animal activists. One alternative is to kill the sheep here, and then send chilled meat overseas.

It is not only the curelty factor here, but an economic factor as well. Moore states

“ A report by ACIL Tasman in October showed that each sheep processed domestically for meat is worth 20 per cent more to the Australian economy than a live export sheep, due to the potential to add value from processing in Australia.”

It is not only live export that is touched on in this article, house pets such as dogs and cats are breed en masse in “puppy” farms, and then sold off at a cheap price. You then have the situation where people buy the animals because they think they are cute, and at a reasonably low price, but when the animals grow up, they are no longer seen as cute, or not what the owner expected, and the animals are either put out on the street, sold again or put down- which is a major social issue.

The other issue here is wether the government wants to step in and stop the export of live stock, and put regulations of pet breeders, but ofcourse, the government needs a reason, and with the live stock industry going well, there seems to be no reason to change it- other than the fact that animals are suffereing prolonged deaths on ships heading away from out shores.

article located at http://www.smh.com.au/environment/why-we-must-ban-export-of-live-sheep-20091216-kvvm.html 

and was publised on December 15, 2009, written by Clover Moore.

Accessed on 19th April 2010.