Construction Post 5: The Back-up shoot

There was a substantial amount of footage we were unable to acquire during our main shoot, for this reason we needed a backup shoot. This was our last chance to get the required footage.
Unfortunately we were put under a bit more pressure due to the fact we were only able to book the studio at lunchtimes, not after school as we preferred.


The main issue to resolve with our shots in this shoot was getting the correct lighting. Thus far we still hadn't managed to get the exact desired effect, the half illumination of the characters faces, much like in film noire productions, such as Sin City.


I mainly took control of the lighting as I had the most experience, and was the only one who had learnt to use the lighting desk.



We also began thinking more about the continuity within our sequence, we began trying to precisely control the cards in play and the number of chips each character had. This was extremely difficult and we never managed to perfect it, however eventually we got a fairly decent accuracy by taking photos of the layout whenever we had to switch props about.

One of the shots we had to change, as it took away the focus on Blake,
 we replaced it with an MCU of Blake, (the character on the right.)

Overall I believe our back up shoot went quite well. Having the list of required shots allowed us to use the time we had more efficiently than if we hadn't made a list. I think we got all the shots we needed.

Construction Post 4: Reflections on Edit Week 1

We created an editing timetable to decide who was going to edit the sequence at what times.

The first thing to do in the first edit week was finalize music. We'd chosen suitable action music for the tense climax of our sequence, our non-diegetic sound, however the beginning part used Hans Zimmer's "Time", which of course we would not be able to use due to copyright issues. To get around this, I ended up producing a track in a similar style using the digital audio workstation, FL Studio.

I did the special effects of the gunshots and bullet hits in After Effects, as I had some experience using the software, for which I used the test shoot footage. When editing the final sequence, I helped Alistair to do the gunshots, as he was having occasional trouble with the masks. Originally, I used this tutorial from YouTube to learn how to do the effects:

One member of the group was not very committed during this time, on a number of occasions leaving edit sessions early, and also failing to turn up to one or two. Those that he did turn up to he sometimes didn't attempt to get involved with the editing, instead deciding to read, despite there being plenty of other jobs to be done.

We created a list of shots to reshoot ready for our back up shoot. These were shots that either had bad framing, bad lighting, serious continuity errors, or issues with dialogue. Though there were quite a few shots in this list, we were sure we would be able to reshoot them all.

Construction Post 3: Reflections on our Main Shoot Session

There was a lot of pressure on us for the main shoot to get all the shots we needed there and then, as, unlike some other groups we hadn't managed to get usable footage from the test shoot, as Alistair had said he'd gotten our main chosen actor when he hadn't, so we'd had to find a quick replacement. Nonetheless, the test shoot had allowed us to try out some lighting and different angles for shots, so we felt fairly confident.

During the test shoot I'd been leading as director and main cameraman, so I felt in this shoot I should allow other group members to be more involved in those areas. Although this seemed a good idea at first, it became apparent Alistair was not able to control and direct the actors properly, and I failed to realise this until we came to editing.

Shot was wrongly framed. The dealer, (close right), was not supposed to appear
in this shot, hence the lack of illumination

Our lighting also didn't work as well as it could have, and due to a mix up with our shoot board we ended up missing a couple of shots, the main issue was an actors line appearing in two shots.
This resulted in us initially having to use recycled footage from the test shoot when editing.
As a result we've planned a back up shoot.

Lighting of Tim, (2nd from the right), was bad. We should have used a seperate
light for him.

It was only nearing the end of the shoot session I found the best intensity to have the ceiling fill light at. It meant that shadows of the actors were not cast onto the table.

Unfortunately, once we'd gotten all our shots and finished the session, Alistair decided to leave straight away rather than help packing up the equipment. Iggy and I ended up leaving half an hour later.

Construction Post 2: Our Post-production Kit

After shooting, we needed to use our post-production kit to order our shots and put them into the sequence. Our kit was vital for this.

Our hardware included:
- Desktop computer
- Two BenQ monitors
- Speakers

Our software included:
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Adobe After Effects
- Data Import Utility

Canon's Data Import Utility was vital to transfer all the shots we'd recorded from the camera to the computer.

Premiere Pro was an extremely useful piece of software, allowing us to easily move clips about, cut them, stretch them, edit their opacity, edit their audio, and add effects. It also allowed us to have multiple sequences open at once, so we could refer back to the animatic when editing the rough cut, and back to the rough cut when editing the final sequence. It also allowed us to add titles and place them within shots.

ProcAmp was the most useful effect, allowing us to do basic grading very quickly, and the 'split screen' mode allowed us to compare the graded version of a shot to the ungraded version in realtime.

After effects was very useful for the gunshot effects within our opening sequence.

Construction Post 1: Our Production Kit

In the construction of our opening sequence, there were several important pieces of equipment we needed.

We used a Canon Legria HF G30 Camcorder, mounted on a tripod, with a shotgun microphone and headphones attached. We had also planned to incorporate the use of a camera jib to do a bird's eye view of the poker table, however we did not manage to get this shot.






As we were shooting in the studio, there were lights above us already, every time we did a shoot I would setup the lights. We used four Arri floor lights and one of the ceiling ones. We had to also wear gloves if handling the floor lights as they got hot quickly.


We also used a clapperboard plus pen and cloth to note down the scene number, take number, director, and camera operator.
Though all the equipment was very useful, the lighting was initially very hard to get to grips with, especially when the actors moved.

Our setup, with me configuring the main ceiling fill light.

R+P Post 20: Reflections so far/looking ahead

Thus far the project has been progressing pretty well. The storyboard we produced was great for splitting our opening into the individual shots and planning framing for them. The animatic was also very useful as when editing the rough cut we could follow the structure we created within the animatic. We did change the structure somewhat however, so hopefully that will help us even more so once we have the footage from our main shoot as then we can refine the structure even more using the rough cut.

Although the test shoot provided us with little usable footage, it still let us learn a lot about lighting and setting up the set. We also will be more cautious with following our shot list due to us missing a shot.

R+P Post 19: Our Rough Cut

Our rough cut was useful in helping us see continuity errors, and dialogue that didn't make sense. We used our previously constructed animatic to quickly compile our test shots into the correct places and lengths. We were also able to test how our chosen sound effects and music fit in with actual footage.

Our rough cut within Adobe Premiere Pro

Things we found we needed to fix for the next shoot:
We missed one shot, and another we forgot to add dialogue in.
We needed to improve the lighting to keep shadows on one side of each actors face.
We also needed to edit the lighting setup to stop too much light spilling onto the curtains and floor.
We noticed a terrible pan shot, the framing of which just didn't suit it at all, so we scrapped that and replaced it with a simpler shot.

One of our shots with visible lighting errors, including too intense light on the characters' faces, and shadows cast on Jen by the dealer leaning forward.