After having completed the storyboard and script I had a confident idea of how to go about creating the movie. I collected a few friends to play the actors within my movie, a total of 5 actors to play 5 characters, additionally I needed my own direction of how the movie would be filmed and how to follow the storyboard in collaboration with the script and Tony Cash provided the role of cameraperson.
I gathered my actors in early October and gave those with speaking roles copies of the script to prep them for the film. Casting actually became a problem throughout the production of the movie as certain actors had conflicting schedules which required the production dates to be decided carefully. A rough set of shots was filmed in late October for a rough idea of how the movie would look, unfortunately the footage captured could not be used due to low audio quality and the fact that it was incomplete, additionally the footage featured an actor who was later re-casted entirely due to schedule conflictions. Before filming my finalised casting crew became solidified:
Alistair Goodwin as Detective Gilbert (Main character)
Harry Kelly as Detective Patmore (Secondary Character)
Amy Morris as Olivia Garnet (Femme Fatale)
Lee Bradley as Charles Graves (Background character)
Bradley Lee as Ned Henry (Corpse)
Location
After having a reliable cast I decided to go out with my partner and find a suitable filming location for the movie. I explored a few areas around Tamworth for my movie, initially I was thinking of an area near a river which I had visited on a Duke of Edinburgh walk and though would be suitable, however upon revisiting the location I found the ground to be much too wet and sludgy to have any kind of filming equipment or footwear on. I decided to have the location at a nearby nature reserve in Amington, which is very close to the houses of all the actors involved, which made it convenient and the ground was suitable for equipment and footwear. The location is surrounded in many tall trees and quite murky surfaces, there is also a small swamp-like lake on set which will appear in the film as a local landmark in the story, I chose the area because it seemed like a suitable location for a murder crime scene and I felt that It's muddy appearance would invite a dark Film Noir style atmosphere to the movie. (add pictures of location here later)
Production Schedule
Upon having my cast and location sorted I had to find out which days would be suitable to get the footage. I found that the entirety of my cast was available every Sunday for filming, so I scheduled the filming of the movie every Sunday, however in the end I only needed a single day to collect all of the footage required.
Filming Footage and Role Allocation
After having everything ready I started filming in mid November, with myself as the writer, director and later the editor and Tony Cash as the cameraperson who took care of capturing the footage. After having audio problems in our practice recording in October we decided to make use of a voice recorder suspended on a sturdy stick to capture audio better and later overlap it with the footage to get a better audio quality. In addition Tony provided a pop filter for the voice recorded to reduce the risk of background noise. As we pressed record on the camera we suspended the voice recorder close to the actors while still out of shot in order to get decent quality audio capture. After completing all of the footage recording which additionally required audio recordings at the same time we recorded voiceovers off camera to be placed onto scenes later in editing.
Editing
When filming was finished and it was time to edit I put the footage and audio onto the computer and went through all of the files in order to separate the blooper footage with the footage we were actually going to use in the film. After doing this I imported all the files we were going to edit together into Adobe Premiere to start editing.
After importing all the clips and audio I dragged them all into the timeline in the order they are supposed to go, with the footage accompanied with the audio it was recorded with.
I then synced the footage and audio up appropriately, which you can see in the pictures shows the audio more spaced out as it has been synced with the footage accurately.
After having placed all of the clips and audio into the film and having synced it all I started to add filters to all of the clips in order to give it the black and white film noir colours and some colour edits to make it seem darker since the original clips were quite light.
Before adding all the filters I created a second save of the film for applying the edits, this way I wouldn't ruin the project by adding the filters.
Throughout the course of editing the film I noticed that a specific clip had dragged on for an uncomfortable amount of time and it made the pacing of the entire project slow down and it seemed unprofessional. In order to try and correct this I added in a clip from earlier in the project with no visual dialogue, named "over shoulder shot" so then the audio could be heard and it would seem as though the character was talking off-screen without it being a voice-over, remaining diegetic sound. The images below shows the image repeated on the timeline as well as what the clip looked like.
Towards the end of editing the project I found that we didn't have enough footage to sync up to one of the audio voiceovers, which we recorded without a clip in collaboration with it. In order to correct this I took a camera and tri-pod out the following Saturday and simply captured a close up shot of the main character as it was him talking in a voiceover. I did this to make it seem as though the character was in deep thought during his voiceover as earlier in the voiceover he wasn't in the shot and it was focusing on another character.
Below you can see how the audio goes further than the footage.
After collecting all of the necessary footage for the film it was able to all be edited together correctly on the timeline. After being synced with the audio the footage of the film was all finished being edited. During post production my partner Tony and I split up to create different graphics for the opening title card and company logo for the film.
I used flash to create a short animation featuring a company logo named Cashcush Productions, created out of the last names of both myself (Cushingham) and my partner Tony (Cash). The animation was purposely simplistic, not reminiscent of any specific styles and was intended to have no genre-specific impact on the viewer. 
While I was creating the company logo animation my film partner Tony was creating a title card for the film, which is called "Ruby Red". After looking up a few tutorials Tony was able to create the title card In Photoshop by layering images and text over one another and by manipulating lighting effects provided by Photoshop. The title card was created to purposely reflect Film Noir aspects, with a spotlight on the title and the title font being quite curved.
No comments:
Post a Comment