week 13, Saturday

After having some problems with getting into the Video Room, we finally managed to do that, thanks to Phil. ) Today we've started the editing. First, we decided to rename the copied files and separated them into different folders so it's easier to search for them later on. We did it quite fast. But then we had quite a hard time with the rest, with putting all the shots together. And here we found some disturbing things,

such as, for example, in Nero Smart Start we don't have a scroll in the bottom of the video line, it was complicated to work with the files because most of the time we had to use zoom in and out just to see what we've done already and in which part are we working at the moment.
Another thing we've noticed was that we cannot separate the whole movie into smaller parts. Like we've tried to build a movie from 2 small parts (just to test), to save and merge them together. But, unfortunately, that didn't work. And so we had to build the whole movie as one file, which wasn't that easy to do, because of the inclusion of very tiny and important details, which were easy to loose in this huge line of films.

Well, the main part of work is done, now what left is audio, special effects and title with credits.
Hope that's complited till Tuesday. )

week 12, Thursday

Yes, we got his phone number, called him, and arranged a meeting at the Margit Island in the afternoon. We all were there on time, and so was he. On the way to the shooting place we got acquanted with him and shared the film story. He liked it very much. )

We found a great place for shooting. The light was only coming from the sun. but that was suitable. Oksana was shooting, while me and Itamar were acting. Anna wasn't there, she came after we finished, and Adel was taking photos of us working.

Well, first shots were quite boring, they were about the nature and us just walking. But the main part was exciting quite a lot for me. ) It's about passion and pain. )) I hope it will look good on screen. :)
We did try many different camera positions, though we couldn't get an OS shot properly. I think that was because of the coats, it was quite cold outside. But overall we did a great job. )

Well, after this scene in the park, we went to the Adel's appartment to take some shots there as well. First, we needed to make some decoration staff on the wall. We did that all together, hehe, even Itamar was helping us. ) So kind of him.
After finishing with that, we started the actual shooting. Well, i think we spend a lot of time with that, and we got many shots. probably later it will be a little bit disturbing. but that's ok. the more shots we have, the more interesting and various scenes we'll have later on , i guess.

And we finished our shooting by taking some pics of Tom (Itamar) dead. He is really a great person, we needed him to lie down on the corridor floor, and he did that! )

I hope we didn't miss anything out of sight. And we agreed to meet again on Sunday evening to continue shooting. We need two more days for the shooting, i think. they are gonna be Sunday and Tuesday. on Sunday we have Itamar again, and on Tuesday we'll try to get Max (for the Powerful Man's role).

week 11

This week we were not able to do anything. Girls were busy, we didn't have actors, were worrying about Tom's role (the main character). We thought already that Itamar would not show up at all. And we started looking for an alternative actor. Though we really liked Itamar, and wanted him to play this role. We talked to Marcel, Natela, Fathir and other guys. Some of them agreed to play, but we spent a lot of time discussing them among us. And we really didn't want to leave Itamar, fortunately we got his phone number finally, and he agreed. )

week 10, Sunday

Yesterday we met with girls (Anna, Adel, Oksana and me) to discuss our video.

First, Oksana (as a director) explained what she wants to show with this movie, and how she sees it. Then we looked through the synopsis we wrote earlier. Then me (as a producer)), i made a list of things we should not forget about: all the necessary props and also effects.

Then we started our script, including dialogues. We had some brainstorming and then selected the best of them.
Also we decided on the days and places we are going to shoot at.

But seems like only me and Oksana are so entusiastic about this film. ((
I don't know, maybe Anna and Adel don't like this story, i don't know.

Ok, after getting home, i sent this draft of script to Oksana, so that she'd correct it and add some more information. As for me, I decided to make pre-storyboard, if i can say so. ))
I just separated all the shots into groups according to the time and place we are going to shoot. This pre-storyboard of mine includes also the dialogues, and description of the shot (like is it a WS or CU, and what we see in this shot - the view); also it contains some descriptions of the costumes or rather look of the actors, and the way they act and talk.

Well, all together i counted 52 different shots, though i guess we'll add some more shots as cutaways. What i like in this film is that it doesn't have a usual storyline, and at the same time it's not very complicated and twisted, at least we'll try to do so. An interesting idea was to have a sort of framing for the story. We did so by introducing a new person. Well, to explain it well i'd have to tell you the whole story.but i can't, so you'll just see it by yourself when everything is ready.

week 10

This week we dealt with lighting. This theme is really interesting for me since i read about it from the course book. We learned the differences between three types of lighting: fill light, back light and key light. It was really nice to go through photos of different ganra and light. It was helpful for me, because i experience the world mostly by my visual sences. Through this we got a visual demonstration of how two lights differ from three, what kind of lighting is usual for a particular ganra. For exmple, for High School Drama we set that at least 4 lights are necessary to be present.
And could be only 2 for a detective film.

And we spent some time in a studio practicing the use of light. It was always attractive for me to know why and how photographers use umbrellas for shooting people, but i never had a chance to try that professionally, and now got it. And i really liked that.

Funny thing we had was trying to shoot from a chair being pushed and pulled (dolling in/out), and at the same time zooming in and out. The result of it was unexpectedly good, and i decided to use it in our second movie (i know already in which scene))

And so Thanks, Phil, for this class. I enjoyed it a lot. But i think, we could have had some more time with practicing it maybe in different places, for example outside in the garden. (of course, i know this would be quite difficult to organize because of absence of outlets outside, but still...)

week 9

This week we tried to shoot an interview. The main point was to see the necessary distance between the talkers, and also the distance between the talkers and a camera, so that the sound is relevant.

We separated into groops of 2-3. And i was with Oksana. (as usual)) We went to another empty class room in IBS, and began shooting. First, we settled upon shooting Oksana and me sitting right by the camera and interviewing.
Important thing we learnt was to ask open questions, such as Tell me about your future plans, or What were your thoughts when you did this and this, etc. The open questions work more for giving a direction to go for the interviewee, while answering the question he can start from one point and end with absolutely another one, discussing very interesting and personal views on smth.

Well, while interviewing Oksana we didn't go too deep into these questions, but we tried though. And it worked well, i think.

The second shot was about us sitting on a table right by each other, keeping the necessary distance (so that we both fit into the frame), talking to each other and the camera as well. )) We also tried to move our hands in space we had between us, so that it doesn't disturb the other person. And this also worked quite well.

And so the lessons we got from this day were:
-how to set right the camera, taking into consideration the quality of the sound, and at the same time keeping both the interviewer and the interviewee within the frame;
-what kind of questions the interviewer should ask;
-which way to look while answering a question for better look and sound;
-how we should use our hands in the interview,
etc.

week 8, editing

Yeah, this week is the last one for our assignment, so we had to start editing. We managed it on Monday after classes. We were quite tired, but we had no other choice, so we started.

As usual we uploaded videos we shot. Everything goes well, but suddenly we find out that some of our videos which are veeery important just disappeared. We started getting angry with the computer and camera, when Phil came to us and saved us. ))
I don't really know how he did that, but finally we got everything we needed. and Oksana brought some music, we listened through some of them, and chose most suitable ones.
While she was looking through them on another computer, i managed to add effects and text to our video, and then we added music.
After pre-watching it several times (and editing it each time, of course) we burned it into MPEG format and saved it into a folder on the desktop.

Well, i can say that editing was quite easy for us, just time-consuming, that's what we noticed.
But it's also interesting to play with all the shots, following the script, and making some corrections. However, we thought that the film could come better if we had more than 4 minutes. He, but anyway we have 5 and a half minutes. And i guess this is the longest film in our class.

And though it was quite hard to shoot this film, we had lots of fun working together. ;)