FINAL SCENE

I filmed the 1st scene in our film, which is the final scene to be shot, on xmas eve. A full moon was scheduled but unfortunately, probably due to mist, i couldn't see it. I filmed anyway and got several shots of the lake with the trees, zooming in and out and panning across to get some variation to choose from. We can hopefully put a moon on in after effects and make it look convincing. I filmed about 4:30pm just as it was getting dark because last time was way too dark to see anything.
We now have to create 10 secs of footage from this and place it at the beginning, then put all of the effects on the whole video.

MORE EDITING

Nicola started our second lot of editing because i was ill. She put most of the clips on the timeline in their order and sped things up etc. I went in Friday and started to piece together the 2 verses' dance sequence as these were the only bits Nic hadn't editied yet. The best takes were chosen carefully put together against the soundtrack. A lot of tweaking was done to get our lips to be in sync with the audio. It's quite difficult to edit with 2 people but we had to compromise on a few details to get it done.
Nic was concerned about her footage being too dark, i felt mine was too bright but i suggested changing the opacity and merging the 2 of us together to balance out the light. It worked well but we had to make sure we were both in time with each other and the music. The takes were pretty good really considering we were singing from our own timing as the cd player packed in. We got everything in it's right place, one problem we noticed though was that on the clip of us 'hovering' you can see the reflection of the camera on Nicola's body!! Something you obviously don't notice when you're freezing in the woods! I'm sure we can do something to alter that and if not we can just leave it out because we have footage of our legs hovering too so could use that. Another scene we decided to discard was the animation of the clothes in the woods. The lighting was poor and as we used torches, you could see the lights moving with the animation and it was obvious it was a torch. The other animations we did were great and we don't need the woods one anyway.
We have to put all of the after effects on such as the rough circular frame around the scenes in the woods to get that judderman feel and some jittery motion. We can't put the frame on in the bedroom scenes because our props fill up the whole of the screen and we don't want to lose any of our animation. After xmas we need to get a good mix on the track and place it under the video. I have to film the woods, moon and lake on xmas eve to get 10 secs footage for the opening scene. There is a full moon so i will film it just as it's going dark as it was was too dark to film before.

ANNOYED!

Yesterday felt like it was a waste of time. I was ill but went in to the lab to edit our latest footage. All of the computers had been updated and final cut pro wasn't letting us log and capture our footage. I tried the room upstairs to try a different computer but it still didn't work, Nick said only 1 of the macs was working but it was in use. He brought the latest version of final cut in for us to install. This took hours!! In the meantime Jonathan suggested we import our footage from imovie. We started to do this but by the time final cut had installed we could log and capture from the camera.
Today we were going to get the editing done but i am still feeling ill and haven't been able to go in. We must get it finished tomorrow if Nicola hasn't already. I was really looking forward to editing but at least i did the 1st shoot.

FILMING IN WOODS

We were looking forward to filming in the woods as the 1st shoot was really funny. We got all of the equipment ready and got our make-up and outfits on. We decided to do the scenes first which required help with lighting so went to fetch my niece, Leah. Nic brought torches because we thought we had a generator at uni plug the big lamps into but Nick said we don't. We could've hired one but we only found out Tues (we filmed Tues eve) so didn't have time. We changed the gain on the camera, the white balance and the shutter speed, so that we would get the most light coming through when filming in the dark.

So, we arrived at the woods, it was so dark, we found the shed where we were going to film by and set our equipment down. It was freezing!!! I wore heels too, which were really hard to dance in on squelchy, muddy leaves. We did the 1st verse dance sequence to start. We placed a few toadstools nearby and Leah held a torch on each of us so we were lit. We did the dance with the cd and went to do it again but the cd player decided it didn't want to work anymore. We tried different things but it wasn't reading the disc...this was really annoying because it was necessary for the timing of our dance and singing. We just had to get on with it, we did a lot of versions and moved camera angles so we had plenty of variation for editing. We then went on to filming the elevation scene. We crouched down and had the cam set low, we then slowly stood up so hopefully it will look like we are floating up. We then set up near a fence so we could sit on to it then jump off, we can then reverse it to get the effect of being lifted off the floor. We will cut these together to give the illusion of hovering! Unfortunately, when watching the rushes we noticed the shadow of the camera on Nic's body so that scene will have to be done again. We then did the landing, where we just jumped into view, Nic jumped off the fence a few times but it was icy and there was no way i could do that with heels on. We went straight into the dervishes scene. This was hard to do on uneven ground in heels and bright light. We had an audience at this point and loads of dogs roaming around. We did the footsteps next and had to guess at the tempo of the beat as our cd player had betrayed us. We did a lot of takes so surely there will be one in time. Next we filmed us coming down the path and dancing around the trees in the woods. We took Leah back and had a cup of tea to warm up, we couldn't feel our toes, lips or hands, or see a damn thing!

Round 2. We set up by a tree to do scenes 4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10. These were pretty good, timing didn't really matter on these. We had some lights in the background that Nic was trying to avoid but when looking through the camera i thought they looked good, like the Spinster's house in the woods. The torches were not ideal, you can see the rings in some shots but we didn't have any other option so perhaps we can make it better in post-production.

We went back to the car and got out of our set clothes into something warmer. The last scene was the animation of the clothes (we still have to do scene 1 but it was way too dark so i will go back just before dark one day, to film the lake, woods, etc.

Nic operated the camera on the tripod and i moved the clothes and held the torches. This didn't take long at all. Everything for the night was over. What a horrific experience that was!

We filmed mostly on the tripod but there were a few hand held shots, which seem to have come out well. I am now waiting for Nick to install the latest version of final cut because the computer is not letting me log and capture.

BACK TO THE TRACK

On Friday, we put some effects onto the vox. We compressed them to even out the fluctuations in the dynamics. This allows the levels to be raised. Nic put some EQ on her voice because hers was less basey than mine. We 'de-sr'ed the vox to make the 's' sounds less hissy. Unfortunately, we forgot to change the second set of vox to have the same effects so will have to do it all again!

The drum sounds that we beefed up were put onto the track and when Nic went to the Max/msp class, i got them all in sync. I find this harder in Protools because you can't zoom in as much as you need to to see the audio properly. I had to line up certain cues so did it by ear. 

We have set aside 2 nights next week to do the rest of the filming.

EDITING

Nick showed us how to get our footage from the Sony cam onto the Mac. It wasn't detecting it because the setting to HDV wasn't right. He showed us log and capture and to make a sub clip so we don't ruin our original footage. Because we had done stop framing, each frame was being saved as it's own clip in the bin so we would have had to drag each one down and there was lots as you can imagine! Nick showed us how to pick out the sections we wanted using 'now' to record and 'esc' to stop, so we re-named those and got rid of all the small frames. Nicola's got her gallery opening so she was needed there so i have edited the scenes we did.

I cut the clips of the middle 8 down to one because we filmed it about 10 times, due to laughing and mistakes so i chose the one i thought was the best. I reversed it to play forwards, it looks good because the bed makes itself in places and some of our movements have the wrong accent to what they would normally. The wolf/man in bed animation was sped up to 400% to appear smoother between frames and then rendered, i did the same with all of the other animations but had the clothes on the bed at 350% going into 200% as they disappear. I didn't think it looked right at 350, it went too quickly.  The wolf/man leaving the room was put at 450%.

With the extras that we did, i cut the best bits and edited them a bit. Nic in the mirror was reversed, cut and sped up slightly to 200%. I copied the clip with me on the bed with funny legs 3 times, all joined together and sped that up to 500%. Nic and I sat holding pebbles was cut quite short and sped up a fraction. I chose the best zoom of the doll that Nic did and cut it shorter. 

The next thing to do is firstly show Nic the editing to make sure she likes it too and then we have to do more filming. All of the other scenes are done in the woods and we have to create our make-up and clothes to look the same as the first lot of filming. There is 1 more animation scene to do, which will take longer than the rest but the others should be pretty straight forward hopefully, unless it decides to rain every day. 

SHOOTING

The first 5 scenes have been shot. They are scenes (see storyboard below) 14, 20 & 22 (which both have 2 scenes each). The first thing we did was set the scene of the Spinster's bedroom up in my room. The professional lights were far too bright for the small room, and when we closed the shutters more the light just bleached out the areas it was lighting. We tried my dimmer switch and the hallway light outside the room. None of them looked how we wanted it, Nicola wanted it to be quite shadowy so we lit lots of candles and placed them around the set. This along with the overhead bulb, which was on it's lowest dimmer setting looked good enough. In these photos we have turned the light up a bit so you can't get an accurate idea of how it looked. 

The camera was set up high for the bed shots and lower looking at the floor in just a small area for the animated leaving shots. For the wolf/man I made some ears from a cushion cover and stuffed them, pinched 2 pebbles from my Mom's garden for testicles and put my horse riding boots in the bed for his feet.  Pillows and a blanket made up his body, which was covered with a patchwork blanket my Mom made, we also covered the storage heater with another blanket she made. It all looked good. A rustic looking pashmina was placed on the storage at the back of the bed to blend with our red capes and various objects were put on top. We had a LRRH doll, 2 toadstools, 2 candle lamps, 2 trinket boxes, 1 mirror cabinet, various different candles and an Ophelia print on the wall by Arthur Hughes. The print looked good in the set with the colours and the lights flickered lovely. We had the doll, toadstools, ears, boots, sheets and pebbles animated by stop framing. This took ages as we had expected but it was fun. The best part was Nic and I doing the middle 8 bit. We made up a little dance sequence taken from our original one and did it backwards so we walked on backwards, etc. We will then reverse it in Final Cut so it plays forwards and bring a slight surreal edge to the scene. David Lynch did this in Twin Peaks;Fire walk with me. It looks weird because the natural movement of a person walking forwards is different when moving backwards so because the film is played to look forwards you don't quite know what's strange about it!

After the main scenes we were shooting, we did a few extra shots that we may be able to use. Nic zoomed in on the LRRH doll, i filmed the bed with Nic in the mirror, i sat on the bed doing something funny with my legs and we both sat on the bed holding a pebble each. Tomorrow we need to edit what we've done.

All of our toadstools are now finished and painted. I cut out the shapes of the wolf ears today, Nic and i will finish them on Tues before we start to film. We are going to set up the spinster's bedroom in mine with lots of props. We have 2 scenes to shoot for that. The middle 8 bit where we are going to speed it up with Nic and I and the ears, pebbles and shoes coming off the bed. We are going to go over to Hurcott pool, Kidderminster (where we will be filming all of the woods scenes) and maybe film the first scene. We went to final cut pro on Fri and Nick was showing us some techniques in the effects for some of the scenes. He gave us a really god tip for stop framing. We have to film for the length of the tape with the lens cap on because when we edit, each frame won't be read seperately, it just goes back to zero, so we would have problems when trying to find the scenes.