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I have just filmed the last scene! Again in black and white, I have gone back to the first scene of Sindy in bed. The whole film is about Sindy contemplating about her life and thoughts so each scene is about her thinking about what she has done and why, so the final scene goes back to her being in bed, after she had the bad dream.
I have animated her stamping her feet, shaking her head, pulling the blanket back over her to flop back into bed because she doesn't feel like getting out of bed to face the day and she's become so deluded that she now questions which one out of awake and sleep is the reality and how much should she have faith in either.
I have done close up shots of her head and the poster together as well as zooming out to see more of the scene. I will now play around with the sindys holding letters spelling my name and then that should be all for the filming.
Today I have filmed Sindy looking in the mirror at herself, her body image, showing how looks are important to her. I am looking back from the mirror. First I set the scene. My bedroom has blank walls and a white shelf at the back of my bed so I used this as it is neutral to build onto. I placed a large picture of Hitchcock's 'The Birds' (1963) at the back for a reference of the decade the film is set in. A Vespa calendar is on the wall and some shelves with various books. There is
also a pic of marilyn monroe and a phallic shaped cactus plant!
I placed a small pic frame over the lens, which is not on the photo, to look as though I am looking in a mirror when I look in the camera. I wore an original 1960's mod dress, a blonde wig and lots of make-up with huge false eyelashes. I did several takes of me
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king in the viewer and camera, putting on lipstick and just generally checking hair and dress, etc. I was going to have Sindy approaching the mirror and then a backshot of her with me looking back at her but decided to film her looking into the camera, and I will blur the image to fade into my face. The last scene to do is the end where she gets back into her bed. I can then focus on the editing and sound.
With the title animation scenes, I sped them up and reversed them to how I wanted them to spell. I had to crop and zoom in in final cut, where the cam had picked up more than I could see through the viewer. I captured the prozac footage in 3 stages. The spin, animation and cut ins. I cut out all footage of my fingers spinning the cushion and also cropped and zoomed. I used dissolve transitions on the cuts i made, which gave it a real dizzy, 'out of focus/mind' look. After messing with the speeds I was really pleased with how the shoot had worked out. The animation with the pills worked well.
I also rotated the last clip of the dream sequence and put a ripple transition on it to go into the next scene. I didn't need a spinning effect after all! I cut the Graham clip as I had looped it to play again but the join was not right.
Tomorrow I am filming Sindy looking at me in the mirror, so I better get my false eyelashes and rouge out!
Firstly, I am annoyed because I just wrote my blog and then highlighted it all and pressed return. So there it went! I am now starting again! Idiot!
Having 3 more scenes left to film I decided to do the prozac scene. After speaking to someone who had been on it for depression i learnt that suicide attempts and inertia are common when taking the drug so kept those ideas in mind when creating the set. The scene is part of the story when Sindy has tried various things to distract her endless negativity. I decided to film in black and white for a classic and sombre feel so chose the props to work accordingly.
Sindy was in a lemon, lace nightie and gown called 'Dreamy Lace 1976. To the right is a newspaper reading '...the ups and downs' from 'Shopping in the rain' 1963. To the left is a glass on it's side and some pills (sweeteners). The scene shows how Sindy is in a state of inertia and deliriousness after taking her prozac and I have tried to show how she is feeling. I lay her on a 60's style cushion with her hand to head on her side. She remains still throughout. It is the cushion that moves. I slowly turned it, first the focus on the head, then we see the glass and pills, her legs and then the paper. The scene keeps going round, it looks like a suicide, which reflects one of the biggest side-affects of the drug. I then dropped some sweeteners onto her and animated them to swirl around the pattern of the cushion for a surreal element. The glass 'hoovers' them up and stands up in the centre of the flower. The pills have become the pollen, (sindy is the flower and the prozac is her centre) metaphotically speaking. I cut in to her head, paper and glass shot.
I have also animated the opening titles today. The first is 'A film by' and i used Sindy accessories such as parasols, shoes, hats, bouquets, coat hangers and many more. They will randomly appear to spell out the words. For the title, which I have decided to call 'Tormenture' inspired from the 'torment' poster I placed in Sindy's bedroom scene, is also animated, but using clothes. The title is a combination of the words torment, torture and men so it reflects perfectly how she is feeling and it fits with the themes I am using. It took ages to rummage through the endless bags of Sindy clothes I have to find the most maliable! Each letter will appear 1 by 1, first to spell torture and the 'men' will appear altogether, in red.
I tried different ways of writing my name to go after 'a film by' but animating it by hand writing was too hard for the time I have to do it. I even squirted ketchup to spell it but it looked a mess. I think I will have Sindys holding a letter each.
When editing the human clips with the animation I was at first dissapointed and thought I may have to do it again. The lighting was different and the human clips closer. I couldnt zoom in too close on the dolls to make them appear larger because the cam goes out of focus at a certain range. I had a mess around in final cut, checking out the effects I could put on. I changed the brightness and contrast of each clip so that they were very similar, already this made them more connected. I moved the clips around, chopped small bits of them to keep and placed them in an order where the animation and people looked similar. I found an effect I liked called radial blur. I thought the clips would look better if they were slightly different to her awake clips. I then found whirlpool in distort menu, it has a sort of concave mirror effect and this looked fantastic for a dream sequence. The movement I have in the scene, coupled with this effect looks great, I'm really pleased with it. I need to find an effect similar to 'twirl' in distort. I want the pic to move in a circle onto the next scene. I looked in transitions but found nothing. Twirl has the effect but not the motion. I'm sure I will find it.
I currently have 3 mins of edited film footage, which is not bad for 6 wks of animation! I have 3 more scenes to shoot, 1 of them is of myself looking out from the mirror that Sindy is looking into. I need to think about the best way I can do it. The other 2 scenes are Sindy on Prozac, which will be brief and her getting back into bed.
I re-edited the club scene so the speed was slower and also the hypnotise scene. I seem to have lost my dance scene somewhere, i know it's under another scene but not sure how to retrieve it. I must grab Nick when I'm in next!
I have about 37 secs of dream footage which will need sound. This along with the 1min 23 secs of psychedilia will be the biggest scenes I will have to do sound for. I won't be doing any filming until weds probably as I have a presentation and draft essay to be in, which I am constantly working on.
After continuing with more editing last week I am now filming again. Last night I filmed short clips of torsos, kissing and a lap dance. The lap dance was in colour and will be editied next to Sindy's pole dance. The other shots were in black and white, for her dream sequence, they looked wrong in colour and will be placed with flashes of doll bodies. It is to represent Sindy's insecure feelings of picturing her boyfriend with other women. I need to make sure the camera is positioned to get the doll's bodies to look the same size as the human ones.
I began to fiddle around with the psychedelic club scenes first. I sped them up to about 800% but they still didn't look right so I had the idea to go through frame by frame and delete all of the still ones. Once this was done I then had to slow them all back down individually!!! God this took ages, there must be a way of selecting them all to change the speed but I couldn't see how. The chill out room looked good but the rest still needs to be played around with.
The Graham dance looked ok sped right up but I wanted to try the same by removing the stillness. I got a ghost like effect so I kept the first frame of every move and put them together, slowing it down to 5%. This looked good too. I need to have a longer mess with it though and David the Maya guy is coming tomorrow so he may have some good advice on removing still frames because Greg said it was probably best to keep some frames in. I really want to shoot the Graham sequence again because you can see dollikin shoot forward when she fell...damn doll!! Oh well the best things don't come easy I suppose.
I never had time to edit any of the pole sequence so I will do that tomorrow also. Hopefully I can start getting a background made in Maya for the pole scene.
I have been thinking about the music for the club scene. It has to be fitting with the era. I was thinking about using a Hammond organ if I can get my hands on one....oh and someone who knows how to play it too!! I could use an already existing track but I feel that would be the easy way out so I will have another think. Jonathan said I could use samples in a music programme, which is another option.
I have just filmed the last scene! Again in black and white, I have gone back to the first scene of Sindy in bed. The whole film is about Sindy contemplating about her life and thoughts so each scene is about her thinking about what she has done and why, so the final scene goes back to her being in bed, after she had the bad dream.
