Thursday 26/11/20 - Filming Experiment

Using my storyboard as a basis I wanted to create a short test to bring my idea to life and give an impression of how I wanted it to look. I decided to use a greenscreen in the studio for this to give me the opportunity to experiment further with my editing skills alongside the physical camera work. Originally I was going to have the model simply standing but I wanted to add something dynamic so it didn't feel so still. I draped a cloth over them like a long cloak or poncho and had two others use cardboard to create 'wind', blowing the cloak gently.

The shot was inspired by two iconic scenes from the Star Wars films, A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. I loved the idea of the character looking out away from the camera, it's one of the reasons these scenes are really recogniseable. I liked this in the first shot especially as the lighting from the sunset created warm colours and a silhoutte. The meaning behind it was another reason, the character wants to go beyond the suns and enter what is unknown to him but feels like it is unobtainable and that they are stuck there.

The idea of the giant light was inspired by science fiction films such as 2001 A Space Odyssey with the monolith featured.

I took a few takes of this to give me some options when it came to editing, next however came creating the background itself. For this I used the LED as a giant square of light, I did this by creating a miniature landscape with cloth and small boxes to create fake hills all whilst using a small model person as a reference for where I'd edit in the greenscreen footage. This was one of the shots I recorded for the background.

Editing out the greenscreen was difficult as I'm more experienced with actual filmmaking instead of editing in post, whilst I did this for a previous project it wasn't much easier this time. The biggest problem I noticed was that the greenscreen was poorly lit up and I had lighting equipment too close to the subject which made cropping difficult. I tried experimenting on my own but the greenscreen always was poorly remove so I looked online for help. I used this video to help me with editing out the greenscreen:

Although the video improved the quality by a good amount I still had some issues from the greenscreen and chroma key, to help this I made the subject smaller than I originally intended so it would be hard to see unless looked at more carefully.

This was the final video, whilst it shows my ideas pretty well it has its issues which I plan on fixing when I revisit this to create a longer film based on my ideas and storyboard. I will find a way to better light up the greenscreen whilst still keeping the subject with lighting to match the background. I will also have to find a better way to blend the subject in, I feel like having some objects in the background that are also affected by the 'wind' and shadows will help this. Some adjustments to lighting and edits in post (such as adding grain) would also help this. I may also experiment with creating a digital background instead of making a physical prop. However, despite these I am happy with the outcome as this was only a short experiment with little technical planning.

I also worked on three short experiements in a group to look at the idea of POV and how camera angles can portray a different story. The three stories to portray were a child wandering the corridors, someone who is in a state of panic and someone who is ridiculously tall. For the child we decided on low angles and to capture it as if the child was (poorly) spying on a group of people. We have the camera move in short bursts of speed with small steps to help imitate this. We also used a gimbal for this to add some stability to the shot.

For the panic we chose to forgo the gimbal as having an unstable camera felt appropriate to portray the feeling of panic and fear. We featured a lot of quick camera movements of looking back to show paranoia and utilised these to add in hidden cuts throughout when necessary, instead of the single take we used for the first POV video.

The last one we decided to go for an exaggerated and comedic approach. We came up with the idea of following the perspective of someone very tall. For this we used a very high angle looking at a downwards tilt. We also featured the camera bumping its 'head' on the door frame and used other people to help emphasis the height of this tall person.