Review Day

For my review week presentation I showed my Serious Fun project 'The City' to a small group. This was one of the most productive type of critiques we have had so far, with a small group and a designated time slot we got a lot of feedback and a lot of questions and challenges that really make you consider your work and develop your ideas so that you might think more critically in our next assignments.

My actual display was okay but I do wish when comparing it to others that I had the other assignments represented as well. I was much happier with my poster when it was in onscreen size but this is perhaps because it is my first time making an image with Photo Shop and therefore I didn't have any experience in how the reproduction would look. I used a cardboard box beneath my poster to hold all my journals for viewing but this would require the viewer being interested enough to pursue my work further before these would be viewed, instead I think it would be much better if there was as much work as possible on display without overcrowding the space. This would show the scope of my work and there would be a higher chance of one of the projects interesting the viewer.



With this first experience I have learned a lot that I would like to apply next time I have a presentation week. Although I was not unhappy with my own display, viewing it I think there is quite a bit more I could have done to really make my own work standout.

All in all I have been very happy with my work over semester 1. As with most things in life there are things I would like to have improved had I had the extra time but I am on the whole happy. It doesn't feel like we have been in the BCT long but looking at all the work presented this week it shows how far we have come and how much of our studio practice has developed throughout the year so far.

I can't wait to see what is in store for semester 2.

Study Week

Study week is an opportunity to redo or improve upon anything that needed further work as well as to create a display of our years work focusing on one main project that we consider our strongest. Part of the presentation requirements is to create an A1 poster promoting one of our works so I intend to present my 'Serious Fun' assignment so I really want to get the building growth and decay working as well as learning to use an illustrating program to make the poster as of yet I'm not overly familiar with any.

Editting and the Popcorn Premier

The saying whatever can go wrong will go wrong is at times very true! Editing day was a little like that. To speed up the initial editing we split it 3 ways and worked on Final Cut Pro on our 3 laptops, that worked really well until we tried to move the sequences between computers and would you know it all the clips were going offline. This caused major problems and a lot of wasted time for our team that we couldn't afford so close to the premier. This unfortunately was one indication that it might have been wiser to stick to our assigned jobs.

With the premier coming up fast we had to sacrifice some quality and get the movie showable so we exported the sequences as quick time movies and used them in turn as clips in a new sequence that made up the whole movie. This was a disappointing day for us as we felt the time that we lost in complications could of instead been used to bring our movie up to a much higher quality.

We did however with a team effort manage to scrape together all the remaining factors we needed to present the final movie and were very happy that we did have a finished product to show on the day.

Our movie will be re-edited and named in the study week so we can hand in a finished product that we are all happy with.

Filming Days 1 and 2

The last two days have been quite hectic in getting with the filming. We have managed to keep the filming locations all within a 3km span so that has been quite a time saver for us but on the whole everything has taken a lot longer than we would of liked, the full two days in fact. Hold ups tend to be caused by the things that you aren't pinning as a problem, waiting for minor cast members left us with questions about how best to order our filming, we found makeup quite a problem as we wanted Dorothy to look continuously sicker the longer the shoes were influencing her and this amount of dark makeup made it hard to do things out of sequence if her face was to be seen. For next time it will be a big priority to find cast members that are flexible with their time. Now for the race to edit before 4pm tomorrow.

Filming Tomorrow

Today has been a day for working out all the little things, we have had Anneke researching makeup, I have been raiding our infinite dress up box to put together some costumes while Charlotte is going to be liaising with her friend who is to be our lead actor and will be organising the bathtub for the climax. We have all been going over our script and making decisions on how we want things to look, we have a voice over written that will be spoken by Almira Gulch (the same person Dorothy will get the shoes off at the beginning of the film. I think this will prove to be quite cryptic and give the viewer the feeling of inevitability about the possession of the shoes.

Tomorrow we all meet bright and early to see how we are going to pull this thing off.

Organising

Today is the day that we are trying to get things organised, which for me as Producer means a busy day. Anneke and I came up with a fantastic idea on how to get a filming location after we decided that the ones we have easily available to us don't really fit our chosen aesthetic. So book-a-batch is now one of my best friends, we sent a very well worded emails to people with holiday rental houses that were local and we liked the look of asking if they would please consider allowing us to use their house for filming free of charge. Surprisingly to us we got several positive replies and we have ended up with a small, creepy house in Long Bay that we will be using as Dorothy's house and the setting for the majority of the plot.

We also worked today on the story board and script, our script so far is less to do with dialogue as I think of conventional scripts having and a lot more to do with the who, what and where of each new scene and discussing how might be the best way to shoot it. This is because as a horror with only one character present for most of the screen time we found it more constructive to focus on how we were going to create the right mood and excite tension in the audience when they are watching the film.

We now after the weekend and a day of discussion have a basic plot worked out for our short film, the main things we have to focus on now is finding actors to play all our roles, a bathtub and a location for Dorothy’s house.

Our basic story line will include Dorothy and Toto finding the shoes somehow, perhaps in an attic or at a garage sale ect. We want Dorothy to have a very pure, (undeserving of curse) appearance, we want her to appear genuinely kind and likable so that when things go bad for her the viewer will have formed an attachment and feel sad or otherwise emotional about Dorothy's plight. The main action in the story will be Dorothy's transition from normal to possessed which will be shown by an afterwards unaware Dorothy surveying the damage. We have a couple of ideas about slightly about disturbing things that could happen but I'm not yet ready to publish our intentions. The end is also very important in the horror genre, we need to make sure that evil succeeds and we see the it set to move on to the next person and repeat the cycle. ie. the shoes will find a new, undisclosed owner (by not knowing who this increases the 'could be me' sense).

Reverse Cinema

Today we were given our final brief for Reverse Cinema, we have been instructed to film and edit a short film based on the Wizard of Oz and to make it in the genre of horror. My group for this task is Anneke Crouse and Charlotte Couttie. (insert links to their blogs.)

We have assigned each of ourselves a job title, my assigned role is that of Producer although there will be a lot of work and its more important to provide help where it is needed, the role will foremost give us an indication of what our personal responsibilities will be and anything extra will be taken care of by whoever it proves most convenient for. Seeing that we have such a tight time limit there will be a lot of work to fit in to a short amount of time and we will need to be very flexible to make sure it all gets done. Our initial ideas for the plot are to create a curse of the ruby slippers, similar in concept to the mix up of scenes from the original movie that we did prior to this.