Week 2 - 12 Shots, 1 video
So for this part of the week, I was given an hour to make a 12 shot video on a mundane task such as cooking or making tea and use filming techniques to make it more interesting. As a tea drinker, I went with the latter and took close-up shots of some props, tilts, pans and other techniques for a few of them.
Although, this video is kinda messy. I've had a very shaky hand whenever my phone wasn't placed on a old slab of wood and the focus had a mind of its own throughout. Additionally, I made a mistake of recording the sugar shot in portrait, hence the blocky shot. I didn't try again since I didn't want to cover my phone is sugar and I had no clean piece of glass to compensate for it.
Either way, here is the video for all to see.
Week 3 - Shooting plan
For this week, we've been learning about the concept of a Shooting plan. The whole point of a shooting plan is to create an overhead view of the scene and have characters, props and cameras directed and pointed at from the overhead. It's an easy way of telling where the cameras will be facing, where the characters move around, but it can also get messy for more complicated scenes.
Below, I've made 2 Shooting plans based on one of the scripts given to me. The one I went with is a modernized Jack and the Beanstalk where Jack sold his car for beans and the mother doesn't like that. I've written down a paragrapgh per camera and went about explaining how the scenes play out.
Week 4 - More shooting plans
Apologies for getting sidetracked on this specific week, but when in lessons, I wrongly got the dates wrong and thought that this week was going to be an on-campus lesson. Because of this, a lot of the work on this is messy from reused pieces of paper. I do apologise if the work does look messy.
Anyways, this week I was given a task to continue the topdown sketches and planning by setting up a scenario with a description and allowing another person to sketch it out. We then share the drawings with eachother and compare.
With my first scenario, I've given the description to one of the students in the current session...
Characters: Leader and Right Hand Man
Assets/Props: Folder and Knife
Location: Makeshift Office.
Cameras: Diagonal Desk Shot, Closeup on R.H.M, Over-shoulder Shot on Leader.
Lighting: Desk lamp and single window.
The left image shows the overhead view of the location, the props and where the cameras, lighting and the characters are placed and move around. As the criteria states, I'm only allowed to do 3 cameras and have to draw out what happens in these cameras.
Camera A pans to the desk and to the Right Hand Man who's walking into the room. The camera focuses on the leader as he inspects the folder given to the RHM.
Camera B is a close-up on the leader as he gives off a worried expression as the camera pans to the door with a yell for assistance.
Camera C is placed on a still shot behind the leader's shoulder as he lifts the knife from the table and the RHM walks away from the office.
After completing that task I was given by a partner another scenario. I was then tasked to do the same thing but with their own descriptions. Below is what I recieved...
Characters: John and Tom.
Assets/Props: Trees and Wooden hut.
Environment: Forest.
Cameras: Mid-Closeup, Mid-Shot, Long shot of the hut.
Lighting: Moonlight.
The overhead has had it's backgrounds lightly drawn, but these are supposed to be trees surrounding the characters. As before, there are only 3 cameras and I've used all 3 of them as intended.
I have explained the camera placements next to the 3 shots but I'll write them down here if the handwriting is hard to read.
Camera A is placed below the characters and views them from above as they walk forward.
Camera B a long shot and a slow zoom onto the wooden hut. Because in my really confused state, I drew a cabin instead of a hut. Either way, I even roughly shaded the parts that are dark and which are lit.
Camera C shows 2 parts of the shot with a character pointing and the other one walking forward towards the cabin.
Week 5 - More 12 shots
I return to more of the 12 shots again but this time, I've been tasked with doing 12 close-ups on a single high resolution image. I was given a random selection of images to use and got to work on the first task, the second had me find a new image online and do the same to that, and the final one was to turn the second task into a video with the 12 shots, acompanied with sounds and ambiance.
Task 1: Biden shots
Of all the historical photographs I was given, I went with a Joe Biden photograph from the 20th century before the Ketamine addicted Abe Simpson became president. So my whole deal was to make 12 shots by chopping up the picture into it's own bits. Further on, I'll be drawing squares and arrows indicating camera movement and such.
Below is the shot-for-shot take of the image. By accident, I did 13 shots but since I've spent too long labeling the images, I didn't want to cut it.
Task 2: Industrial Market
With that done and dusted, I did my own research and found an image by myself and found something that would fit the bill. It is a matte painting of an Asian market by Bryan Bong and like the Biden photo, I got to work.
Below, I did the same thing for task 1. Nothing else to say, other than read it.
Task 3: Industrial Market (Video edition)
For the third and final task, I would take the 2nd task work and turn it into a full video on how the camera moves, and acompany it with sounds of ambiance, music and/or dialogue.
Most of the sounds are taken from free sound websites like Freesound.org and ambiance and dialogue has been taken from Half Life 2's Beta and official release.
Week 6 - Kuleshov effect
The Kuleshov effect is all about 2 shots that play side by side, showing an event and the character's reaction. The meaning of a scene changes if the character looks at a different event entirely. One example would be the following 3 tasks that I've went through.
Task 3: My own take
In a very embarrassing task, I had to do 3 versions of the Kuleshov effect by recording myself reacting to 3 different events. First being a plate of a veriety of cake, second being a collection of games, and I don't even know what the third one was.
2 Notes: In 2 shots, I completely forgot to hold the camera in landscape in 2 shots so pardon if they look zoomed in.
And once again, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to stop the camera from auto focusing. There were no settings for that so expect more of that unless I find an alternative.
Other than that, enjoy whatever I've made.
Task 1: First examples
I'll start off with the following examples on the sides in picture form. I haven't used the same pictures to give off different meaning, but I do have that idea focused more on the next task.
How I've gone about this is that I've taken unrelated pictures from a copyright-free website which the teacher suggested. Needless to say, the search was very unreliable and took up more time than needed. With that being said, I took 2 images for each row and meshed them together into one scene where you can tell how and what are they reacting.
Task 2: Same faces, different meaning
This time, I've decided to take a few of the reactions from Task 1 and replace the scenarios for Task 2 and compare them. This is a much better example of the Kuleshov effect where the middle image shown can change the context of the person's thoughts and reactions if the image itself is changed..
Assignment 1 - Photographic Storyboard
The following assignment is a photographic storyboard based on the selection of breifs that I've been given. I decided to go with the 2nd brief titled "Perspective" which basically revolves around the perspective of 2 characters contrasting between eachother. I was to do 20 to 30 photographs as well as include an extreme close-up shot, a blurred shot to simulate fast movement of an object or person, and a depth of field shot where it has a blurred background and only focus on the important prop or person. I managed to perform these tricks for a few shots, although not all of them.
The premise of this Storyboard is that the man in the denim jacket and gloves (Nicknamed Gordon) is having sausage and toast with tea. He reads the newspaper only to realise that something written on the papers caused him to gag and throw out the bitten sausage. Then, another character wearing a hat and green jacket (Nicknamed Oliver) has entered the room wondering why Gordon is acting up. He passes the newspaper to Oliver and as he reads it, he notices that the sausages that he bought could've been related to the news about rat droppings in a Butcher's shop.
Oliver laughs at that scenario and Gordon isn't very pleased with this kind of reaction. He continues to laugh so hard, that he's banging the table, knocking over the vase with flowers, spilling the water on the newspaper, the tea and Oliver's phone. Gordon gets really mad and he hands Oliver a mop to clean up the mess that he made.
It wasn't always going to be laughing at food posioning since the whole plot revolved around what was printed in my hometown's newspaper. There would've been any other scenario that would change the beginning shots, context and other points.
Characters: Gordon, Oliver
Props: Food, Newspaper, Flower vase, Mop
Location: Kitchen
Cameras: Camera in middle of the table panning to 3 sides with closeups varying on props or context
Oliver's seat has a camera to show closeups of Gordon's face.
Gordon's seat for viewing the bitten sausage.
A camera to the door entrance to show Oliver walking in.
Lighting: Room lights
Premise
Scenario Bulletpoint
Topdown Sketch
For reference, I've made a very rough sketch of the kitchen and the character, props and camera placements so I'd know what goes where.
Setting up my camera
As for how I plan to set up my camera, I don't have a current stand for the cameras that we're supposed to use, let alone the cameras themselves. So with a combination of tape, PS2 games, a chair, blu tac and my own phone, I made a homemade stand for my phone.
No surprise, but the positioning was a bit inconsistent when comparing similar camera shots. The blu tac was a bit dodgy.
With everything set up and the kitchen free from interruption, I got to taking my pictures and editing them into storyboard frames. It was an easier way of labeling them and giving exact info on what's happening on each frame.
As you can tell, I play as 2 characters with only the clothes being different. This was my attempt at trying this brief solo.
Feedback
Since I couldn't share my work with anyone in-person, I had to be a critic of my own work. And I'm not gonna go easy on myself.
What went well?
To start off with positives, I would say that there are some okay attempts at the main 3 criteria with a few shots; examples being the closeup of Shot 5, The blurry fist in Shot 19 and a couple blurry depth of field shots like Shots 12 and 21.
Another positive would be that even if the faces don't show, you could tell what the characters are thinking and their opinions on this rat dropping newspaper having a clash with one another.
What didn't?
On the other hand, I would say that the Left and Right table shots are very off with different colours and positioning if observed closely for the latter..
There is also a continuity error with the right side of the table. In the storyboard, Gordon was meant to put away the plate, but the plate still appears next to Oliver when he's seen laughing. Nothing too damning, but very head scratching.
My final point is that in most of these cases, I don't do my best with emotions and come off like the children from Signs. In my defense, I was tired from a lot of things.
How to improve?
For one of my first improvements would probably be to get better equipment. Even with 3 cameras, my phone doesn't have that much benefits compared to a lens camera. And if that's not an option then I would have to find a better stand that doesn't consist of blu tac and CD cases.
In addition, I would probably have to organise my props properly and place them in suitable parts of the set. One of which is to double check if any of the props are supposed to stay or be left out, and perhaps have later props appear much earlier. Maybe the mop could've been behind Gordon the moment he enters the first shot.
The final improvement would be to figure out how to liven myself up a little. Have some excitement kick in and give off more emotion in order to improve the quality of the character's interactions to the news and eachother.
Week 8 - Stop motion
NOT related, but sir asked nicely
This video is an old college animation that I've cobbled together for a healthy eating campaign, along with other stop-motion related videos. Reception was good and compared to other people's work, I could tell why.
Sir asked me to upload this to Wix as a demonstration of what I did before this module. Perhaps this is more of a before scenario to show how much I've grown in learning this module.
And now, the actual animation
I started by getting myself a toy lion from the toy shop to use as a reference for the cutout. I drew the ears, head, body, limbs and the tail by tracing a rough shape around the toy. Additionally, I made myself a bone for the scene where the lion has a stretch. After that, I cut out the card shapes, used the cutouts to draw and cut around the coloured paper, glued some of the pieces together and added details with a sharpie pen. Finally, I connected all of them with blutac.
The short animation that I want to do is a stopmotion cut-out animation similar to the ones by Monty Python, in style and humour. It would start with the sun being pulled out with a rope and a lion waking up. It does some morning stretches until it snaps in half and it's legs run away.
The background is made up of multiple pieces of paper with the wheel and sun sticking to the background with blutac.There is a gap inbetween the back maintains for the sun to fit in so that when the gag of raising the sun on a rope occurs, the sun would pop out of the hills.
The arm was sadly not printed out and had to be added digitally. The intention was to print out a blue hand and give it a paper sleeve out of coloured paper, but the printer didn't work at that time.
With all that coming together, the animation is finished and can be viewed below. During the process, I was using a custom stand for my phone, instead of balancing the whole thing with PS2 games. However, it was made really shoddy and it kept moving when I went with the pictures. So you will notice the constant shaking.
Week 10 - Nõtan stills
In this week, I had the task of creating 6 different Nõtan still drawings from stills of movies and shows. This method is done by drawing the darker parts of a scene dark, while leaving the light parts blank, It's a way of contrasting both light and dark parts of the scene.
I've made my pics for what I wanted to trace and I went along with it. Usually, it would include a background drawn in the same effect, but I wanted to focus more on the characters.
Still 1: Walter White
This still was taken from the Pilot episode of Breaking Bad where Walter White points his gun on the road.
This was my first one and I do think that without the image source, you could tell that's Walter from the moustache and glasses.
Still 2: Gus Fring
Also from Breaking Bad, this still is from the Season 4 finale where Gus walks out of the explosion before collapsing.
I've left out the burned side of the face as light to make it appear that whatever happened on the left side is splitting away from Gus, while the right side stays intact is it's unhurt in the explosion.
Still 3: The Thing ending
This still shows Macready resting outside of the base after he blew it up.
The scene is mostly dark, with only the left sidebeing the brightest. I've used this to colour the whole right side to be nothing but black, but a slight light glows on the left, showing Macready's face
Looking back, he looks a bit like Hagrid with how large I made his coat.
Still 4: "It's a Trap!"
This scene was taken out of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi as Admiral Ackbar says his famous line.
I've followed the shadows normally by colouring only those parts, but I may have went too in-detail with the eyes and the nostrils. Looking back, I could've made this one much simpler.
Still 5: Reservoir Dogs
As the title suggests, this is the intro to Reservoir Dogs as the main characters walk on the pavement as Little Green Bag plays in the background.
With the colours, I wanted to colour each suit differently depending on the character's names, but keep the sunglasses and hair black. In addition, I've also made some outline around the suits. Probably would've looked better without them.
Still 6: Nelson
This is a still of the character Nelson from Mongrels, a mature puppet comedy. This one, I've just coloured the still red and did my hardest not to copy the same mistakes as Still 4.
Not much to say other than I like this one the most.
Week 11 - 300 storyboard
For this week, we were tasked with doing another script to replicate in storyboards and shooting plans. The script that I've went with was the 300 script where a spartan inspects a child as a candle acts as the only light source in the room, before it's snufed out in the end.
Below is the shooting plan I had to do for the scene. As always, I made a mistake of writing some of the information upside down. So to save neck turning, it says "Wind blows out candle at camera C."
After that, I've drawn out the storyboard based of the shooting plan that I've made. I did 4 pictures with the middle 2 showing the pan around the baby.
Assignment 2 - The animation
For the 2nd assignment, I was tasked with making an animation based on 3 scenarios of my choice. I decided to go with the thrird option where I would be picking my own scenario. What I wanted to make was a somewhat continuation of my story by going into the past of a pre-established character.
Since this was a huge project, I felt like doing everything in a presentation so it was much easier to handle compared to Wix. So for this reason, I've made a bunch of links containing the Script, Storyboard and Presentation of the animation.
Note: The final animation is in the Presentation link. You'll need to go to Slide 20 if you want to see the animation.
Storyboard
Script
Presentation