Goldfish Enthusiast

The final week!

In this week's tutorial, the team reviewed the footage we had collected from last week's filming endeavours. While we were impressed by our own acting and filmography, Zali decided that a few of us head back to FBT to capture some better audio and a few little shots of footsteps.

So, on Wednesday, Zali and I headed back home... I mean to Fort Bunkertrench to get the extra shots and audio clips of sound effects that would be useful for post-production, as well as capturing some photos of some of the graffiti for Tate to use as reference for the poster design, which turned out amazing (obviously, considering how talented of an artist she is)!

The next steps for the coming week will be the editing and sound design, mostly taken care of by Zali and Ned, though, as we have with Tate's poster design, group input will definitely being used. I am looking forward to seeing all of our efforts come together into a finished product, knowing how much hard work and early mornings we have all put into this project.

While my role for the task is mainly complete, I will be offering any help I can give, particularly with editing, having completed the first film in this course with Zali, we make a good team. Though my list of assignments due this week is long, I will definitely make time for this one in particular. Having put so much into it and being attached to its evolution, I am definitely emotionally invested in its success.

Overall, this assignment has been an adventure. Creative collaborations has definitely lived up to its name, having brought our group together as strangers and leaving it as friends. I couldn't have asked for a group of nicer people to complete this film with. They have all shared my enthusiasm to make the best film we could and have put so much effort into making not only the film, but also the process such an amazing experience. We have all worked together so well, collaborating on everything, respecting each other, taking feedback, and communicating. I know we will all definitely remain friends going forward, and I am glad I can call them friends rather than group partners.

I really hope that our film is one of those selected for the Goldfish Film Festival as it would be amazing to see how much our work has paid off, however, even if it isn't, I'm coming out happy with the experience and friends I've made.

And that's a wrap fishies! Week 5 was a busy week for our group, ending in us finishing our filming! During our tutorial, we were highly productive. We started by making a to-do list of the remaining things we had to complete for our film and started to tick them off. Firstly we looked at the sound, looking at sound effects and audio, then we went through the shots we had from our first filming session. After that, we started brainstorming for a title, which at first went horribly. But! Then we stumbled across an absolute masterclass of a name "disarmed". Something we found comedic but in a subtle way that doesn't disrupt the seriousness of the film. After Ned's diagram-drawing fun, we found a time (finally) to shoot the last scenes of our film, which was Saturday evening.

We met at 'on set' at Fort Bunkertrench at 5:15 on Saturday and were filming (and singing and running away from insects) for 3 hours before finally wrapping up. We were able to shoot all the outdoor scenes that we previously couldn't in the sunlight, however, we did have to make slight altercations to the plot as we weren't able to shoot before the sun went down. Shooting in the dark meant we had to be prepared with lighting which, thanks to Zali and I's previous Bunnings trip, we had sorted. The torches used by the cast were also really helpful in creating the perfect lighting for the scenes. The weather was perfect in terms of pathetic fallacy as well, with lighting in the background that created a great atmosphere, though luckily the rain held off until we were done with shooting.

Moving forward, my role will be to make sure everything is running to schedule and giving input into the editing and sound that will mainly be completed by Zali and Ned.

I'm really looking forward to moving into the final production steps of our film and excited to see the end result of all of our hard work. The team have worked so well together, having all gotten along super well, listening to each other's ideas, tips, etc. Also, the workload has been evenly distributed in our roles, as well as everyone helping each other out where possible.

See you next week!

Welcome back goldfishes, this has been a very busy week for our film!

Firstly, the week began with Tate, Zali, and I zoom calling to work out our rough script which Zali and I finished that night so that Tate could start working on the storyboard. That day, Zali and I also went prop-shopping to buy ingredients for fake blood, went to Bunnings for lighting, and to pick up our arm.

The next day, (Tuesday) we had our tutorial and opened the fake arm and saw Tate's storyboard. We then headed to Fort Bunkertrench to see our lighting in action and did a run through of some scenes and a script rehearsal.

Wednesday, Zali and I headed over to Tate's place between classes to test out our fake blood recipe which was more fun than successful however for the most part worked well, but Zali took the ingredients home and made a new batch that was more red and looked more realistic.

On Thursday we began filming! *insert noises of excitement* We all arrived at 7am in the freezing cold but with enough enthusiasm to bring the roof down... metaphorically speaking. We managed to get almost all the shots we needed from inside the bunker, minus the ones that would have had sunlight in them.

This week, we will be organising a time where we can get the last of the shots we need, considering we need to shoot at dusk/night for the rest of the scenes, as well as organising the shots we have and beginning to edit them, which will mainly be the job of our Editor/Cinematographer Zali.

Overall we had a super productive week and are on track for completing our film, we just need to find a time to shoot the final scenes and bring it all together. I'm really proud of how well the group has come together to put a lot of hard work and effort into our dream so far and look forward to continuing this for the next few weeks to create our goldfish-worthy film!

Till next week, keep swimming!

Welcome back fishies, this week during class (on my birthday), we received our approved risk assessment and began working on our dream film. First we used our class time to start to nail down the plot of the story and the characters, deciding on having two main characters with the three other friends as supporting characters. The two main characters consist of Ollie who will be played by yours truly, and Albert, (who's name we may change depending on who we end up casting for the role). Ollie is the character who turns out to be psychotic and 'Albert', his victim. For the role, I will have to bring out my professional acting skills to recreate the masculine character I will be playing, tapping into the practice I've had for the first 18 years of my life. To progress on our film, we started working on our costume design and moving forward with the development of our aesthetic. We decided to go op shopping for costumes and found a classic button down white shirt that my character will wear with a pair of jeans I bought from Kmart and some beat up Vans to create the teenage casual vibe but also bring attention to my costuming to juxtapose the bright graffiti of the setting as a main character and the white shirt with light jeans will create a nice contrast against the bright red blood that I will eventually be covered in. As no one is willing to donate real blood for the film, nor an arm, we also worked on props this week, finding realistic fake arms and looking for realistic looking fake blood recipes. As well as this, we discovered the perfect murder weapon that Mason found in his house, which is a little suspicious but it works with the film so I guess we'll ignore that for now. I will attach photos/links of all props below.

Overall, my team worked really well this week and are planning on zooming tomorrow to knock out the script, plan filming times and hopefully work on solutions for lighting considering the setting is so dark and we will need a fair bit of artificial lighting to film, however we need to ensure that it fits with the aesthetic. I feel like we are on track with our progress but need to make sure this week is really productive to stay that way. I'm looking forward to beginning our filming this week and having fun with our vision.

Till next week, just keep swimming goldfishes!

Welcome back! This week we made a lot of headway in our film journey. We started off in class beginning to settle down and decide on our storyline, getting more serious about our ideas. We were all on the same page with ditching most of the comedic tones we had been thinking of, and really putting our all into the aesthetic and story of the film as we are all determined to do really well in this task

Originally we had planned to shoot our film at the abandoned Wangi Power Station and spent a lot of our time this week working on ways that we could make that possible, such as contacting the council, chatting with our tutor, attempting to contact the owners of the building/land and talking to the head of the course about it, however after no response from the owners, we moved on to finding a new setting for our film so as to avoid wasting any time. So to do this, we found a time on Thursday that we were all free, met up at Uni and went on a group road trip to scout out some locations. We looked around Stockton and at the old BHP site, however we couldn't find anywhere that wasn't private property and fenced off. Lastly we drove to King Edward Park and looked around for the old Tunnels and Bunkers that still existed... and we struck GOLD! We found the perfect location for our film that still matched the aesthetic we hoped to achieve at Wangi. We took videos and photos of our new location and began considering lighting, shots, and characters for our story.

Lastly, we zoomed to discuss the risks that we may face with shooting in our newly determined location in order to complete our risk assessment together which we submitted. We considered driving to our location, being close to the road, filming close to the cliff, lighting, uneven ground, broken glass, and nearby neighbours. After identifying these obstacles, we put steps in place to minimise and avoid these risks at all times to make sure all of us are safe and every hazard is lessened as much as possible.

Overall, this week has been really productive and I'm looking forward to nailing down a story plot and gathering all the equipment we will need for shooting in the next week to turn our amazing ideas into a reality!

See you next week Goldfishes!

Hi! My name is Cameron Probert (19, they/them) and I am the Director/Scriptwriter for my group (consisting of myself, Zali, Ned, Mason, and Tate) in our Creative Collaborations 1-3 minute short film.

The group has been well divided into roles that best fit our abilities to maximise the overall efficiency and quality of our film, with everyone bringing their strengths to the production. For this, the allocated roles are:

Producer - Mason

Scriptwriter/Director - Cameron (myself)

Cinematographer/Editor - Zali

Art Director - Tate

Sound Director - Ned

Despite having particular roles, it is already evident that there will be a lot of overlap and participation by the whole group so that we are not only on the same page but also so everyone is involved in the creative process. This will obviously require compromise, listening, and collaboration which can be a challenge in group work, however, as seen so far, we have worked really well together and are respectful of other’s ideas and views.

While this is the first official week of working on our film, in preparation, we decided to zoom call in the week before so that we could get out some ideas and therefore have some traction going into our first week. This worked well as we were able to get right into it in class and had a good foundation of ideas to start developing our story from.

In our zoom we started by throwing around some different genres we could use. We talked about a lot of different genres but ended up deciding that we liked the idea of using suspense and mystery with the potential to add in a bit of comedy. From there we talked about different ideas and vibes we wanted to incorporate and started a collaborative document to narrow down our thoughts and make sure we are all on the same page. We also started a collaborative Pinterest mood board to gather ideas for scenes, shots, lighting, etc.

From there, in class we were able to expand on our ideas and begin developing some semblance of a story, gathering multiple different options. While our ideas are pretty broad, next week we will begin narrowing it down and culminating all our thoughts into a single script, hopefully having that finished by the end of the week, which will be a part of my job as the group’s scriptwriter and director. 

Thanks for listening Goldfishes, check back for next weeks update (if you can remember)!