#pre-prod

On a commencé notre projet de fin de 3ème année, un très court métrage (1 min) en 3D sur le thème de la ferme agricole ! 

Voici des visuels que j’ai fait très rapidement pour trouver les scènes clefs du film.

For my scene I am going to have two ships racing each other and the blue ship bumps the red ship causing it to crash into the ground and explode.

ROUGH RENDERING:

Here is the ship I will be using

CAMERA PLANNING:

The example of the camera work I will have in my scene as a playblast. Also roughs for the background, the red ship and the blue ship which will be added in the final piece this is just to give an idea of what I want to have. 

PROPS AND BACKGROUNDS:

* The two main characters are the red and blue ship

* The Scene will be a city scape

* The effects I will use is an explosion for when the red ship crashes to the ground

COLOUR PALETTE:

Here is the colour palette I plan on using for my scene. I used these colours to make the scene seem eerie as well as making the ships look futuristic in an almost out of date background. I will be giving the ships lots of colour and keeping the background simple and in grayscale. 

The top left: These are the colours I plan on using for the red ship. I want it to be a shiny metal to reflect the red that is the most pastel and the main colour to be the darkest red. I will be using a lot of dark colours in my scene so I will be using the main two colours on the right as the ship and the lightest tone for the reflections. 

The top right: These are the colours I will be using for the blue ship. I will again be using the same method as the previous ship having the lightest colour be the reflection and the other two tones being the main colouring. 

The bottom left: These are the colours I am going to use for the city. I am going to have the city be dark and pretty much in black and white to make the saturation pop from the ships. I am going to be making it dark and make the ships seem like they have a glow to them to add to the futuristic theme and to give the background more depth.

The bottom right: These are the hues I will be including in my scene. I will be adding them not only to the background but adding them a bit into the ships. I will also be including these tones in the explosion effect. 

UV’S

The Uv’s layout for the ship base

Uv’s for the top part of the ship

I Kept these separate so that they would be easier to texture. Even though I will texturing the ships in around one colour each I wanted to UV the ship separately so it would be easier to work with as well make it easier to add logos or vents on the ship. 

LIGHTING STYLE EXAMPLES:

I found this very helpful to look through lighting examples because it gave me the idea to have the scene not as dark and to add a hue in to add more depth and interest into the scene. 

TEXTURE EXAMPLES:

I want to keep the ships relatively clean but I will be adding some rust and some scratches in the metal. The red ship will be more rusted and the blue ship will be more scratched and have some paint scratched off. 

FINAL RENDERS:

FINAL VIDEO:

REFLECTION ON MY PIECE:

Today I’m going to talk about how the pre-production actually went on the Saturday of the Sci-Fi 48 Hour Challenge 2012, and how the brief affected the narrative and the creation of the film.

Due to us being, what I thought was on time, but apparently was a lot later than many of the other teams that turned up to the Apollo Cinema in Piccadilly, I ended up relatively near the back of the queue, but it turned out that it didn’t derail us.  The brief we received was:

TITLE – Galton’s Case

PROP – We see a character write “Revision 0.9” on a white CD/DVD disk.

DIALOGUE – “Are you sure you want to permanently download the contents of your life?”

While the title was a little odd, we were pleased that the prop and dialogue felt as though they complemented one another, which was one of the most important things.  It helped us to create a cohesive narrative.

Our optional theme. Um, ok?

SIDEBAR – Our optional theme was “finding sentient life in dark matter”.  I’m going to be honest here, I don’t think I once considered trying to include it within our film.  I know dark matter in Futurama terms, but beyond that, I wasn’t convinced there was a way to incorporate it into our film, and I’m glad that no one else on the team felt differently.  It’s too close to the “science” and not enough into the “fiction” for my liking.  I’m sure some teams have made it work, but we left this one alone!

The way we approached our pre-production was to consolidate all of our assets.  We had one actor, and our DoP had a couple of great locations near him that we ended up using.  We sat round for a couple of hours hammering out ideas, and came up with a plan to work from, and went straight out and shot some of our footage at our first location.  But, with the weather threatening to scupper our production, and the fact that we were too relaxed about the way we shot the first scene, we went back into pre-prod the Saturday night.

I always go on, on this blog, about how important pre-prod is, and this was a situation where our second lot of pre-prod pulled everything together.  While our first lot was important, allowing us to form a bond as a team and get roughly on the same page, we didn’t put together a strong enough narrative, and the second pre-prod session became vital.  Myself, our DoP Matt and our editor (and later, thread wrangler) Martyn sat up until silly hours in the morning going over the beats of the script, the emotional centre and the motivation behind our lead (who was now Galton), and we put something together that became our final narrative.

Early morning pre-production. As performed like a news programme. Trust me, it was awesome!

KING CONQUER | Tyranny

Ok, it's been a while since I posted about The Wardrobe, and I intend to address that (I also intend to address the infrequency of posting, but there's a website being built, and CVs being rewritten, so give me a chance!), but I've been meaning to post this for a while.  Now that we are well into post prod, I'm finding it too difficult to try and review the pre-production process from the mindset of being in production.  So, I've decided to address it from the stage we're currently at instead.  As such, welcome to part two of pre prod reviewing!

I suppose the best thing to address first off is that, once you sit down in the editing suite, you get to see all of your mistakes.  Let me start off by clarifying, these mistakes are my own, no one else's.  Being the director means that you have to have the overall vision of what the end product should look like, and it is your responsibility to bring that in.  You know how it looks in your head, and no one else can see that.  One of the primary responsibilities, in my opinion, of the director during pre-production is to ensure that everybody is on the same page.  It's not just a case of being prepared for efficiency purposes (though that is a very large and weighty factor of pre-production), but it's also the director's job to ensure everyone has the best understanding of how he or she sees it.  Therefore, concept art, storyboarding, production meetings, proper communication, etc. are all vital factors during pre-production if you have any sort of vision for the finished product.

Editing - this is the stage where it all comes out. Stop taking photos, you fool, you're only highlighting the areas you went wrong!

Once you hit post-production, you sit down and watch the rushes and realise where you fell down in pre, and the repercussions of any on-set changes you made.  Every time you decided to cut a shot, merge a shot, interpret your shotlist, shunt something to another day for time reasons, convenience, or simple shooting stress, when you sit down to watch the rushes you see what effect this had on your plan.  This is why having a pre-production plan that's tighter than a drum is essential - higher efficiency on set means less concessions need to be made, and having a watertight plan means that you've prioritised all of the important narrative shots over the cool ones.

That being said, I'm pleased to report that, with The Wardrobe, it appears that we don't have any narrative holes, and, furthermore, a decent chunk of the extra bits and pieces were pulled off.  However, there's always room for improvement - certain shots needed more takes than I gave it, certain plot point shots could have been further developed and, as usual, some shots that just weren't tested before hand didn't work in the way that they did in my head.

A narrative hole is a lot like this one, but more metaphorical.

So, what this means is, as with every project, my pre-production time STILL needs work.  It's going to be a long road before I get to the stage where I'm pleased with my pre-production time (if I ever am - possibly one of those situations where it's impossible to be totally content with your pre-production process), but I think this has been a step up from the process during Gone Walkies and Steve.  The thing I am finding though is that I feel I'm just starting to reach the stage where I'm not making basic mistakes, and that we have both enough coverage for the final product, but also to make the important emotional points in the narrative.

Hmm, that last paragraph went a bit away from finding the lesson of all of this.  I think the things to take away are that the shot listing process is VITALLY important, but also that, once the shots are suggested, camera rehearsals and test shooting is also incredibly important, particularly within the location and under the conditions that are going to be in place during the shooting process.

There's definitely a distinct order in which the development of the shot list should go.  Due to casting issues, our rehearsal was slated for the Thursday before production, but, in future, I'd want to be rehearsing with the cast well before the production.  And this comes down to the freedom you give to your actors.  With all of our shots and lighting set ups close to locked, we're going to have to be ready to change shots quickly, or ask our actors to cut down their performances to fit our setups, neither of which are ideal.  This leads me to a map I made of the process, as I'm beginning to understand it, or, at least, a better way forward than I adopted before:

N.B. Certain steps have been skipped for this post, but it's only because I'm trying to look specifically at the shot-plan/set up area of pre-prod for this post.

Planning! Cannot stress that enough!  Also, tic tacs!

Script -> Rehearsals - After the script is locked, start rehearsing with the actors, preferably somewhere set up as close to the actual location as possible. This allows character-based changes from your actors, and a sense of the movement of the scene.

Rehearsals -> Floor Plan - From there, you can start putting together a floor plan for the location, with an idea of where your cast are moving. This allows you to map out the floor plans and start working out what camera angles are possible, and where lights are needed.

Floor Plan -> Shot List - With your cast's movements mapped, you can work out a shot list of what you want to show the audience.  This also allows you to work out where you need to change the blocking, if necessary.

Shot List -> DoP's Shot List - However, it's your DoP who will do the fine tuning of this, working out where the camera and lights need to go to allow you to get the shots you need.  He/she may also need to adapt your shots to something that's actually physically possible, and amalgamate shots to cut down the set up changes.

DoP's Shot List -> Lighting Plans - With the positioning sorted out, lighting plans can be drawn up to help let the team know where the lights need to go.  The ideal is that lighting tests can be done before you're even shooting, but it's not always the case, especially at my current level.

You probably actually want something drawn in the storyboards, but only if you want the rest of your team to be able to work from them.

DoP's Shot List -> Storyboard - At the same time, the storyboards can finally be worked up to show everybody how the film should come together in the edit.  You can then sit down with your editor to work out if this order will work, or if there are shots missing that will be required for the narrative.

What I actually did for The Wardrobe was more in the region of script -> shot list/floor plans -> DoP's shot list -> rehearsal.  It was better than nothing, but it definitely was not ideal, which helped bring me to the above list.  The more planning, the more preparation, the smoother the shoot will go.  Though we got everything filmed, it could have been a LOT smoother, and I think that's down to my pre-production, particularly this business.  We had no storyboards and I was unable to properly coordinate with my DoP about the shot list.