The Skeletal Keys

THE PEOPLE OF FEATHERHEAD

Synopsis: Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The People Of Featherhead’ tells the story of two private detectives and a lawyer, who are sent to a remote village to track down the son of a politician. When they arrive there however, they realise finding the boy will be more difficult than originally thought. As the three men are split up, they encounter three different voices of the village; the local pub landlord, the drunken preacher, and the mayor himself. One by one, the investigators discover that they are meddling with cosmic forces of evil far outside their control, and they are eventually sent on paths that will lead them to doom.

CREW LIST:

WRITER/DIRECTOR: James Woodall

PRODUCER/CINEMATOGRAPHER: Harry Rae Smith

SOUND DESIGNER/EDITOR: Zac Gardiner

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Jonathan Sauer/Jody Spilman Gough/Curtis Branwood Williams

Kickstarter which sadly failed: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/441138926/the-people-of-featherhead/?ref=kicktraq

Facebook: https://b-m.facebook.com/thepeopleoffeatherhead/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FeatherheadFilm

Poster for the MUGSS production of Iolanthe.

As previously mentioned, this will be an overview of the jobs that I have taken part in or done solo for various parties. I will also be talking about the new information I have learnt and the skills that I have developed over the previous three years, how I've developed them and how I intend to further develop them, hopefully, eventually getting me a job within the film industry.

To start I'll talk about the film work and networking events I have taken part in during the last twelve months. The first being a gig I helped to record.

I, James Woodall and Harry Rae Smith were given a job to film a gig for a psychedelic rock band, The Lucid Dream at The Death Institute in Manchester. We covered every angle we could between the three of us, Me and Woodall on stationary cameras at the very back of the room and right-hand side of the stage, with Harry wielding a camera on a shoulder rig to catch the action closer to the stage. We also had a Go-Pro set up to capture the audience and a sound recorder plugged into the sound system. Everything seemed to be going right... until after the shoot, the sound file recorded by the H5 hooked up was heavily distorted and a member of the band offered to clean it up for us, sadly the computer it was stored on stopped working so we lost it. The edit of the gig has yet to be completed.

The next two were networking events that I took part in due to an interest I developed in Virtual Reality thanks to the Future Film labs I attended in the first term of this academic year. The events were called VR Labs. I attended the second and part of the third VR Lab, in these labs, the attendees were split into groups of diverse skill sets and given a brief to create a VR experience. The first lab I attended was based on the novel, and now Spielberg film, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. We had to create a VR experience inspired by the novel so my team, #NotZork, set to create a story about an agent of the evil IOI corporation from the story, who rebels against IOI after finding out her daughter was killed in an attack by them. We told this story by having the audience wander around a room with various objects placed around that when held, had a poem ring out which gave clues as to what happened in a cryptic sense. I composed the music used in the background of both the title screen and game and the created the sound design of the game. I also helped to develop some of the ideas. The second VR lab I only attended part of due to illness but I helped research the theme, which was The Suffragette movement. These labs were a great chance to network with other creative types in a friendly environment, Whilst there I made many contacts with people of all areas of art. I intend to develop my knowledge of VR and how it can be used in film through creating my own short film for VR, a project that I was working on for the Major film unit at MMU on the BA Filmmaking course but sadly fell into production hell due to my own mental health issues and other issues. I will eventually direct and produce this short film and attempt to send it to the festival circuit very soon.

I also filmed the Manchester Universities Gilbert and Sullivan societies' (MUGSS) recent production of Iolanthe. This helped to develop my skills in communication between me and others, which is something I somewhat struggle with quite often due to strong anxiety and mental health issues. I had to work with and record various sections of MUGSS, be it the band alone, rehearsals or the full production and this required me to make sure I knew where to be and who to talk to when I needed information, Thankfully I have a close friend on the committee for MUGSS so it was fairly easy this time around but I feel this and the previous three events I spoke about helped develop my idea of freelance film work actually is.

Hey folks,

From here on I’ll be posting my overview of all the film work I’ve done over the past 12 months, and a general look at what skills I’ve learnt throughout University, for PE3. 

Over the past year or so I have worked on quite a few various projects including a promotional video for the CFCCA, Freelance camera work for the GameFaceShow and freelance video work for Humanity Hallows magazine. I have also written for Intertainment magazine, mainly music reviews but also various reviews of films shown at the Manchester Film Festival (MANIFF).

Throughout these experience I have learnt a lot about working with people with different skill sets, I have been taught how to use new and different camera equipment by semi-professionals whilst filming for GameFaceShow. I've also learnt to work with people from many different backgrounds of filmmaking and media studies or real life experience as every time I worked with GameFaceShow, the only person who stayed the same was the two main people who asked me to work with them. Other than that there were different other camera operators each time I worked with them so it was interesting to hear what they had worked on previously etc.

Whilst working with Humanity Hallows I was asked to make a film for the Reclaim The Night march in February. I was put into a team of three and assigned to filming the march and getting interviews which were an interesting change from my usual experimental art style of filming. It was a great learning experience as I was thrown into this world of journalism that I had never really been in before and it ended up great. We got two videos out of it, all in all, one short promotional type video and a two-minute overview of the entire event.

Working with the CFCCA was great, I worked with two other fellow students from the course on, in total, three short videos all for promoting the exhibitions that had just started at the time and the artists who worked on them. It was, once again, another new area of filmmaking that I hadn't really worked within before and it really helped build my confidence within interviewing. This was actually before the women's march so I feel it helped a lot with that even though they were quite different scenarios. We had a set date to film and interview but one of the artists didn't have time to be interviewed that day so they delayed their film for a few weeks but we persevered and had it finished for the CFCCA in time.

The work I did with Intertainment may not be as relevant as the rest on here but I still feel that It contributed to my professionalism as it's a magazine I've worked with since it's beginnings and I've written many film, music and art exhibition reviews for it. I plan to work with them for the foreseeable future also.

I have also worked with Hannah Vigus and Melissa Sorel to create three promotional videos for two artists who had exhibitions at the CFCCA. The first we completed was an interview with Helen Chapman, the second one was an overview of the opening night and the two exhibitions and the third was an interview with Suki Chan. 

It was a great opportunity to work with the CFCCA and I really hope to work with them again sometime in the future as they were really accommodating and helpful whilst we were shooting.

I can’t find the videos but here are some photos from the filming of the event:

Over the past year, I’ve written quite a few articles for Intertainment magazine. I’ve written about music, art exhibitions, film festivals and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things. This has helped me a lot in becoming more confident in my writing. 

Here is a collection of the articles I have written: https://intertainmentmagazine.com/author/zacgardiner/

I’ve also done work with Humanity Hallows throughout the past year. I’ve done quite a few photography jobs for them but the main job I’ve done is helping to film and create two short videos for the Reclaim The Night women's march in February. It was a fantastic experience and helped bring awareness to a greatly important cause. 

Here are the videos I worked on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzl9RmkPl-U

To kick things off here, let's start with something amazing and weird I worked on from around late October to December, GameFaceShow’s Chip Battles!

These are a battle of the bands/rap battle type competition between two chiptune artists, live on a stage and eventually put online for the world to see. The two artists would create songs live using all sorts of random games consoles and other technology.

 For those who don’t know, Chiptune is a genre of music created or inspired by old game consoles such as Gameboys, NES’s and Megadrives. Since these consoles only had small amount of memory, the music had to only take up a limited amount of space (generally 8 bits) so it was very simplistic and chirpy. People are very nostalgic to this type of sound, plus it sounds awesome so thus a genre was born.

Unit X was an experience. Most of it went quite well and we achieved what we set out to do as a group but I believe two members of the group disagree with this. Our idea was to show how time and light relate but in a very contemporary way using time lapses of sunsets; busy streets against photos of places that should be busy but are quiet; cityscapes and even how age effects people and the differences between a young adult and her grandmother.  We achieved this in our film with most of the work going into it being relevant and that what wasn't being used to create interesting and weird effects, this annoyed two members of the group because they felt like their work wasn't included as prominently as the others which it wasn't but it was still used, I tried my best as the editor to use everyone's work as much as I could.

The exhibition went quite well in my opinion, my groups work was displayed on the show reel so it was shown many times throughout the evening alongside other really well made films, my parents came from Blackburn to see the exhibition along with some friends from around the Manchester area and they all enjoyed it. Comments from them varied from "interesting" to "I don't understand it, but it was cool to watch"

(below are some photos from the exhibition, please excuse how blury one or two are)

I think in the future I'd like to experiment with old TV monitors and headphones rather than work being displayed on a projector because I feel like it could be more immersive and interactive that way, also some audio effect were lost due to the audio being played through the speaker on the projector, at times the audio was supposed to pan from right to left ear in time with the film changing rapidly but this effect didn't play through the projector which disappointed me a little.

I believe this unit has helped to develop my editing skills and my sound editing skills due to the accumulative 15+ hours I spent working on the visual side of editing alone. I also learnt how to use various tools and effects in Final cut which may come in handy in the future. My communication with the group could have probably been improved by me contacting them more often but I always let them know where I where and what I was doing when I was working on the film. There has been a few arguments as mentioned earlier within the group as some members felt that their work wasn't used as much as others, this is because they gave me work I couldn't use as much as the others because it was irrelevant and when we tried to give feedback, it was either too late to give feedback because they gave me the work with about a day to go before the deadline or they ignored it and produced more of the same. The films I were given were all interesting and decent films by themselves, it's a shame I couldn't use them more but they were just so out of place.

In conclusion, I believe Unit X was a success, although stressful and argument inducing I think we mostly worked well as a team. A fair few disrespectful things were said about myself by some members of the group but I won't dwell on that because creative differences are bound to come up in collaborative work. The film looked quite cool in my opinion and It stood out amongst the others which I would say is  a success.

Thanks for reading,

                              Unit X - Lines of enquiry/Investigations

 When we got to work on our parts for the film, most of the group got straight into getting footage together. I created a few gltichy style timelapses using footage that I captured especially for this project and footage that I had from when I first moved into my current flat. I also took some footage I filmed whilst on holiday last year and worked on that for textures and backgrounds for the film.

The footage Ben gave me was his take on a “glitch-like” timelaspe, he took timelapses he filmed of busy streets in the city center and added a mirrored image effect to the footage and then flipped it so it created a somewhat kaleidascope type effect.  He also came up with the idea of taking the film around the city at night and projecting it in various locations, he hired out a generator for the evening, sharing the price equally between us all. He and a few others from the group then took a laptop, the projector and the generator to various locations around the city and filmed the projections for the final piece.

Ruth worked on a project which showed places where time was usually incredibly important, areas that are usually infested with people rushing around. I chose to have these images every 8 seconds appart after the first of her pictures because it takes roughly 8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Earth relating it back to time and light. Ruth also contributed a few short clips of various locations around Manchester edited in quick succession which I also used in the film. She also helped out with the projecting of the film and photographing the projecting of the film.

Tyler contributed to the film through a few short timelapses taken from the Cloud 9 bar on the 23rd floor of The Beetham Tower. The first timelapse starts in the early evening eventually leading into twilight, this I used as the intro. The second timelapse goes from late evening/twilight to dusk which I used as the outro. He also helped with the projecting of the film at different locations across the city.

Sam contributed to the film mainly in the projecting of the film across the city but also through filming this and a short video of solar waves from our sun which he took from the NASA website and edited in a jumpy mannor. I used this as a transition from the somewhat calm start of the film into the crazy gltichyness that is the rest of the film.

Maya produced a short kaleidascope stylised film which I used as a calm outro to the film, it contained footage of her and her grandmother to show how time affects humanity, how humans age etc. It was a nice contrast to the rest of the film and worked well as an somewhat intermission between the craziness of the rest of the film and the somewhat calm ending.

Thamanna produced a couple short films of her and friends spending time together with transitions of experimental style lighting and shadow effects. Most of her footage was sadly not usable due to the non suitability of it but I worked as much of it as I could into the film, mainly the lighting and shadow parts.

Amy contributed a somewhat irrelevant short film of her dancing after weeks of not showing up to any group meetings or joining in with any discussions on the group we used to communicate with outside of meetings. She tended to have a problem with the lack of her video in the final piece but she only got the footage to me a day before we needed the film finalised for projection so there wasn’t much I could do. She also sent me some music to use which I couldn’t because It didn’t fit the theme at all and she sent me the song way too late for me to give any feedback at all. I used her film as much as I could but it was difficult and she still didn’t like what I did use, mainly the amount but there wasn’t much I could do.

Above is the final piece for the film, I spent a long time collating all the footage and editing it together to create a glitchy dream like experience, edited together using various overlay effects. The plan was to then project it onto walls around the city center which was done effectively and without many hiccups as seen below

Although some of the footage went out of focus, I think it turned out quite well all in all and I’m looking forward to seeing it at the exhibition.

Thanks for reading,

(PE1)

(PE 1)