Shooting Day

The day had finally arrived for our shoot and we were all very excited and ready to go. We got there at around 8 with a view of starting at 10.30. Tom had organised us a shoot order and I gave Amelia a call sheet for her own reference a couple of days before the shoot. Once the lights were all set up, we were ready to go and pretty much on schedule.

I had Kat take the timings whilst Shahid read the words out for our wide shots, which we decided to do first. The day ran very smoothly in general. We let Amelia choose her own music as we felt it would be easier for her to dance to something which she knows would feel right for the quality of movement we wanted. This meant that we were going to have to record sounds later on for the soundtrack. 

At a couple of points throughout the day we had to stand for a few minutes and figure out how the lighting was going to work as we wanted front mid shots and close-ups of the dancer, but we had to move the lights around to do it. This could have been better planned, but we sorted it out very quickly and we just switched some shots around on the shot list in order to make it work more efficiently for us. This was especially problematic for the intended VFX shot of Amelia going through the mirror as we had to keep reshooting it for continuity purposes, which we could have planned better. However we stayed on schedule all day and finished when we expected to. We all had a fun day, and Amelia told me that it was a really nice way of working for her.

Throughout the day we also had Laura, who did make-up for us and Kat and Lauren as our runners. It was much easier having them around and made things run very smoothly. We also had them recording the day with photos and videos as well for our own memories and to give to Amelia after the project was finished.

Rehearsals

On the day of our rehearsal with Amelia, I was really excited to meet her and to get working. I had such high hopes for this film and for her as a dancer and I really wanted it to work out well. I came with a general plan of what I was going to go through with her, such as setting her tasks and then seeing what we could generate with her. The day also offered us an opportunity to do some technical tests and decide on costume ahead of the actual day.

Once Amelia arrived we introduced ourselves and sat down with her to talk through the project and how the day was going to go. She showed us some of her costume ideas at this point and we decided that we would see how the clothes looked while she was moving and then decide based on that.

Firstly, based on the audition we did with Daisy, I gave her the task of trying to dance as if she was trapped in a box, and she really wanted to get out. The harder she pushed, the bigger the box got. I put on some music that I had found previously and we watched her do that. I was very pleased with her movements and knew from that moment that we had chosen the right person for us. She had a mixture of qualities of Joe and Sophie from the dance workshop with Rachel that we really liked. From there things really progressed, and Amelia gave us a lot of input which helped us structure how we thought our film was going to look, and we had a lot of fun in the process. In the end the task we found most successful was getting her to react to different body parts being shouted out. We shouted out random body parts and a verb to go with it e.g. spiky tailbone, and saw how she reacted. This then threw up the problem of how we were going to time it to make it match in the planned wide shots we had, and so we decided to shout out the same words running through it twice, timing when the words were said and then telling Amelia that she was either being oppressed or the oppressor. This gave us some really interesting, contrasting quality of movements without the continuity errors that would have not allowed it to work.

The last thing we did with the day was to shoot some technical tests and just generally shoot some footage of her for our own reference.

We also later on that night decided on costume for her to wear, we took some reference photos of what she was wearing for the rehearsals, but one was too floaty and one was too restrictive. 

We wanted to keep the costume simply, and we liked the bare legs and plain white shirt, so we wanted to keep that but we wanted something with a bit of movement.

Auditions

Our plans for the 4th and 6th of March didn't work out as no one could make it on that day, so we held our skype auditions first on the 12th and then held our other audition on the 13th. During the skype auditions we were speaking to two people, called Caldonia and Amelia. We interviewed Amelia first, and we really liked her attitude towards our project and she seemed to really understand what we wanted. After speaking with Caldonia, we also really liked her, she was nice and she understood what we required from the project as well. We also looked at their show reels and were very impressed with the quality of movement that both of them created.

The next day we then also audition Daisy Tait in person, I was looking forward to auditioning a dancer in person mainly because I had never done it before, and so it would give me the experience of auditioning someone from a medium I have not had much experience with. We liked Daisy and some of the material she gave us was really nice. We asked her if we could film her and gave her the footage afterwards.

In the end we decided to go for Amelia, as we really liked her quality of movement and the way she spoke about out project. We immediately clicked with her and felt that we could have a really good working relationship. At this point we had to change our shoot date to the 20th due to unforeseen circumstances, and this worked out better for her anyway. We arranged a rehearsal on the 16th to work out how we wanted to shoot the piece with her and to generate something really good with her. We agreed to pay her expenses and food etc.

Finding a Dancer

After our pre-production was mostly done and we had booked our shoot for the 25th March, all we needed to do now was to find a dancer. I offered to do this, and so I set about firstly by emailing Rachel asking for ideas of where the best place to post dancer ads would be since she would know far better than I would. She suggested places like Ideas Tap and Artshub, so I set about placing those ads, using our synopsis to give a good idea of what the film was about and our description of the dancer we wanted.

After getting a few replies, we decided to try and organise auditions for the 4th and 6th March. However some people couldn't make it so we decided to hold skype auditions on the 12th as well.

Final Ideas for our Dance Film/Pitch

After talking about our production design ideas, we agreed as a group that we wanted our film to reflect the lighting and minimalistic style of Pas de Deux, because we didn't want to reflect the message we were trying to portray literally. We also felt that the lighting style would contribute to the mood we wanted for our film as the film is all to do with hidden identity, or hidden parts of a personality.

Also, we also decided that our sound design should reflect the sound design in Rosas Danst Rosas, as we really liked that attitude, and as our film is intending to have very specific and deliberate movements, to be able to hear that in a minimalistic way and focus in on that will hopefully draw attention on the dancer themselves and the movements they create.

In preparation for our pitch, we aimed to have all of our production pack together in order to get it signed off quickly and allow us to start organising the shoot day as quickly as possible. Shahid and Tom had already decided that they respectively wanted to be the Cinematographer and Camera Operator, as well as handling the colour grading and the editing. I took on the role as the director, and co-producer with Tom. I also wanted to do the sound design for this project as I had quite a good idea in mind for it. 

So with that all sorted, I went about making a shot list based on my vision for the film, which Shahid then did a beautiful storyboard for. I also wrote the treatment for the film and synopsis, whilst Tom did the risk assessment and also set about creating a google doc with tabs that allowed us all to see our scheduling, contact details, budgeting etc.

The main thing about the structure of the film I would say I wanted to get across is the progression throughout the film from being controlled and restricted to being totally free. I want to try and work with the dancer that we get in order to get that message across. In my shot list I have told it in a very narrative based way, however due to the nature of the dance it's very possible it will end up as something completely away from that.

Our pitch went very well, and we got plenty of compliments on our organisation. I used some photographs to reference what the lighting was going to be like, and they seemed to be quite optimistic about the film in general.

Photography Workshop- 18th March

This was our last photography workshop and today we were looking at printing. Beytan asked us to bring up two prints; one from the studio lighting task, and one from the five images task.

He explained to us the printing process, and how we were going to achieve the result we wanted. He also went through colour calibration manually and with a hardware calibrator in order to allow us to see our images as closely to what was going to be printed as possible.

In order to prepare our images for print, we firstly had to look at our proof setup to ensure it was simulating the right color space and set our rendering intent:

Once we had chosen this, we could then add a sharpening filter if we chose to do so.

With the sharpening filters, you can choose high pass, which will sharpen according to a set radius on a moveable bar. The result is a light sharpen if you choose a small radius such as 1.5 shown here. However I found that I would like it to be sharpened more, and so I chose to use mexican hat sharpening which involves physically putting the values in, however it is mathematically correct in the way it sharpens the image.

Without Mexican Hat

With Mexican Hat

This is an extreme view, and it is much more subtle when looking at the image as a whole, however for me it greatly improved the overall look of the image.

Now we could start to setup our print settings to match the paper, colour profile, printer, rendering intent, and 

The most important thing here was to make sure that photoshop was managing the colours so that the colours would be accurate to what I see on the screen, and to make sure that the rendering intent, and paper are the same as what I am using to get an accurate result.

Once I had made my first print, I placed it on the keyboard with the image on the screen so that I could compare them and determine whether my print was successful.

Maya 3D Workshop- 2/3/15

As this was our last session of our Maya workshops, we were tasked with creating a new model and trying to use all the skills we have learnt over the last few weeks. We were asked to make a UFO.

Firstly, I started out with a cylinder and then manipulated it to come up with my basic UFO shape:

I then started mapping out my UV's to enable me to take a UV snapshot and create my texture. After I had done this, I took it into photoshop and painted two different UV textures, a colour and a specular colour:

Colour texture

Specular Colour

The difference with the specular colour is that it determines how much light will bounce off your model. In short, how shiny or matte it will be. To make a surface really shiny you paint it white, and any areas you want completely matte are black. Other shades of grey with have more subtle differences, creating slight shines.

Basic colour texture on my model with no specular.

The final thing we had to do was use baking to creating more detail on our models. To do this, we created a duplicate of the mesh and then added more polygons, which allowed us to create a model with much higher detail. The idea of this was to add subtle details that we can then bake onto the lower poly model, which would be better for game engines to deal with (if you were to make a model for a game). We used the transfer maps option to create our UV normals, which will then tell our lower poly model what detail is going where:

After I had added this and my specular colour, you can really see a difference in the quality of the finished model.