Cup of Tea Piece - Session 2 - 19/10/2023

-

 Continuing onward from the first session of the Cup of Tea assignment, Kavinayaa, Quevin and I began the process of filming out 90 second film, a process which took us about a day to get right. We were lucky enough to be lent the equipment that would be needed for the filming, mainly a camera to film with, a tripod, a kettle for boiling water to make the tea, and a microphone with a windscreen to record close-up audio of the tea being made. We all decided it would be best to work together for each shot, and had a conversation about how each of our storyboards would need to be acted out.

During our first attempt at filming the piece, we admittedly made several mistakes that rendered the footage unusable for the assignment. The camera's aperture was far to high, causing the background to be far too bright and blend into the props. It was also shot without any focus on the person pouring the tea, which goes against what we were told to establish based on the shots seen in Gattica.

As we attempting a second filming, we did our best to correct as many mistakes as possible that we had made before, taking care in ensuring the lighting was consistently bright, but too bright as to make the footage unusable again. We also tried to apply a technique Gattica used to focus on the faces of it's actors, keeping the camera level with their eyes roughly a third of the ways down the shot. Gathering a lot more footage this time around, the shots were far better composed than before, thought still needing some improvement in places. The tripod we used for this and all other sessions after was also different than the newer one we used in the first shot, meaning the camera was more prone to sudden jolts or tipping slightly, meaning that we had to take more care of it as we filmed. A mistake I made as the camera operator however was trying to make the shots too mobile, with far too many shots of changing focus. I learned from Stephen, our lecturer for this assignment, that it's better to not touch the camera as much as possible, to avoid the sudden shakes that are the tells of amateur filming.

During our third and final shoot of the day, we reshot the scene with far more focus on the actor, (Quevin in this instance), as Gattica did with it's actors. We did this as per Stephen's instructions to focus on what the filming wanted to tell to it's audience, what emotion it wanted to convey. For our film we wanted to convey a sense of calm and focus to the piece, with many more shots of Quevin's face as he made the tea to show the concentration and serenity of this simple task. We had ideas for other shots such as placing the camera in a cupboard for a nice shot of taking of the teabags, but unfortunately the camera we used was too big to fit inside the overhead cabinet that the kitchen we were filming in had, even when we took all the other things out. 

I think that this assignment has helped me greatly in learning how to shoot properly, and how to better compose shots as to convey the message and emotion that a film is meant to deliver to it's audience, even if the assignment has not yet concluded. I'm  very certain that what I've learned from this experience will help me greatly in future assignments and artefacts, even if they don't necessarily have to do with filming. Hopefully with the completion of this assignment after the editing of our footage is complete, me and the others will have produced a short piece of film that we can be proud to present.

Linked below is a google drive link containing a video with a small collection of the shots used in the final video, along with some additional outtakes and bloopers.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HRaHGvvLmv-3Qwq6N6rcyIxxrAl4g0yi/view?usp=share_link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storytelling and Gaming development timeline and doccumentation.

-
Image
The purpose of this blog post is to outline the development, creative process and progression of my Storytelling and Gaming assignment for my second year second semester at Hertfordshire University. While I understand that the assignment brief requested a series of blog posts to be created over the duration of the project's development, I neglected this aspect of my work out of no fault than my own, due to already having to maintain a seperate blog for my Independent Project, and on being told prior that the final end product was the most significant component of what we present. I appologise for the unprofesional nature of this stand-in blog post, though shall do my best to use this blog post to deliver a cohesive timeline of events. CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT My choice to have the style and asesthetic of my storytelling project to be in the form of a retro-esc videogame introduction cutscene game both from my enjoyment of the style of introductory cutscene I wished to make, as well as...
Read more

Animating in Photoshop 2 - 17/11/2023

-
Image
 Today in Photoshop continuing onward from our bouncing ball project, we moved onto more complicated animation, namely being the animating of a simple walk cycle. To do this we used a template from AngryAnimator.com as a base for our initial animation. Below is shown the template we used for our initial animation. To animate our person taking each step we first separated each part of their body into their own layer, the head, the torso, and front and back arms and legs. This was done to make animating far easier and to prevent unwanted squash when warping the limbs, additionally converting each layer into a smart object for easier animating . In order to make the arms and legs move we utilised Photoshop's puppet warp tool in order to establish joints on the arms and legs to manipulate and animate. One again using Photoshop's timeline feature we created a 25 frames per second animation of the walk cycle. After that was complete we then created a background for our person to walk...
Read more

Animate Future Stories Piece Documentation

-
Image
 For my Adobe Animate project for our Future Stories assignment I chose to do a rendition of the 3 Little Pigs story modified to be an educational interactive story for children about Internet Safety and Password Security. My initial design process was done by drawing out the designs for the characters, the story structure and the movement of assets in animate in Adobe Photoshop, which can be seen below. The wolf was designed to be more angular, mainly made up of triangles to signify danger, also being a harsh red colour with yellow added on his ears and grin. The three pigs all share the same base body structures, but being colour coded and with different shaped heads, each chosen to signify the stability of each pig's house, or in the case of my story, passwords.  The first big has a circular head and is sacredly, with circles not being very stable shapes. The first pig is also a light blue colour to represent their general sad attitude and passiveness. The second pig is squ...
Read more