Strangers in the Park Film Project - 1/12/2023
This week we were tasked with creating a short film piece under the theme "Strangers in the Park" with visually appealing shot composition and visual consistency. For this we were placed into groups for which the film crew roles would be split up within. For me I grouped up with Quevin, Kavinayaa, Joe and Thomas, and we immediately started with pre-production. I was assigned to be the camera operator, Kavinayaa was originally on sound, but later swapped to directing the project, Quevin stayed as our main sound operator, and Joe and Thomas were assigned to be the actors in our project. While I originally storyboarded a plot revolving around a strange otherworldly entity, we were encouraged by our lecturer Steve not to create a, as he put it "hallway chaser" piece, and so my concept was scrapped. After some brainstorming amongst the group, we eventually decided on the plot of two students meeting each other in a park, one being outspoken and friendly with the other being reclined and socially awkward, the message of the story being to not be afraid to reach out to other people, which was basic, but it was functional for the project we wanted to make. Kavinayaa handled writing down our new script and storyboard, while I created a synopsis based off of that and Thomas doing the same for the project's treatment. Below are some of the pages from the storyboards we created for our project.
For filming we were luckily supplied with the audio and video equipment required by the university, so our second objective was choosing the location for our shoot. Luckily we found our ideal spot just over the road from our base room, a large bronze statue with two benches either side of it in a small square. Not exactly a park per-say, but we figured it was as close to one as we could get on campus. On Thursday our shoot was admittedly not the best, and the majority of the footage from that day was scrapped, aside from some footage of leaves rustling in the wind we planned to use as a credits background. Luckily on Friday we were met with far nicer weather and lighting for our shoots to take place, though we tried to include as little people in the background of our shots as possible to avoid asking every person that passed by for their consent to be included in the video. I made sure to keep the camera's aperture at 5.6 throughout the shoot, to ensure that any later edits to lighting could be made consistent throughout each shot required, though some shots still came out darker than others due to filming taking several hours, meaning differences in sunlight. In total we recorded a total of roughly 48 shots including both days of filming, however this was cut down when editing both because of some shots simply being unusable, and to keep the final product relatively short. Below is an image of the location where we filmed our project.
Unfortunately, most of the sound recorded came out a bit muffled or obscured by background noises, but luckily the main pieces of dialogue at the end of the film came out good enough for use, only requiring a bit of cutting up. Thankfully I still had many sound clips saved from previous projects that I could use as substitutes for the sounds that had to be cut out due to poor audio quality, mainly footsteps on pavement and on leaves. I also recorded a few other sounds in my own time to add more subtle audio to the project, such as pages turning for Joe reading his book, and zipper sounds for his bag. I edited the footage and audio together at home using Adobe Premiere Pro 2023 on my personal computer over the weekend, spending most of my time on the audio trying my best to make it both consistent and fitting for each shot.
Overall I think this project helped us get a better idea of how to plan a shoot, and how to better write pre-production documents like a synopsis and a treatment. We also learned that it's REALLY damn cold in November to be outside shooting for hours without that much protection, so we definitely learned a lesson there. Hopefully this project can serve as another stepping stone for us to develop our digital media design skills for future artefacts and group projects, better preparing us for what's to come. Below is linked my edited version of our Strangers in the Park project, as well as a link to our synopsis and script (written by me and Kavinayaa) and treatment (written by Thomas) for the story of the project.
Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MEnRhZClBTC62OXHP6ALCnC9zKbTPVQI/view?usp=sharing
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