When the time came to show our movie in the class, it turned out that we haven’t exported our movie correctly. Thus, we couldn’t present it when we should but after the break.
It was well taken by the class in general, and the comments / critique was mostly directed towards establishing more solidly how the two main characters are different, without going back and re shooting the whole thing. The suggestions included shooting the H& O’s fan watching one of their videos for a while, as well as shooting various of their posters. The same treatment should be used for the guy who was a Terror Movie Fan.
During the presentation, we also talked about the main obstacles we encountered and there was another group who had happened upon similar difficulties (such as watching the scenes immediately after shooting them).
Since it was our first time ever tackling editing, and shooting as a matter of fact, we found out that it was the worst idea ever to look at what we have filmed immediately after filming it. That is, because we rewound and played each of the various takes of each of the scenes we have filmed (personally out of curiosity and excitement of filming our first movie) we have left some seconds between each of the takes, which made it very tricky to get the footage onto Final Cut Pro. We had help from Marianne, which happened to be around, and by-passed that first obstacle. I learned that we should NOT look at each scene after shooting it. Just make sure to shoot it several times, so some of it would be good.
The second obstacle was that I looked at the camera immediately after the scene to say “cut”, and it was quite difficult to edit it correctly so that that particular gesture did not appear on the final movie. At the end we managed, but I learned that we have to “keep on rolling” for about a minute as well as give some space at the beginning of each scene for editing purposes.
The final obstacle was finding the appropriate music for the whole film. We were able to find a way of totally “silencing” the park scene (extremely loud when we first shoot it) and record the music over; but it took a LONG while to be able to take the music out of Zannah’s iPod, and get it into the computer.
Finally, writing the introducing credits and end credits took longer than expected, but we were all really happy with the final product, since it is funnier every time we watch it.
In spite of the fact that none of us are actors, when the question arose in class about WHO was going to act we decided that we were going to do it ourselves. When we meet to distribute the scenes and so on, we found out that it was going to be very tricky to be able to film both stories. This due to lack of enough actors for all the roles and also to time constrains. So, we decided that we were going to focus on ONE story, and distributed the various roles amongst ourselves: camera, sound, lights, location finder and actors and directors. We had to re-draw, or rather, enlarge the storyboard, to accommodate this new development.
It was a lot of fun to alternate between all the roles, and it was much more time consuming that I ever expected. It took us all Saturday to have about 5 minutes worth of tape, most of them between two and four takes of each scene. By the end of that Saturday we were tired and happy with our work.
We got together as a group (Jonathan, Thomas, Zannah and myself) and brainstormed about the various ideas we had for our first three – minute movie. We had two main concepts, and discarded one of them because it would be really difficult to film specially regarding locations and actors (children were involved).
We focused on the second idea: leaving a personal note in a book that someone else took, and started working on it. It developed into two parallel stories:
- The first one was about a guy who loved Hall & Oates, draw a picture of them, and bookmarked what he was reading with it. After colliding with another person who also happened to be reading the same book, his girlfriend found out a ticket for horror films (which he disliked) and treated him to one. He had nightmares about it.
- The second story was about the guy who liked horror movies. A friend of his, upon finding the Hall & Oates drawing (from the original guy) gave him a H&O t-shirt as a Birthday Present.
We divided the work so two different people worked on each of the Story Boards. We also emailed each other regarding the story line we have discussed, to make sure that everybody involved was clear on what the story was. Our “final product” can be found here storyboards.
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