Hi All,
Haunted is very nearly done! Production stills are now available, the movie has its own web page on the site, trailer is coming in a week or so, and the movie will be added on Hallowe’en (31st October 2011).
Cheers, Hywel.
Wheeee! It took an extra three long days at the computer and a couple of burnt DVDs to check out how it looked on TV to fine tune the rough cut, but I can finally declare Slave Auction to be done! There’s one or two things could still do with polishing, but without shooting more footage, I think I’m happy with how it has come out.
Hooray! Just in time for a much deserved holiday, too. My poor Mac won’t be getting a break though, it is hard at work number crunching to export the video and encode the MP4 and DVD versions. Should finish overnight, ready to upload tomorrow.
Here’s a few extra frame grabs to whet your appetite…
Shooting video on set at night requires light. In fact the lighting set-up is so critical, it probably took as much time to create accurately then actually shooting the content.
What our eyes see at night is quite different to what the camera picks up and conveying the correct feeling and atmosphere of a night scene is pretty tricky. It required a moon lit feel with sufficient light on the model to maintain visibility without looking fake.
Is this impossible to shoot? No, but it did require 2 important aspects to the solution. The first is using light weight, battery powered controllable LED lights. These can be placed virtually anywhere with no trailing power leads and full dimmer control. The second part is having the expertise and knowledge of Hywel on set to arrange them in such a way to create the correct feel. It’s a daunting task and taking sufficient time to really get it set-up properly is vital. Once you have them roughly in the correct place and pointing in the right direction, there are a lot of fine tweaks to make including colour correction, diffusion, camera set-up and monitoring the output on a large screen to check the final look. But if you can achieve all of this, the results are very impressive.
I’m about to edit these night time sequences, so hopefully I can do justice to all the hard work Hywel put in.
HI All,
Just managed to get the Restrained Elegance July updates done, freeing up a few days to get started editing Slave Auction. The automated stuff getting the footage in is all done, looking through it all now. The first thing one always has to do when editing is to look through all the raw footage- which for Slave Auction runs to a couple of hours. I’m looking for the best takes, the best angles, beautiful shots but also for shots that didn’t really work.
Here’s an example- a lovely framing of Ariel in the mirror, about to get flogged:
As a standalone, this is a lovely shot- good enough to open the film with, I initially thought. Unfortunately, because the shot doesn’t show enough content of the room to reveal where Ariel actually is, when you cut to any of the rest of the footage we have of that scene, it gives unpleasant “jump” (for techies, the mirror causes a line cross for Ariel when you cut to another angle. If you flop the shot, it causes a line cross for the rest of the room geography).
I’m still attached to the shot, it is a lovely one, but I’m not sure it will even make it to the rough cut.
What I’m doing now is adding the latest batch of Audio Network music to my hard drive. These most awesome people supply the huge music library on which all our RE and ES productions depend. 564 CDs worth at present time, to be exact! Waiting for the latest batch of 11 DVDs to copy over suddenly made me realise I should blog 🙂
With big productions where the music is scored afterwards, it is common to edit first, then fine tune the music to the movie. For small productions, using music which is fixed, we often work the other way around. Dramatic moments in the film work so much better if they come along with a crescendo in the music, so much so that it is worth stretching and trimming the scene to make sure the most important bits happen in time to the music.
So before editing a rough cut, I usually like to have a clear idea of what my soundtrack is going to be. So this morning’s job (after copying all the new DVDs) is to audition dozens of tracks and decide which ones “feel” right for a couple of key scenes. That will give me a theme or two for the movie, and also set the overall musical style.
Which leads me to wonder… what SHOULD the musical style be? I sort of imagine the Slave Auction story being a bit retro, even though it is clearly set in modern times it has a lot of look and feel of the 1950’s about it already. Should the music emphasise that? Should I go with classical and orchestral music, or something a bit more intimate feeling? I don’t think I want anything pop/rock/indie feeling, but maybe solo piano would be a good timeless way to begin? I’ve not done much with Jazz, maybe some classic-era Jazz would sit well?
So excuse me, must turn up the volume and listen to a few dozen music tracks along with some of the shots and see what floats my boat!
Hywel