Independent Study FTW!

As the title may correctly suggest, I dedicated some of my weekend's downtime to the pursuit of Independent Study. And while I am not yet content with the amount of time I could have put into it (migraine attacks, hooray...), I certainly did prepare and even learned my fair share.

But first things first.

Since we have been given the task of producing a short film with the theme of "Me, Myself & I", I have been jotting down ideas, improving and discarding them as time went by and I finally ended up with a concept that I personally consider as my "First Viable". Without revealing too much at an too early stage, let's just say that I will try to aim at an slightly narrative piece that also functions as a meta commentary on film itself. Given the fact that the short film is supposed to be a maximum of only three minutes long, I understand that First Viable could end up being too ambitious. But I have two aspects working to my advantage: 1. I already have extensive lengths of the short film visualised in my head (and fell in love with them) and 2. I have already produced a three minute short film and hence a (hopefully) pretty accurate idea on how the visualisations might play out time-wise.

To make a long story short, I decided to revisit my first piece "Happy Ending" and take it as a blueprint to see whether First Viable will live up to its name. And tadaaaa.... It does.

The only catch, you might ask?

I can now clearly see all the bugs of my first short film. Like, ALL of them. Dayum.... To further abbreviate my findings, here an extensive (but not exhaustive) list of aspects I need to improve upon:

1. Continuity (I did not shoot enough material to prepare for continuity errors and thus ended up with a few botched transitions)

2. Colour Grading (I remember wanting to infuse every scene with a different mood and being frustrated because the colour grading looked somewhat strikingly artificial) 3. Speed of narrative (an hastened squirrel on energy drinks would have trouble following the first 3/4 of the story)

4. SOUND, for God's sake! (I need to brush that up ASAP!)

5. Camera movements (I have too many static shots)

6. LIGHTING, dammit! (um, yeah, see comment under 4.)

Since I really, really love First Viable and would be pretty frustrated if my cinematic faults would distract from the idea, I decided to tackle the issues by watching Youtube-tutorials touching on the subjects mentioned above and found the channels "eevnxx", "DSLR-Guide" and "PeterMcKinnon" pretty helpful for a very first overview.

Now, to a very condensed list of knowledge gained in the raid for personal cinematic improvement:

1. Did you know that softly and evenly lit frames make colour grading an easier task and more natural to look at? It would certainly explain, why some of the scenes in "Happy Ending" seemed so artificial - previous overexposure is one of the major warning flags here. And the fact that we did not shoot the material in raw.- but in mov.-format might also have impeded a natural look, though I might need to look into the IT-aspect a bit more before cementing it as a fact.

2. Besides the fact that the sound was way off at times (I used a pretty cheap and old Røde directional microphone), I almost always forgot recording extra ambient sound effects which would have given more acoustic depth... (see Peter McKinnon as in 1.)

3. Shooting either early in the morning or later at night not only gives you the soft kind of light, it might also set a little bit of extra mood you would normally have to painfully recreate with a lot of lighting equipment and swearing. Plus, you avoid the harsh type of light that can cast shadows on your footage. (see Peter McKinnon as in 1. and 2.) But this also means that you would need to be fast and proficient in shooting the material, since you do not want to end up with a botched continuity due to lighting differences. Which means that I need to bother Lee a lot (Sorry, man!)

4. If you want to end up with smooth camera movement but have shaky hands (Dips on that!), you can either consider software solutions (Adobe does really have a warp stabiliser? Why did I learn that just now?), shooting for slow motion footage (which you would need to know beforehand because anything that shoots with less than 50fps looks creepy when in slow motion - at least to me) or using stabilisers/gimbals.

5. Having an extensive archive of B-roll-footage not only might save your arse one lucky day, but can simplify your editing choices and add visual quality to any material given.

6. There are such things as colour grenades? Heck, I might use a couple of those for my "Me, Myself & I"! (After the proper risk assessment, of course!) (see Peter McKinnon as in 5.) Finally, since I already do have a pretty visualisation in my head but no idea of how exactly to achieve it, I decided to gather a couple of stills from films and TV-shows I really do like visually. My plan is to learn why exactly I do like certain styles, how they were brought about technically and, heck, even recreate them if possible. I want to know whether I have already subconsciously developed a somewhat sophisticated artistic concept for my very own work or whether I am all over the place and a sucker for basically anything as long as there is a sense of coherence in it. But this I will do on another splendid day. This "Me, Myself & I" sure is not only a delve into my very own themes, but also a delve into my visual preferences. Sneaky. I see what you did there.

References:

Svea Hartle (2017) Happy Ending (2017) [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAwItaTquNw [Accessed 2 October 2017]

Peter McKinnon (2017) 5 Ways to Instantly Make Better Videos [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjtt-bMonpc [Accessed on 2 October 2017]

eevnxx (2017) 4 Ways to Get Smooth Camera Shots [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq8S0p2xlzg [Accessed 2 October 2017]

Peter McKinnon (2017) Step up your Filmmaking: Importance of B-Roll [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXzLvYN-HSc [Accessed on 2 October 2017]