'The Lads' Outtakes/Alternate Shots

When filming we naturally had waaaay more footage than we needed; some of these were things that went wrong (goofing up lines, leaving unused props in the shot etc.) and others were alternate takes that just didn't look right in the sequence. I actually have a fair bit more unused footage than what I've put in this video; though much of it consists of multiple repeats of each shot - in these cases I've just put one example so you can get the idea without being bored to tears watching us mess up the same things over and over. But eh.

-HM.

Coursework Update 12

So yeah, after about a month's worth of editing and four months worth of rendering we've finally got the thing finished off...

Overall it's fair to say we've had a great deal of problems delaying this, with the most prominent over the last week or so being the sound mixing. Oliver's had to record his own overdubs away from us and email them to me to use as he's a fair way away - thank god for the internets... Luke recorded his overdubs a few days back, and we haven't been able to get hold of Samir, so I had to voice act him.

The problem this has caused is that as we've been using different equipment, everything's been recorded at different volumes, meaning that it's been a technological nightmare to get everything at the right volume relative to everything else. I spent nearly two hours straight Tuesday evening just adjusting the volume of the different sound clips to try and balance it out; this is partially down to paranoia, but also because it's necessary to make the thing presentable. I'm still not completely convinced by the music levels vs. the dialogue levels, but in all honesty I might end up driving myself to insanity if I start again...

The other consistent problem has been the render and export times but yesterday when I clicked to export... it'd finished in about an hour. Maybe it was just that the technology demons were saving all of their energy up so they could enforce the Performance Curse yesterday evening at the showcase... -_-

Will work on a proper evaluation for this later on, but for now, watch and enjoy.

-HM.

EDIT: 50th post on le blog, what do I win!?

Finishing touches...

This is the slightly confusing space which we call our timeline...

Am currently working on finishing off the last few pieces (mainly sound - RAAAAAAGE), I believe this is nearly done.

-HM.

SIR

I left your hard drive in Rm 57, wasn't able to find you as I left. Sorry about that.

-HM.

Coursework Update 11 - Storyboard

After spending a great deal of this weekend eating and watching Sonic and Mega Man LPs on YouTube I thought I should do something productive and get the storyboard posted. 

In regards to image quality - I have to apologise for this, I don't have access to an A3 scanner and cutting from an A4 scanner is too awkward to be practical so I ended up taking photographs with the Bloggie and then cropping them to a reasonable size. The lighting makes it too difficult to read most of the writing, so I ended up going into Preview (yeah, I know) to add a text box to each shot clarifying what is happening in regards to things like camera angle/dialogue. 

All of the transitions are cuts except where noted. The artwork is the work of Luke, because I can't draw for my life.

-note- A fade transition is used here, to make the shots look more 'epic'.

-note- That should say Oliver. I am a terrible person.

Won't you fly high free bird?

As mentioned earlier, we have a part where Oliver gets hit by bird mess. Previously we were just going to  let the dialogue clarify what happened, but we decided it'd be much more effective if we actually show the bird in the sky.

Today I went out to get a shot of a bird flying around which we could use. Simple task right? Just get the camera and start shooting when a bird flies past, right?

Apparently not. I probably spent a good 30-45 minutes today wandering around the school looking for birds to film as they fly over, but it turned out to be difficult. This is as 3 criteria need to be satisfied in order to get the shot right:

- A bird needs to fly over. Well, duh. There haven't been many birds around today, and the ones that have been have just been sitting on the ground or on a branch, as though they're just mocking me for fun.
- There can't be any trees/buildings/fences in the way. So many shots got killed by this.
- I need to be filming properly. I lost quite a few shots where my camerawork was all over the place.

Here are the different takes I got today --

I would love to have dubbed A New Venture or some other form of unfitting music over this but sadly copyright exists; so you'll just have to appreciate the many takes of me trying desperately hard to film a bird.

-HM.

Coursework Update 10 - Productive Week Is Productive

Have been doing editing work this week, and somehow or the other managed to get stuff done! Yay for productivity.

Tuesday

- Moved some of the titles around, they now move at a faster pace and come in around the same rate as the beat of the BGM.
- Exported so we have some kind of progress to show; this is uploading now and providing YouTube doesn't decide to hate me this should be posted later today.

EDIT:

This is now outdated due to the edits made earlier, but it gives a general gist of what the titles look like.

Thursday


- Tidied up the titles a little more. This ensured they came in and out spot on with the beat which helps maintain their pacing. Also moved the 'The Lads' title card further towards the end of the intro clip.
- Fixed some of the lighting in a number of shots - most noticeably in the shots where Oliver runs through the door, and when Samir puts his hat on - prior to this some of the shots looked a little too dark, which made them seem out of place when one considers how light-hearted the action on screen is.
- Filmed a bird in the sky and interjected said shot into the shot of Oliver being 'attacked' (more on this in a later post).
- Adjusted the framing of the shots where Oliver runs through the door using the Wireframe tool in FCP - this now works as an action match transition as the double-door appears to be in about the same place on the screen in both shots. Wasn't really much inspiration behind this other than thinking "wouldn't it be cool if..." when watching it back, but I'm now glad I did this as it looks much better than it was.
- Tweaked volume of the bird sound effect during Samir's scene so it's now just a background noise and slightly less obvious that it's a stock that's been placed over the top of the shot.

I also ended up booting up GarageBand and using one of the slow blues presets and the Musical Typing piano to compose a song titled "I'm Dying And My Family Are Dead And My Dog Is Dead And My Life Is Generally Terrible" to leave on the Mac's HDD to spark the interest of anyone who happens to use it.

So yeah, now we're going to have to get the voices overdubbed, fix up a couple of parts and then we should be off the ground.

-HM.