Animations

We had the idea for our piece to add some animations into our documentary to make it more visually interesting. As I have some background in animation, I was able to use Adobe Flash to create some simple graphics into our film. 

The first thing we were thinking was for when the questions come up on screen. We initially had the shot blur out, and the question appear, but we decided to try and make it more interesting. As our documentary is Christmas themed I came up with the idea of using  a gentle animation of snow in the background of the questions, so in Flash I spent some time animating snowflakes drifting down across the screen.

We really liked the effect of this in our piece, and thought it would really add to the enjoyment of the viewer if there was a bit more animation in there, so we decided to add in some more graphics through the duration of the film.

I thought it would be a to relate the animations to the questions our interviewees were being asked. The first question asked was about their favourite Christmas present as a child, and so I designed a small Christmas present that could hover in the corners of the frame. 

Also for this design I needed to make sure my canvas was the same size as the film, (1920x1080) as I needed to make sure the lights would be in the right place for when they were added to the film.

In another question, one of the interviewees starts to talk about big, old fashioned, coloured Christmas lights, which I thought had really nice imagery and so I animated a string of those kind of lights coming along the top of the screen.

At one point, Church was mentioned and so I thought that as the stars are a theme that frequently crops up in Churches at Christmas and so I created a graphic of stars in the night sky to flicker around the interviewees heads.

The above GIF was my initial design for the stars, but we found when it was applied to our film it covered some of the people in the frame so I had to re-design it slightly so that it hovered above them.

For the family question towards the end of the piece, I thought a Christmas tree would be a nice representation of families at Christmas as it's traditional part of Christmas celebrations. 

To make it a bit more interesting, I added tinsel coming in from the side and wrapping itself around the Christmas tree. This animation took a much longer period of time to complete, as while I could loop some of the frames of the base layers, I had to draw each frame of the tinsel individually otherwise it would be static as the animation continued which would look unnatural. Drawing each frame meant that it added movement and a bit more realism to it.

I then wanted to come up with a commercialisation animation, and after discussing it with my group we decided the most simple and obvious choice would be do use money. We decided this would work really nicely with the question and so I drew out a little pile of money and made one of the notes fall down from the top of the frame and land on the pile. After I had done this all I needed to do was loop it on the edit.

Editing

We knew in the edit we would have to keep things organised so we could keep track of everything, and it would make things a lot easier in the long run, so Ethan made bins to keep all of the different clips in. 

Ethan and I layered my animation over his 'blur' when the questions appeared on the screen. We had decided that as our documentary was Christmas themed, it would add a really nice atmosphere to the documentary if we added snow to the background. Ethan suggested doing it on After Effects but after some consideration we came to the conclusion of using Flash, where I could draw out the animation and we could key out the background later.

We knew that we needed something to set the scene at the start, and Logan had the idea of a time lapse of the sky getting dark and we considered different places around Farnham where we could get this footage. We wanted it to be somewhere high, preferably looking over the town and then we thought of Farnham Castle. The castle would perfectly meet our needs, and so we went to the highest point of the castle and set up our camera. We time-lapsed for almost an hour, and at this time of year it gets dark really quickly so we were able to get almost a full coverage of the sky from daylight to night which we were really happy with. We then placed this at the start of the film to bring the viewers into the atmosphere of our piece, cold and wintery and set at night.

We ended up having a very busy timeline on Premiere, as we had so many different parts added in from different places, such as the animations, the typography, and of course the clips.

When colour grading, Ethan thought it would be a good idea to try and make the tones in the image warmer as this would emphasise the snugness of the couple's home and make it seem more Christmassy and warm, which we all thought would be a really good idea.

The above image is the footage without colour grading, and underneath is the footage with.

Schedule and Paper Edit

Schedule

Paper Edit

Synopsis and Treatment

“The Changing of Christmas”

Synopsis 

This documentary will be about how Christmas has changed over the years. We will be gathering our information by interviewing people that have experienced Christmas many times to give us a variety of perspectives on how different people celebrate Christmas. We will aim to interview people who have lived in Farnham for several years to ask them how Christmas has changed through their eyes. We may also touch upon the topic of Christmas becoming more commercialized over time. Comments could be made about how Christmas is used as a selling device for companies rather than a celebratory holiday.

Treatment 

For the shooting of this documentary we will aim to film at least 1 interview to give use a source of information which we will be able to meld into our documentary. As a group we have 3 DSLR cameras at our disposal. Cinematic wise, we would like to shoot one Time-lapse of the sky changing from light to dark. This will be used in order to set the scene of filming at night and also give a sense of time for our project. We plan on either shooting this in a field or at the top of Farnham castle. Permission will be needed in order to film on top of the castle. We also would like to shoot aesthetic shots of Christmas lights so that we can set the Christmas theme. There will be an event on the 21^st of November of the lights turning on. This may be a good visual to shoot as people celebrate and enjoy themselves. Although this may be hard to gain permission to film since there will be a huge crowd of people and We want to add a very aesthetically pleasing style to our documentary using the various different Christmas lights that have been spread out around Farnham. Focus pulling Christmas lights can create a very abstract effect when they are out of focus. We have found decorated Christmas trees placed around Farnham, which will be very useful for the type of shots that we need. Lights are also setup all the way down West street which we will be able to shoot to show the how decorated the town is for Christmas. Permission will be needed from the council in order to film on the streets. We have found 2 elderly people that we can interview about their Christmas experiences. Since the interview will be conducted in their house we will need to consider how much space we will need to film, what kind of lighting we will need and how long we will be able to film them for. This will be a 2 person interview so we will need to create a two shot that is visually pleasing. Since we will be using our 3 DSLR’s we could shoot the interview from a variety of different angles. We were given verbal and written permission from each interviewee.

Post production wise we will be using Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe Speedgrade CC, Adobe After Effects CC. Since Adobe CC is transferable through different systems, we will be able to use our own desktops and the university desktops. We will allocate one editor and all pitch in ideas on how we want the project edited.

Permissions and Risk Assessments

Permissions

Without a doubt the most stressful part of the project, we had to make sure we got permission to film where we wanted for our film. As our film was about Christmas, that meant going out and filming Christmas lights and decorations and all things Christmassy and so as we came to realise, that meant we were filming on a lot of different properties owned by Farnham Town Council, Waverley Borough Council, and some privately owned areas.
To get permission, we emailed a lot of different councils and we also phoned several and got permission over the phone.

We filmed at Farnham Castle to get a time lapse over Farnham town, to help set up our video at the beginning. We went to Farnham Castle to do this as it's the highest point in the area and we could go right to the top of the castle, and as we went at 3:30 we were able to show the sky getting darker.

We also filmed the outside of Farnham United Reformed Church, as the Christmas season is also about 'The Birth of Christ' and we thought it would have a nice relevance to our video. In this email it is referred to as the 'Sanctuary.'

We also needed to get some background music for our documentary that we had permission to use, and we found this piece by Tom Rosenthal called 'Go Solo,' and found that it really worked well with our story.

We also found and image of Farnham in 1973 online, and thought it would make a really nice addition to our documentary. We emailed the owners of the website it was found on to ask if they'd mind us using it for our film.

I was also given the task of completing the risk assessment for each of our shoots. I had to complete three pages of information about each different location we visited and assess how high risk the situations we would be filming in would be before we got signed off to be allowed to shoot.

Documentary Research

The documentary we are going to make is a group project, and once we had decided our theme was going to be the Changing of Christmas I began to do some research on a large variety of Christmas short films and documentaries.

One I looked at took a very comedic approach to Christmas, and is made in a single room with just two characters. It's about two coworkers forced to stay behind and wrap all the presents on a list before they're allowed to leave. Everyone else has gone to a work party.

This could have been quite a boring scene due to the lack of other interaction, however the director and writer Vick Krishna ensured that the plot was interesting enough to keep people watching.

The film uses a wide shot of the two men sitting at the table to set the scene, and the director has cleverly divided the two halves of the shot.

I really like how the set design has foreshadowed the the split between the two men, with the right had side character wearing a red jumper, and all of the props on that side of the screen being red such as the wrapped presents leaning against the wall and the Christmas tree decorations, and then on the left, the man is wearing a green jumpers and the presents on that side are green and so are the decorations on the tree. I think this is a really nice contrast.

Another short film I looked at was 'The Night Before Christmas,' about a homeless man breaking into a families house the night before Christmas to steal presents. 

The film has an interesting plot twist that I really liked, where instead of showing a load of aftermath with the family after the homeless man stole from them, it follows the homeless man as he runs away, and meets his wife/girlfriend and their child in a make-shift home in the snow, and gives her a cookie that he stole from the house. I thought this was a really nice change to the usual way of demonising homeless thieves etc, and showed a more human side and how they're not so different than our own families. 

I also loved the cinematography in the film. There were some really beautiful shot of the Christmas lights in the house at the start, and the snow outside, drifting down onto the tent/shack that the homeless family are sleeping in.

The lighting is warm and cozy in the house, contrasting with the cold greys and whites of the outside, representing the collision of the two families very different worlds.

A documentary we all looked at was 'Folded' about a woman looking for a man she once loved. This is not a Christmas film but we took a lot of inspiration from the filming techniques used in the piece. 

We found the transitions really interesting and engaging and really liked how the filmmakers showed the progression of the story with their footage.

Another documentary that we looked at was a short film called 'City Lights' by a filmmaker called Colin Rich. We took inspiration from this for our timelapse and also for our music. We also found the lights in his film really beautiful and wanted to try to capture that when we were filming the Christmas lights around where we were filming.

Initial Ideas for Documentary

Farnham woodlands and fields - conservation
Students - life/international
Timelapse
Lady selling Big Issue magazines
Waitrose guy who busks
Christmas lights
Beer
Antique Store
Market