Storyboard First Draft

I was assigned the role of storyboard artist and grip, and so once the first draft of the script had been written, I began to plan the storyboard. 

Initially, there was no script but I knew I was going to be storyboarding and so I did a few practice drawings to show the assistant director the sort of style of drawing I had in mind, as while I knew I had okay drawing capabilities I had never done a storyboard before and was unsure how detailed to go or what sort of framing to use. 

At first I played around with using a light source and using different angles, just as it had been a while since I'd drawn anything that wasn't just doodling and needed to be a relatively accurate representation of what was supposed to be onscreen. I am also not that familiar with drawing on photoshop and so I was experimenting with different opacities and brush styles and sizes to see what gave the best effect for the work. I knew also that I was going to have to draw quite a lot of frames and so I'd have to draw them so that they didn't take up too much time but also looked detailed enough to give an accurate picture of what was taking place at that particular time in the film.

Once the first draft of the script had been written I began my first draft of the storyboard. At this point we didn't have a shot list so I was going on what we had discussed in our group meetings, but of course although the camera team and director described what they had in mind, I could only draw what I imagined they meant and couldn't read their minds. 

I began with a very rough outline of a storyboard as I wasn't at this point very familiar with what they were supposed to look like. 

I also made sure that I numbered each frame so that I could keep track of the order, and made sure I was adding the drawings into the right place.

Each drawing I did on a full size photoshop document so that I could get more detail in the drawings, and them added them to a general template I had made earlier. Once I had done that, I wrote some notes on each one to describe what was supposed to be happening in each frame.

To tell apart the Id and the Superego, I coloured the Id in black and kept the Superego in white, to show the darker side to the instinctual nature of the Id and as they were supposed to be reflections of one another, this helped me to tell apart which one I was drawing and also to the rest of the crew when I showed them. For the draft a lot of the angles weren't very accurate, it was more of just a visual representation of what the script was telling.

I knew that I was going to have to do more frames, and also re do some of my drawings as the script developed and the shot list changed, especially as this was a 5-10 minute film and I had only done 16 frames. But to do a more detailed storyboard I was going to need a shot list and the next draft of the script.

Dance videos research

I chose this film as the lighting and atmosphere were really intense, and both work to enhance the turbulent relationship between the two individuals. The smoke effects work really well to display what the woman's emotions are doing, and the removal of layers of clothing shows how this relationship is figuratively tearing her apart. The fact that she has smoke coming off of her combined with the name of the film 'Abaddon' make me think of her being linked to Hell and demons, as Abaddon is the name of either a high ranking demon from Hell or a place of destruction and devastation. This is confirmed by the woman disappearing into ash at the end of the sequence.




This film I picked because I loved how the dancer chose really specific movements to portray each element. The introduction of each physical element into the dance added a really nice accent to the piece and further improved the quality. In the video the editing played a vital part of making each segment more accurately reflect the element it was currently representing.
The film is comprised of quite simple components, with a plain background and a single dancer, and just a few props throughout and yet all the dancer moves in such a way that you can really tell what element he is supposed to be representing, and the addition of the physical elements doesn't take away from the dance as it might have done if it was a less well made film, but rather increases the quality of the film. The music is very important with this piece, as each section matches up to the element it is portraying.

Studio Shoot Synopsis

Synopsis:

We are taking inspiration from the photo ‘Untitled’ by Hannah Starkey (1997) looking at self-identity and mental health. The way the girl in this photo is holding the moth reflecting on it has inspired us to look into animal instincts, therefore bringing to mind the Freudian theory of the Id, Ego and Super Ego. We will start by having our actor/actress walk into the set which will have two sides to it. One evidentially good and one bad and the element that splits the two in half is the Mirror centered in the set about the size of a doorway. The character enters the good side seeming distressed for an unspecified reason. They walk past the mirror which is represented by an empty frame, at first it is just a reflection of the space and them. Then as they go to walk away they see a figure out the corner of their eye in the mirror. They will double back and go examine this figure which will be actor/actress 2. This figure is the Id but it begins calmly with them reflecting the movements of the character as if still a mirror. Then the Id will slowly get more distressed and begin to act out not exactly copying what the character is doing anymore. Then the character begins to realize this is no longer a reflection of their true self and will begin to fight back with the Id and control it. Things around the set slowly get more broken as the reality of the piece becomes broken. The fight is broken up by the two characters moving away from the mirror into their own space. Eventually the main good character decides to solve this problem by turning the mirror around so that they can be alone for a moment. When calm and alone they go back to the mirror and turn it back round again but just as they do this the Id lashes out and pulls them through the mirror to the broken side of the set. The Id then moves to the good side and walks away out of shot. The piece ends with what initially started as the good character in a heap on the floor in the broken side of the set.

Studio Shoot Initial Photos and Idea

We were given these photos to serve as a source of inspiration for our idea, and we spent a lot of time drawing different aspects from each of them that we liked before we narrowed it down to final one that we decided to use.

'Blind Twins' Jane Evelyn Atwood

This piece we really liked because of the duality of it. The relationship between the two women is that of twins, and they seem to be taking some kind of comfort from one another and the contact they're sharing. Their costumes also seem to be mirroring each others.

'Kind and Queen' 1970 Diane Arbus

We found this one the least inspirational, although we liked the framing and both the subjects have an interesting vibe - they're both wearing clothes consistent with royalty on top of normal every day outfits which is an interesting contrast.

Untitled' 1962 by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Most of all on this on we enjoyed the lighting of the photo. We thought it was really clever, and the way one child, older than the other one is looking into the room while the other hides in a dark corner, could be representative of the mind. Like an older version of yourself looking back at your childishness of previous years. But from this one we mostly drew the idea of using windows and doors as more dynamic ways of creating light.

'Untitled' 1997 by Hannah Starkey 

This was the image we chose as our main source of inspiration. We loved the woman's interaction with her reflection. We also found it really interesting how you view most of her environment through the mirror. There is a weird sort of connection between the woman and her reflection, like she's gazing through some kind of window, as if they're two separate people.

We used this photo as our primary source whilst stilling drawing on different aspects of the others. We thought about using 'identity' as our main theme, and wanted to incorporate mirrors into our film. We briefly thought about looking into mental health but that's quite an overdone theme (although still important) and we decided to look at it a bit differently. Of course, mirrors are often scene as vain or narcissistic and as a sign of obsession with physical appearance but we wanted to stay away from that, as it is a bit of an overused cliché.

From the other images we used as reference for our lighting ideas, as they used quite dramatic lighting and the misé en scene in the framing was also something that we wanted to incorporate into our piece.

With our idea of identity, we began to look into the idea of animal instincts, and the sort of base urges that most people suppress. Using Freud's psychological theory of the Id, Ego and Superego, we began to explore this idea.

The Superego is the higher level of our minds, and is based on morals and judgements, and our sense of right and wrong. The ego is the middle level where you recognise more primal urges and find civilised ways to achieve them - such as the need to eat, drink, reproduce, or respond to situations with violence. The Id is the level of our mind that represents the most basic part of our personality and thinks only of what we need and that we need it now. It is more primal and is purely thinking of survival, and functions on instinct. 

We had already decided we wanted to use mirrors in our piece, but the idea of the Id, Ego and Superego led to the notion of us using the reflection as a sort of alter-ego. Which is to say that we came up with the plan of having someone looking into a mirror and seeing the Id looking back at them. Like there is an alternate version of themselves inside the mirror being reflected back. We decided it would overcomplicate matters if we tried to incorporate all three parts of the Id, Ego and Superego, and narrowed it down to just the opposite two, and developed it from there.

Final Piece

'Talk'


DSC 3761 Sub 05 from nicole harman-smith on Vimeo.

Editing

We had to sort through a lot of different clips before we even got around to importing because while we had filmed at the same time, we couldn't start the cameras at exactly the same time. In addition to this some of the cameras carried on rolling while others were stopped and started and so there were different amounts of clips and they were different lengths. This made sorting through them very time consuming.
Once we had sorted the clips, we began with importing our piece into premiere. When importing our piece we had to triple the width of the 1920x1080 standard screen size so that we could fit all three pieces side by side to edit.
We knew we would be exporting them at the end as three separate files, but we needed them side by side to edit them accurately and ensure they matched up.
We also had to go through each clip and match them up, as it was essential they were in sync, and trim them to exactly the same length.

Our piece, though it had all been filmed at the same time, in the same place, still had some irregularities between the shots. This would have been due to different angles and spaced out lighting, which we noticed too late after our shoot.
Colour grading the two shots with the actors was relatively simple as they were on the same background, just a few meters apart, however it was trickier to get the right tones for the middle screen as it was using a different background and was also lying down flat.

Nicole used After Effects to figure out how to make our texts come up on screen, and she spent a lot of time getting the shape right and learning how to make the items move and add text. I helped her with finding the colours and fonts to make it look more legitimate.

We decided that it would be a good idea at the end of the woman's video to have it glitch to black as the others fade to black. This would be to symbolise how we are using old technologies less and less and the eventually won't exist. One of the hardest things to do these days is match up formats so that you can watch things. What I mean by this is for example, I have a lot of old videos at home, but no VCR to play them of off because my dad chucked it out to make room for a DVD player. Old tech is going out of style, and as our piece is partly about the relationship between new and old tech we wanted a way to show this. 

To do this we decided that having the man keep trying to contact the woman with his iPhone and technological pieces and the woman have a delayed response and trying to reply with something old fashioned the the man didn't understand. She continues to try to keep in touch but eventually her screen begins to glitch and fail, and turns off. This is the end of the piece.

To accomplish this I needed to learn how to create a glitch in premiere.

I looked on youtube to find different tutorials on how to make glitches. This was the first one I found that I liked.

It seemed very simple at first, copying layers and changing them to 100% blue, red or green, and then changing the opacity. I didn't get much further than this however as for reasons unknown I couldn't get the settings to remain fixed. As time was of the essence I decided to have another quick browse of the other youtube videos to see if I could find something else that might work.

I quickly found another video, and this one I liked the effect of even more. 

This tutorial involved creating and adjustment layer and adding wave form effects and changing it to the noise version. I could then mess around with how big the waves were vertically or horizontally, and see what looked best. I didn't want it to be too comical to look at, we wanted it to genuinely looking like it was bugging out, and so the waves weren't too in your face but were there just enough to be like 'ooh what was that?'

Before adding it straight to our final piece, I began to practice on one of my own holiday videos, and just spent some time experimenting with how I could place the adjustment layer, splitting it up and adding it in different places.

This is an example of what it would look like in the film. I really liked the effect and so did Nicole and we thought it would get across the point of the old technology fading away and falling out of use.

However we began to run into some problems when we tried to add the effect onto our final piece.

The file was already enormous as we wanted relatively decent quality and it was also 3 times the size of a regular screen.

This meant that when we added the adjustment layer and then tried to export it, the file came up with the finishing time estimation of about 9 hours. We understandably couldn't wait that long and for now had to hold back on adding the glitch to the end of the piece, but hopefully we'll be able to work on it and come up with a solution.

Final Shoot

After our first shoot was completed there were multiple things that needed fixing and improving upon in our next one.

To begin with, it had been a long time since we had used DSLR's when we took them out for the first shoot, and we wasted valuable time trying to remember where all the controls were and what all the right settings were for shooting in a studio. This time around we were able to set up the cameras a lot more quickly. We also changed the positioning of the table where the objects lay and incorporated the use of the step ladder which made it a lot easier when trying to film our birds eye view as we could place the camera further back and still keep it high up. 

We also spent a lot more time making sure we had as few shadows as possible in the shots this time, and to do this we were able to move the birds eye view camera further back to prevent this. This meant that instead of being positioned in front of the lights like last time we were able to pull it back a bit more, so it was less in the way of the lights and so the only shadows that were cast were from the actors themselves.

This did then raise another issue of the shadows of the actors on the white background, so we used softbox lighting which really helped.

This time around we decided to incorporate more actions into our film. 

When the actors arrived we talked them through our prepared list of actions we wanted to take place, and where we wanted them to place the items. Item placement was quite an important aspect of our work, and we worked hard to ensure that our shot was relatively balanced and we fit everything into the frame as much as possible. We made a conscious decision to leave the old fashioned phone in the frame through the whole piece as a nice little bit of consistency and a reminder that we still use some old fashioned technologies today. 

We had several practice run throughs of the piece before we began rolling to help the actors become familiar with the order of things. Once they began to get the hang of it, we started to film.

We did several takes, the first one or two we still had to edit where we were placing the items as the actors of course cannot see what is in the frame. We had place masking tape around the edge but it was only helpful in regards to what wouldn't be seen on camera, not how an item would look when it was in the frame.

 Once they got the hang of that we played around with timings, and how long each segment should last. We did multiple takes of different lengths, seeing what would work best.