Fields and Frames Presentation

For my fields and frames project, I was initially very unsure of what to do and it took me a long time to settle on something. I decided after some deliberation that I would use a combination of the projects I had previously most enjoyed, and those were the experimental film project and sound. I also used to do animation and I wanted to incorporate that as well, which I have wanted to do for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity to do so. I was especially inspired by the scratch film workshops where I drew a frame by frame short animation, and sort of remembered how much I enjoyed doing that sort of thing.
So I knew what I wanted to make, but I was still lacking in a theme. I did have one idea, but I was trying to avoid doing it because it meant I had to make a film about myself which wasn't something I really wanted to do... but I couldn't think of anything better so I decided to get over myself and just do it.
When I was 7/8, I was was told I had ADD, which is very similar to ADHD (just without the hyperactivity - mostly). My year 3 teacher had noticed I got distracted very easily, wasn't listening or paying attention and had trouble concentrating. These are symptoms everyone experiences every now and then, but if you have ADD or ADHD it's more of a happens all the time kind of thing, which can be very frustrating.

So my idea, is that I want to make an experimental film using film and animation, with sound as a very major part of the piece, and is about life with ADD (from my perspective anyway)

I then began to research films either in the type of animation that I wanted to emulate with my work, or that were relevant to the style of filming and editing I wanted to use.


30% (Women and Politics in Sierra Leone) from Anna Cady on Vimeo.

I found this film and was instantly struck by the dramatic animation style it was done in. I did something similar to this - on a much much smaller scale - on my foundation course and I really liked doing it. On this film I love it because in what is otherwise a relatively average camera frame, the animating brings a whole new level of colour and movement, which I find brings a lot more life to the film, and keeps it really interesting and enjoyable to watch. The work was done using oil painting and live action, and I like trying to figure out how it was done. I would imagine that they had glass plates or something that were placed in front of each frame and traced each image with paint. It must have been very time consuming. I think I might have liked it more if the entire film was done in this manner, I find the live action part of the film quite dull to look at in comparison.


ADHD from onnolee w on Vimeo.

This film I chose because it was about ADHD, and it becomes this sort of montage of overwhelming noises and distractions that pull attention away from what the subject is supposed to be doing. The sounds in the piece are introduced slowly and increase as the film goes on. There is also emphasis on the symptoms of ADHD, for example the post-it notes everywhere, and the forgetting of the keys, something in the background grabbing attention, and the constant restlessness, fidgeting and doodling.  The sound reaches a crescendo and falls away to silence, and I think it's really effective the way the sound builds up, creating this sort of sensory overload. While I enjoy this film I also think it comes across as not necessarily the highest quality. While I find is useful as a base, and to get some ideas from and helping to visualise my own plans, I would hope to largely improve upon this if I did something like it.

Feeling My Way from Jonathan Hodgson on Vimeo.

This piece is my favourite. It is an analogue film piece that must have been drawn over frame by frame to create this effect and I love the final outcome. It was created by animator/director Jonathan Hodgson in 1997, and is of "a journey from home to work through the filter of the conscious and subconscious mind. Through use of moving collages and painterly animation combined with live-action footage, the viewer is able to share the traveller's experiences and his mental reactions to the trials and triviality of urban existence."
This film is what really inspired my idea, and is what I want to experiment with doing for my piece - although mine will possibly be more experimental/erratic, and less linear.

Shoot

For the shoot, I assisted with lots of different aspects of it. Most of the time I was the clapper for the camera, which was not something I had ever done before so I watched a lot of youtube tutorials on how to do it properly. We had a slate taken out of the equipment hire department and I used masking tape to correctly write down the numbers and changed them with every new take. I pre-prepared all of the numbers and letters I was going to require and set them all out, to minimise the time it would take up between each new take. I also kept a list of which shot we were doing and taped it to the back of the slate so that I could keep up with where we were up to, and could let the director/AD or producer or any of the crew know if they asked.

We spent a lot of time marking out where we were going to be moving the dolly by using masking tape on the floor, so that we could ensure consistency in our shots, and in addition to this we used masking tape again for the where the chairs were placed in different areas for different parts of the film. This enabled us to keep up the continuity of the shots. We also had different lighting set ups for each act.

Overall I think the shoot went really well. It was so interesting and rewarding being a part of a film crew and seeing how all the different areas people were working on came together to create something we had made up, and have an actual result from nothing.
In addition to this I learned a lot of really valuable skills such as how important communication on set it, and working things out together. Because everyone comes from such different backgrounds we had a lot of different ideas and which was great as we were able to use all these different ideas to make things work.

Rehearsal

Before we started filming, we made sure we had time do test our lighting and run through what we would be doing on the actual shoot days with the actors. 

We went over different parts of the film with them, and made sure they felt comfortable with the how the narrative was flowing, and with the movements they were going to be doing. This was especially important with the fight scenes as there was a higher risk of someone injuring themselves. Our AD worked with the dancers as they carefully choreographed the battle sequences so that while it looked quite violent, both actors were completely in control the whole time. 

it was very useful from our perspective as well as it gave us opportunity to actually see what it was going to look like and envision the shots with more accuracy. It really helped us to build up an idea of what was going to happen on the shoot days, and we could change bits and chat to the actors about what they thought as well which helped bring a new dimension into the film as they have different perspectives than we do as filmmakers.

Rehearsals are also important as they give you a chance to see what areas of the film don't work as well as you thought they would, and gives you a chance to edit things before shoot day.

Set Build

To do the studio shoot, we had to build our own set. 

This was something none of us had done before, and was a very exciting new experience. We had to lift up heavy wooden frames and nail them together to form the walls of our set. Our course was split into two for the shoot so we had to design a set that would work for both of us, and have a quick turnover time.

We also had to strip down all the old wallpaper and paint that had been layered up over years of reuse, which was very time consuming, so that it would be smooth when it came to wallpapering over the top. The wooden segments were also very heavy and required 2-4 people to move around, and then someone to come and drill nails in while it was being held up. The other team were only using one half of the set, as they didn't need the door so we had a larger set to manage.

We needed the door as it was the mirror. We decided early on that having actual mirrors on set would be hazardous and so we came up with the idea of having the door as the mirror. This was what triggered our need for two actors. They acted as each others reflection.

We then had to wallpaper, and as we were designing our own background we used plain white wallpaper to cover the entire set. Once it had dried, we painted a layer of grey paint over the top using rollers and paintbrushes.

Once this first layer of paint had dried, we used a technique called stippling to cover the walls in brown splotches, to be the base layer. We then added areas of purple using the same technique, and went over it again with a wet brush and blended the tones together. This wall design was only put into place on the side of the set that was designed to be the inside of the mirror where the Id lives, as it gives it a much more earthy and animalistic vibe.

We had a very specific set design idea, which involved dark and dramatic lighting on one side of the set and bright high key lighting on the other. We used the dark browns and purples on one side of the set and on the other we used a light pastel purple. The superegos side of the set is tidy and neat, with inspirational posters and smart shoes. The Id's side of the set is designed to look like a dark and twister alter-ego and has sexualised images on the walls and references to drugs, as well as leaves all over the floor and party heels thrown under the desk. These props are all designed to highlight the contrast between the two sides, whilst still showing an eerie similarity.

Auditions

To find suitable actors for the Id and the Superego, we had to advertise the roles and use any contacts we might have to get people in to audition. We found a few actors who were interested and asked them to come in and run through some of the ideas we had for the roles with us. As my main role was storyboarding, once that was mostly done I decided to throw myself in to lots of other aspects of the shoot. I knew that this would be a useful experience and I would be able to think about how the camera angles that I had drawn would work for the camera team, whilst thinking about how each individual would work best for which role.

Molly and Gabby were our first choice for our film, and all we had to decide was which one of them would work best for which role. They both had very unique styles of acting and were clearly very good at what they did, so we had several group meetings to decide who was going to play who.

In the end we decided that Gabby, whilst she showed a lot of really intricate emotion and played off of the idea of the mirror really well, would probably be best as the Id as her facial expressions showed a really interesting childlike aspect when she was playing around with the idea of the animalistic alter ego. We liked this because the Id is supposed to be instinctual and selfish, acting on behalf of it's own survival, and very small children have that sort of vibe, as they are still in that vital development stage, where in fact, the Superego hasn't fully developed yet and so they are unaware of how not to behave socially and if they become hungry then they wont take into account that other people might need something else more.
Because of these connotations in her performance, we decided she would definitely be the best fit for the Id.
Molly showed a much more vulnerable side in her audition, and the fear came through a lot more in her movements and breath. This was a vital part of the Superego, as the discovery of her alter ego trying to escape the prison of the mirror was a terrifying one, and so Molly brought a lot of susceptibility to her performance.
Both actors had worked together in the past, and they fact that they were already comfortable together worked in our advantage, as when they were acting jointly their acting had a really nice tone to it that was perfect for our film.

In addition to myself being there, we also had the director, the assistant director, our producer, assistant producer, the DOP and camera operator. Our DOP and camera operator were able to film the auditions so that we could show them to the crew members who weren't at the auditions and we could discuss the matter as a group. We were all making notes throughout the auditions to refer back to later on. We drew a line on the floor in tape so that when we gave the candidates various exercises to complete they could imagine that was a mirror. We also provided them with a real mirror for another one of the exercises, and we provided them with some music as well.

Storyboard Final Draft

As this is the final draft of the storyboard, I spent more time on the drawings for this one and there are also a lot more frames in total. For this storyboard there was a total of 28 frames for the film, and I tried to make sure to cover every scene as fully as I could, without being excessive. When doing the drawings, I did sometimes struggle with making things like the mirror look more real, like it wasn't just an empty doorway or something, and often had to make small adjustments to what I was doing such as adding lines across the glass to show that it's there, and using different tones within the mirror.

I was able to reuse some of the drawings from my other draft as some of the shots were the same, which meant I had some additional time to be able to re do some of them to improve the quality of the drawings. I also had to re do some of them because I hadn't had the final shot list, and so they had to be changed to match what the camera was going to be doing and how the DOP wanted to frame the shot. I also tried to include the direction the camera was going to be moving in the shots to make it easier for the director and AD to know what was going on, and wrote about what the camera was meant to be doing and whether it would be using a dolly, slider or shoulder rig and anything like that.

To improve the accuracy of my drawings, I often took photos of my own hands or arms so that I could draw them to look more realistic. I also asked people to help me with the photos so that I could have more than one arm in the photos at a time. I also had to keep up the same style of drawing throughout which required a lot of referring back to the sketches I had already done, and in addition to this I had to be observant about continuity and making sure if I had drawn something one way in a frame, that in follow up frames it would have to be the same, which was sometimes hard to keep track of. The angles in mirrors are tricky as well, as when I first began drawing I had to ensure that if in one shot the character was moving her arm in one direction, then the reflection would go in the same way but with the opposite arm to what you would think... if that makes sense.

Making the Storyboard

I made the storyboard on photoshop as it is the adobe software I am most familiar with for drawing, and did multiple practice attempts before actually starting the storyboard.

I began with the first scene, which was described to me as the Superego/main character walking down a hallway into a room. I began by drawing the anatomical circles I usually use for drawing a body, and roughly joining them together before adding more detail.

I used layers to separate different parts of the drawing process, such as 'sketches' 'background' and 'ink'. This helped me to keep the parts of the drawing in order and enabled me to edit parts of it without changing any other aspect of the piece, making my work a lot simpler and keeping everything more organised.

I made the choice to keep it in black and white before I realised that that was the norm for storyboards anyway, and I also made the decision to have a faint off white background so that I could emphasise any highlighting work that I did. 

Once I had completed an image, I would merge the layers together and copy and paste it into my rough storyboard template.

When beginning the drawings, I would always do multiple sketches, just to give myself a rough outline for each layer so that I can build up a more detailed figure.

I also did more research and found some examples of storyboards so that I could do a more accurate template for my own storyboard, as the first one I attempted wasn't very accurate.

This is one of the examples I found that I used as reference, I
noticed that there was a much neater set up for the text boxes
 and the outlines of the drawings themselves which I tried
 to incorporate into my next set of draft of the storyboard. 

This is another source drew inspiration from.
I like the drawing style a lot more on this one, and I think the
shading is don really well. I don't like how the layout is done
as much though, so I think I'll keep to my three by three theme,
as I feel you can see what's going on much easier.

I found that it gave me a better idea of where I was aiming for when I had a clear end to the storyboard that I could see. It also made the template look more professional and gave it a sense of completion. I also added text boxes underneath each frame with more detailed notes about what the camera is doing in each frame and what is supposed to be happening. I used arrows to show the direction of the storyboard, and to show the snake pattern that the story followed across the page.