The Shoot

Due to scheduling conflicts, the time and situation of the shoot at Mt. Pisgah was set for 5:00 AM this morning. However, ALL people involved slept through their alarms. The idea was to catch dawn (5:35am) and shoot in the pink/orange glow of dawn. Instead, we started meeting an hour late. I began to panic. This happens far too often when I plan a shoot (since none of the actors are paid). One of the actors (Lindsey Kerth) had helped me Wednesday for a film shoot in a different class (the cyberpunk project) and luckily she was free again to help out. The problem was she was driving and since we had lost an hour already we had missed our morning window. She had her own classes to attend until noon.
Early Afternoon Lindsey and my friend Sam Coggeshall (who is also lindsey's boyfriend) became the only two people available to shoot at the new time. I changed the set of shots that we would experiment with to the shots of the couple walking in the forest with the baby. Also you may recognize these two as the actors in the first attempt at "In The Forest" although as different characters.
We went down into the same valley I had found the weeks previous and played with various setups. I started by playing with compositions of light and foliage resembling some of the photographs I had taken. This was to be able to discuss how the lighting textures work with the song and which ones would be most appropriate. After shooting these variations, I went with what I thought felt right in terms of the lighting and played with two variations of the actions the couple deals with in the storyboards. I chose for Sam to carry a machete (and to not even have rags anymore for a shirt) instead of a gun because it felt more real. The first approach was to shoot the walking and hearing something and pointing the machete at the noise (like in the boards). The second approach was to have a more emotional and physical reaction of fear and posting up behind a tree and protecting Lindsey and the baby as he assessed the situation. I shot some sample footage of playing with depth of field to create the uneasy focus of the violence. Most likely I will only use the reaction shot of Sam's face after the attack and not the attack itself.
Tonight I have begun to play with the color correction to balance between the tones of "The Road" and "Children of Men" that I would like to achieve.
Also the shots of the spiked stick have been taken at many angles and pans and lifts so that next week I can begin to learn the techniques of implementing the 3D models!
Peace

Location! Mt. Pisgah

I have seen the promised land. We have a location for this shoot. I have been waiting two weeks for a call back from Mt. Pisgah County Park and I finally got it. Tis a go! This is great news because I had been up there two weekends in a row (fridays) using my girlfriend's car on the only hours it was available to me (during class) (someone shoot me).
The first trip involved getting lost for almost two hours trying to find it, then not having quarters for a parking pass, then running up one trail and glancing around, taking a cell phone photo, and running back. I knew only that I loved it.
The second trip I took trails close to the parking lot (in case of mass gear for shooting) and found THE PERFECT SPOT. I photographed it extensively before a downpour ended my trip. Rain obviously will be the biggest problem with shooting there. I've added a few of my photos on flickr (since blogger hates me) to demonstrate this exciting part of the process.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/outoflineproductions/sets/72157624013079819/

Pre-Production Loose Ends

Fixing storyboards turned out to be complicated although it was only a matter of changing a few. John and I had discussed that the emphasis should be more on the fear of the situation for both parties involved. This did strengthen the bond between the audience and the plight of the characters.
Also, another examination of the first attempt at the video was a sure sign that I simply worked too fast. I had shot all our footage in 2 1/2 hours. Sure my planning was careful but my production was not. My still shots were not still, my handhelds were too shaky, the make-up and costumes were not believable, and overall there was simply an absence of care involved in the footage. Sure it was in the concept and the editing but not the footage.
This discovery became the most important distinction between the process I had used previously and what would be expected of me to make quality work now and into the future. Experimentation had been the time for time management to mean fastfastfast. However, this new attempt at quality involved something else. Now, the project had become only a handful of shots. The shoot is planned to be of the couple walking through the woods near the end of the video. Much like in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" where a new writer is told to write about one side of one coin before talking about the economy; I will simplify. I have been working too much on a large scale with small time and now is the time to reverse those factors.

My shoot is scheduled for either Wednesday morning or Thursday afternoon depending on the weather (not that either day looks promising). I plan to shoot in HD for the first time as well. If I am lucky I will shoot the sequence involving all 4 end chararcters. Due to actor flakeyness this could easily drop to 3 or two (as it has countless times in the past).

3D models

The next problem I started dealing with was compositing and effects. I've so far neglected mentioning that this project is a second attempt at the "In The Forest" music video. Originally I had slated the video to be the final project in Rolfe Redding's Advanced Compositing and Effects course winter term. As his class does not allow outside audio on the projects a short film version was created called 2024: In The Forest. However I have not provided this version for any consideration due to my awful voice over work as well as a less than average use of compositing tools. Two of my composites turned out very poor due to the movement of the camera in those shots. Essentially heads on sticks looked like floating photographs of heads floating up and down jerkily on poles.
A version of this poorly costumed In The Forest is available to be seen as a first draft of the music video which I also edited. This edit removes any color correction and compositing. One can see my intentions, yet without the compositing it looks like a bunch of townies chillin in the forest for no reason. They barely look roughed up. It looks like ...well...a student attempt at a music video (hence the focus for a polished version this time around).
this version 1 can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9HX9kL3o

The first solutions to the problems with the first video were provided by John, who walked through the options available to me with 3D models of skulls and bodies to put in the background and how much more freedom this provided me. Due to my lack of knowledge regarding such tools however this would slow down the goals of the project in class. In terms of attempting the whole video, I was advised to only attempt one or two composites to start.

Early Development

For this project, the largest evolution in my planning process for a video was the way I approached storyboarding. Previously any storyboards I did were stick figures to quickly remind me of a general visual i needed to achieve a line of story. This was the first time I have ever made storyboarding a large part of the pre-production proces. In the past I may have sketched out a handful of boards to give the crew and cast a basic understanding of the style we were all working together on. Now, I've used them as if they were the video shot for shot. This has helped enormously. Initially they were created to think through composition better for that more polished look I want, yet now I see the additional pain that they have saved me. Through meetings with John Park (my professor) we agreed to plot photographs of the boards together in iMovie and synch them to the song. By doing this I was able to see what sort of timing each shot needed to flow well during PRODUCTION, and NOT in editing which was already a wonderful new thing for me. Watching the edited boards a week later with John, an even better understanding of this tool came about. Watching it with new eyes we were able to discuss the flaws in the harmony between the story I had created and the tone of the song. This first iteration of the video included a gunshot and some strange timing as to the drama, which when compared to the tone of the song did not work well together. It should be noted that the set of storyboards edited together was also already a second collection of storyboards from a first set. The first set involved many more boards and introduced way too many characters.
Below is a link to this early (second) set of storyboards as they were edited together:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmpSZ9T4gqc

Special Problems Class

I signed up for this course to have help working through my technical problems regarding my latest video projects. Over the past year, my interests as a writer had begun to include some elements separate from the harsh realism I had spent so much time with before. I began to digest science fiction by Phillip K. Dick and other sci-fi writers with similar reputations. This mainly surfaced due to my new interest in brain science, health/fitness, and technology. Previous to these areas of study, I had spent quite some time under the influence of art films and theatre. To put it simply this has been quite a departure.

Now, as a senior at the University of Oregon, I am beginning to transition from experimentation into (hopefully) a more polished line of projects at the end of this term. To accomplish this I notified musician friends of mine that I would be willing to make them low budget music videos for their bands at no cost. A number of bands approached me about this and I have turned these projects into different stylistic pieces to help serve my exploration of the fantastical. I am working currently on one Steampunk, one Cyberpunk, and one Post-Zombie-Apocalypse videos as the bulk of my studio credits. I have given each project its own time for research into the social statements made by the style, the style itself, and my reasons for articulating a video in the style to the song chosen.

In the case of the Post-Zombie-Apocalypse video (of which I'll be reporting about in this blog) the choices were made for me in that Luke Kuzava's song "In The Forest" which I chose to create a video for, is a PZA (Post-Zombie-Apocalypse) song on a PZA concept album. The song is about a group of people who live in the forest PZA and for protection they shoot anyone who tries to enter their small peace-achieved community.

I chose this song because of the interesting societal changes created using crisis to form a new world for these people. This set of fictional circumstances works for me to metaphorically examine the psychology of a militarily protected community (on a small scale). It also serves to possibly communicate the rights and wrongs of a tragedy becoming the catalyst for a move to a sustainable way of living. I also chose this song for the forest. I love nothing more than working outside and creating dramatic works of theatre outside and filming them.