Tuesday 8 June 2010

Moon Tea - Final Edit

Heres the final edit of my 1 minute video.






I definitely think I'm going to go back to this at some point to fine tune it and make it look more professional.

2 minute video - The Chase

For the 2 minute video I worked with Matt Taylor and Robbie King.

The story we decided on was based on something that happened to Robbie and his friend one night. It focuses on two main characters who are walking through the park and are feeling pretty paranoid due to them being high. They then see two shady looking characters point at them and start running in their direction, which causes them to run away. This then escalates to a whole chase scene, which comes to a halt due to a busy road. The two shady characters draw closer to the main characters cowering at the road, and begin jogging on the spot. When the traffic clears the joggers continue with their run.

This changed slightly when we were filming in Hyde Park. As we were walking around scouting good filming locations, i saw a bit of a hill, and decided it had to be incorporated into the video somehow. After a quick break while discussing changes to the video, we decided to have Robbie and Luke, the two main characters to jump over this hill to add a bit more action into the scene. This resulted in Robbie's hat falling off which made us decide to change the ending. The new ending would involve Robbie losing his hat and running away, and the joggers see this and pick up his hat to give back to him.

Heres my final edit:

1 Minute Video

For the 1 minute video brief I wanted to do something humorous, which involved both live action, and 3d animation. Basically I wanted to make an instructional video on how to make a cup of tea, but with a twist. I wanted it to be done on the moon. The reason behind this, is because one of the most standard videos people tend to make is instructional videos on something simple. And i wanted to take that something simple, and turn it on its head, to add some edge to it. I wanted the audience to start watching it and think to themselves "oh no, not another instructional video on how to make a cup of tea...how boring" and then by the end of it, completely shattering their minds. Well that was the plan at least.

In my head i knew exactly what i wanted it to look like, so i drew up a storyboard and came up with a script. As for the actor, there was only one person who could bring this video to life, and that was Thomas McCoy, due to his passion for tea.

Heres my original script:

"Hi there, today I will be showing you how to make the perfect cup of tea. We'll be doing it a little different today so we have to hurry. (running into garden)"

"(arrives on moon) That was a fun ride, ok so firstly we need to boil the kettle. (sped up, tom bouncing around on the moon in the background.) Next we add the tea bag and  boiled water. We then leave this for a few minutes and stir. (as he pours the water it starts floating around, tom attempts to get it back into the mug.) "

Ok so while filming the scene inside the spaceship, tom accidently dropped the mug off the desk, so i thought to myself "ooh that would be a nice twist" so i put a note down, basically incase all else failed.
After we finished filming and i started editing the footage together, a few problems began to arise. First of all was we filmed at night, so when tom ran outside you couldn't really see much. Second problem was again with it being night, the 3d rocket didn't really fit into the scene. I tried fixing this by lowering the brightness of the rocket footage. This method sort of worked but still looked a bit sketchy, which was also due to when the rocket blasts off, the surroundings don't light up. I had a solution for the ignition, which was to put a bbq in the middle of the garden, in the rough area where the rocket would be placed, and then squirting petrol on it to cause the surroundings to light up as if a rocket was taking off. (sounds very dangerous, but it would have been very controlled) In the end i decide to reshoot some of the footage during the day, which fixed the problem of the rocket fitting in, and the visibility.

Another problem i came across was the fact that my main actor also had his FMP to finish, so I didn't want to take him away from that too much, so some things were done very last minute. I decided to go with the mug breaking idea, due to time constraints, but i think it added a bit more humour to it, and made it less like a boring instructional video.