This assessment is my first time doing a proper film project, so I am actually feeling a little lost in the beginning. For this project I teamed up with Samantha and Kay, because we all prefer making artistic and abstract film. However this film will be longer than the ones we used to make, we decided to add in a little narrative so the film will make more sense to audience even without us explaining the story behind it.

Samantha came up with the idea of the story. A girl indirectly caused the death of her boyfriend and it gave a big impact to her mind, the line between reality and dream started to become blurry for her. I like the story, and my style can fit in very perfectly into this project. After a few discussions, we finished the job distribution. Samantha will be the main director and photographer since she came up with the story, I will be assisting her on the technical aspects and also I am responsible for the abstraction of the movie, Kay will be doing post production.

To find inspirations for our film, we looked at “Lost Highway”, “In The mood for Love” “Playtime” and also a short film called “Wake”. “Lost Highway” really helped me develop ideas of abstraction, the lighting, close-up scenes, cold colors and illusions are very suitable for our project. On the other hand “In The Mood For Love” inspired us on the scenes of sweet memories and dreams. The red color, and ambiguous vibe is very interesting. “Playtime” is also on the abstract side, the film itself is also a little complicated and hard to fully understand, but it is the cold color throughout the film that really caught my attention. Because we are making a sad film, we need everything we can get to show a depressing feeling, so we decided to use less color like “Playtime” and try to give our audience a cold feeling throughout the film. The short video “Wake” is our inspiration for the car crash scene. Because this video is also about someone lost his wife because of a car accident, there are a lot of elements in there that we can learn from. For example, the scene when the car comes right at the viewer’s direction, it gives a little tense to the audience and also clearer showed them there was an car accident although there is no scene showing a broken car or two car crashing.

In our first shooting, we will be shooting the car crash scenes. Because we are going to move around a lot with huge lighting kits, we decided not to use film camera for this project and just use the DSLR cameras. The first shooting was a little rough, we spent a long time to get familiar with the actor, the garage we were shooting in and also the lighting setup. After we finished, we went home and started checking all the shots, and a lot of them were off focus. This problem happened is because Samantha usually uses her Canon 80D to shoot, which has a Live tracking auto focus feature, but she used my 5D Mark III this time that doesn’t have the feature and caused this problem. So we will have to shoot the scene again. Though exhausting, this have taught us a lesson, always check the settings before shooting.

After the 2 shootings, I analyzed a few problems we had during the shooting.

1. Creating a car crash

Since we don’t have enough budget and equipment and skills to make an actual car crash, we have to use scenes to give our audience an idea of a car crash. Our idea was shooting in the dark garage so the surroundings will be all black and I will stand in front of the car with a very strong light to imitate a car’s head light, Samantha will be sitting in the back seat shooting. In this scene we used the Dedo Halongen Spots lights, they are very helpful and easy to carry. The hardest part of this is to make everything look real. The angle needs to be precise so audience won’t be able to see the number on the dash board is 0km/h, and the exposure needs to be right so I won’t be seen on camera and the light will look real enough. It took us so time to get everything right.

2. Lighting

Lighting is this scene is very complicated. Because of Kay’s absence, we don’t have enough people to hand hold the lights. So when I am in front of the car holding a big light, there is no lighting on the actor. Therefore when Samantha is shooting inside the car, it’s too dark and audience will not be able to see our main character. Luckily the car has a sunroof, so I used the flashlight on my phone and put it right above our actor’s head to make the interior look a little brighter.

It was not the best way but due to the circumstances this was our only way. The effect was pretty good, so we decided to stick with this lighting and finished the scenes.

Because we are more familiar with everything, the second shooting was way smoother than the first one. After these two shooting, I have learned to be more careful with everything. Always check the shots and make sure they are right. Being more familiar with everything can also save a lot of time and improve the quality of work. It is also important to have enough people for the job, because of Kay’s absence we were having many problems when we were setting up the lighting and when we are carrying all the equipment around.

The next shooting is about the scenes of our female character walking around in the city to relieve herself and also think about her boyfriend who just died. Everything went well and efficient, except when we were filming at Melbourne Central. We were shooting on Latrobe Street, our actress will be walking in the crowd, and Samantha will be shooting from the tram station. Because of the long distance and busy traffic, it was very hard to get a good look. To communicate well I was with the actress on the street to tell her start walking when Samantha gives me the signal on the phone. It was very repeating because it was so hard to get a nice shot. The speed, timing and traffic all needs to be perfect. At the end we did get a nice look, but because she was walking in the crowd, it was a little difficult to see where she is, which might confuse our audience. So we were not sure if we should include this in the final film. As we finished the editing, we decided to not use the scene because it was very long and doesn’t have a clear focal point. If we put it in the final film it will ruin the tempo of the film. But I think it is alright, having more options is always good. Because we have more scenes than we need, we can try out different effects during the editing and decide which one works the best.

We also had a serious problem when we were shooting the memories scenes. What we needed was a sweet little moment of a couple, feeding each other food and smiling. However the chemical between the actor and actress is a big problem. As a Chinese, I know a lot of us are very shy, especially with strangers. Our actor is one of them. Because of this, it was very hard for them to look like an actual couple. We could literally feel the awkwardness from the camera screen.

I wanted this scene to be very sweet, and I wanted them to smile like they are actually feeling the happiness, I wanted this scene to make our audience to fall in love with someone. But it was hard. It took them a long time to finally reduce some of the awkwardness. The scene still doesn’t look that sweet, but it was the best we could get. This taught me another lesson, we need to make sure the personality of the actor/actress is suitable for the film before we start shooting. Because I haven’t done any casting job before, I didn’t make sure where our actor’s boundaries are. I will be more careful next time so this situation won’t happen again.

After all the shootings we did, and the help from the storyboard, we have all become more fluent and familiar with film shooting. So the last shooting went very well. In this part of the film, we have a transition of our female character finally losing her sanity and become mentally unstable. First she was just struggling, thinking about the past, but then, the scene showing her stepping down the stairs in the dark, and her weird smile will represent her finishing the transition. The stairs is a representation of the path to the darkness here. This part is inspired by David Lynch, the lighting, composition and even the postproduction skills are filled with David Lynch’s style.

During these weeks, we also had an experimental shooting at the victoria market. I managed to get some very nice abstract shots but my memory card somehow lost all of the footage. The next time I went there, the night market closed down already so we had to delete these scenes from the film. I tried very hard to plan out everything this time, but problems are still coming. This reminds me of an old Chinese saying, “Plans can’t keep up with changes.”

Throughout the shooting process, lighting is one of the most difficult parts to us. We have used a lot of different kinds of lights:

It’s actually embarrassing to say but after a lot of experiments, we found the phone flashlight to be the most useful one…. Ofcourse the Dedo Halogen Spots and the LED panels provided some help as well but the big size of them limited their practicability because we don’t have enough people to carry them. The mini LED lights are not bright enough and the Laniro Red Heads are just too yellow and the brightness can’t be adjusted. The phone flashlight is easy to carry and move around, it is also possible for the photographer to hold it on one hand while shooting with the other hand. It might not be the best lighting equipment but it was the most suitable one for our group.

We have also used many different lenses in this project.

Canon 17-40mm F4

Canon 24-70mm F2.8

Canon 100mm F2.8 Macro

Canon 50mm F1.8

All of them worked very well, the macro lens and 50mm has very shallow depth of field and the blurry background can help the audience to focus on the focal point. The 17-40 and 24-70 are very practical lenses that can fit into most situations. I wanted to use a 16-35 F2.8 but the that one is too popular and I couldn’t borrow one from RMIT, I would like to try it in the next project because the bigger aperture will be very useful at night.

Feedbacks from other people are also very important for a film. So after Samantha finished the rough cut, she sent it to a lot of people to see what they think. A lot of people couldn’t understand the story and they think it is a bit messy. Overall the feedbacks are a bit negative because of its complicated structure.

So we had to change the order of scenes a little to make it a bit more easier to understand. After everything is done, I also think the second version looks better, because the transitions are a lot better. The way different story lines switches looks visually better and smoother.

This project has taught me a lot. Before I did this project, I have almost zero knowledge on filmmaking. Now I have learned different uses of lighting equipment, how to set up a right lighting. I have experienced the process from making ideas into a storyboard to shooting little fragments and finally putting them all together into a proper film. I learned the importance of the chemical between casts and weather an actor/actress is suitable for a film. I always wanted to plan everything out perfectly so we won’t run into problems during the shooting process, but problems always seem to happen. I will still keep trying to avoid problems in the future!

In the future, I would like to be more serious about the casting job, and make sure we have enough people in the group to finish the job. I need to make sure the theme of the film and the filming crew fits together and everyone is on the same page. I will try to make the plans even more delicate so we can avoid problems as much as possible. Looking forward to film project 2!