For Film Project 1, I’m working alongside Pavina and Lyreca. The whole process was quite long, thus I’ll be diving them into three sections.

Planning:

At first, it was a bit hard to decide what to do as we were just loaded with just so many ideas. But we all agree to make cinematography a big part of our movies, meaning we’ll be prioritising the visual look of the film. We finally decided to settle on a concept of “boy meets girl”, a more refined version of my individual pitch.

The concept we agreed on is that the movie will have minimal to no dialogue. Our focus was to capture emotions and deliver a great visual experience. We also decided to each have a go at operating camera, directing, scripting and editing.

Regarding our inspiration, we were inspired by mostly Asian movies. For example, the dark alleyway scene from “In The Mood For Love” is very aesthetic, especially the slow motion effect of them walking.

There is also the ending scene of “Kimi no Na wa” (below), where the boy and girl crosses each other and then turns around which was packed with emotion.

After discussing face to face and through chat, we finally finalised our script. We didn’t give the “boy” nor “girl” a name as it didn’t matter. The movie will lean towards the girl’s perspective, thus it will start with the girl’s daily life. Then, the girl and the boy will have a few encounters, noticing each other more as they do, and then in the final encounter, the two will finally actually talk to one another. We named the film “Missed Moments”.

For the actors, I volunteered to play as the “girl”, but finding someone to play the “boy” was a struggle. James suggested a talent website called Starnow, which we considered, but just when we were desperate, we found Aaron.

Regarding the locations, we choose those that we consider pretty, so it aids our aim of great visual. There are the pier in Docklands, Victoria state library, Yarra River, and Chinatown. We originally planned to shoot at the Little Library in Melbourne Central but after finding out that we couldn’t, we changed it into state Library. All the location are public spaces, so we didn’t need any forms filled.

Finding a schedule to shoot was highly challenging, since everyone has very different schedules, especially Aaron. Thankfully we had the mid sem break, but even so, only Wednesday and Thursday were possible, so we had to shoot again the week after.

Shooting

Our first shoot was at the State library. We shot it with Lyreca’s sony a6000, and all three of us took part in directing as well as holding the camera. Aaron was cooperative and did well. We tested our shots, played with angles and retook them until we were satisfied. We brought along our tripod but unfortunately, the security didn’t let us use it.

Another two scenes (“Yarra River” and “China town”) were shot the next day. My friend (Terry) helped us carry around the lights we borrowed from RMIT. We shot the river scene at a nice spot in front of Southgate during the Golden Hour. The Chinatown scene was shot in this alleyway with a neon red light banner on the wall. We used the light panel to light up the actors’ faces as it was quite dark. We experimented a little bit before ending up with soft lights as it looked good on the camera.

Finding time to shoot the week after was as hard, so only me and Lyreca shot the girl’s alone scene. We shot it at Docklands in the afternoon for good sunlight, and also some in my house.

The only scene left was the tram scene, which we shot the day after, when everyone was available. However due to the gloomy weather, we decided to change the location from the Docklands tram stop to Southern Cross Station, tweaking the script a bit. We did have to deal with so many people as the station as well as the train can be really crowded, but thankfully no one had any problems with us shooting.

During each shooting session, we made sure to take as much shots as possible so we’ll have a lot to work with. We also made sure to take a lot of beautiful shots to make sure we have the supporting materials to work with.

Editing

We decided to split the editing workload by scenes. I edited the girl’s scene and the river scene with Adobe Premiere. I was contemplating whether or not to have only background music playing, since there are no dialogues. When we finished our early edits, we uploaded them into the drive and then gave feedback to one another. We decided to ditch the opening scene of the girl alone, since it doesn’t go well with other scenes.

After screening our rough cuts in class, James suggested to not rely on music, and we agreed, so I re-edited the river scene and this time I implemented ambience noise and appropriate sfx, only playing the music at certain times. It was hard to obtain free sfx but I found a great website (freesound) that does just that. This was my first time editing real-life sfx (e.g footsteps), so it was challenging as I had to find sounds that really matches the visual, and also sync them at just the right times. I also did colour grading, and mainly adjusted brightness, highlight and shadow to make sure the film visual is consistent throughout.

We also tried to cut down the duration of the film as the rough cut was too long. Unfortunately, Pavina’s laptop lagged which caused an audio and visual sync problem, so I helped fix it. She edited with Davinci Resolve so I had to basically re edit the whole library scene, which I’m happy about since I was able to polish it. Regarding creative development, I think I’m getting better in choosing and assembling shots. I used to edit videos only according to the beats of a song, but by editing for the film, I was able to improve my sense of rhythm without the help of music.

Then, the last step was to put everything together.  After re-editing my parts until everyone was satisfied, I uploaded them to the drive and Lyreca was in charge to put all the edited scenes together. And so, our movie is finally finished. I’m happy with how it turned out as the story flowed nicely from scene to scene. More importantly, the visual of this film looked great, especially the night scene in Chinatown.

– – – –

There were many difficulties and problems throughout the whole process. We set a certain criteria for the “boy” but finding an actor was way harder than we thought. One of the biggest problem was finding a time that worked for everyone as everyone had different schedules so it was almost impossible to meet. We communicated mostly online, which was a bit hard especially for the editing stage, because I had to wait for a reply, which could take a while at times. There were also times when things didn’t go our way, but I’m thankful that we as a group, rather than panicking, worked together to sort it out.

Despite all that, this project has been a great experience. I got the chance to go out and shoot in a group, edit, and even act for this movie. I learned a lot, especially the importance of teamwork. Working in a team means that everyone has to contribute, and this includes ideas, time and effort. I was focused on having everyone do equal work, but then I realised that there is no completely equal workload, nor is it the point. If I was able to do more, then it’s okay, because the point is to help one another achieve our goal.

In the end, I’m proud of our teamwork and the film that we made. Our film delivered great visual, but more importantly, because everyone put their best efforts. I hope you enjoy our film “Missed moments“.