Having gone round the city recce-ing various multi-story carparks, Reza and I settled for one along Little Bourke Street. It has good access to the building, and the lift goes all the way up to the roof where there were a few cars scattered around. It didn’t seem too crowded at the time we were there, and it had a very nice view of the city scape from the roof. And, if we were lucky, at the right time, we could get the perfect lighting from the Sun passing through neighbouring buildings, or reflecting off glass panels. We would have to play by ear, or in this case, by our eyes, on the day itself when we’re out here shooting our experiments to see how the lighting conditions will be like.

At the same time, we took the opportunity to brainstorm ideas for our zombie chase scene. I decided to take on the approach shooting this like a trailer. After all, we are required to submit a 30 second screener at the end of this semester to showcase to our fellow studio mates. Hence, I thought the trailer concept would be the best way to exhibit several shots, our areas of interests/research, all in one sequence. For example, I would do a colour grade over this sequence as how a zombie apocalyptic film would look like, and Reza would do his foley and sound design base on the chase scenes. (Ie. Footsteps, zombie grunt, screams, ambient sounds…)

Since there isn’t much told in a trailer, we would not be so tied down on the narrative or a plot, just a basic storyboard of a zombie chasing a person. Maybe if we do get the time, we might do a little background story of why they’re chasing and how the zombie became a zombie, but that is probably as far as we would go in terms of writing a narrative, as we intend to focus on the area where we would like to experiment. As for Helen and Trong, we believe they could have great input on zombie movement, camera movement around the zombie, and the overall mood of the trailer to see if we can achieve the zombie apocalyptic feel overall.

I’m also glad to say that I’ve managed to get a mate of mine who’s in Singapore to do a basic film score over the trailer. My approach to this is to get a proper piece to show at the screening at the end of the semester, and not something rough, hence I believe music is a key element in trailers and teasers to drive the overall look and feel of a film. This overseas collaboration not only boosts teamwork effort, but also bring recognition to people (for what it’s worth) not bounded to RMIT. I am pretty sure in the industry there are instances where local companies collaborate or sub-contract their work out to overseas production houses for a torrent of reasons, budget, production, location, people, or even politics….the list goes on. Of course, this comes with its own set of challenges, such as having to put my point across, it would not be as easy to telling him face to face, I might have to draft a spot list with proper timecode to cue him when to insert music or when to dial it down, if need be. Looking forward to another set of collaboration, with an overseas partner this time.

Happy times are ahead, and we’re slowly but surely drawing closer to the end of the semester. Heat is up (not so much literally, it’s getting cold by the day), and everyone seems to be crunching their way through this time of the semester and very soon that little shimmer of light at the end of the tunnel will eventually blow up into the surrounding.