Small Things Assignment 2: Making and Reflection

Small Things Assignment 2: Deconstruction

Small Things Assignment 2: Idea Development

Small Things Assignment 2: Colour Grading

Scene Ideas:

Music:

Movement of the camera through architecture (walls, floors)

Motif of Food:

How someone eats is an indicator of their personality, background, habits etc. Eating food in a social setting is an intimate and vulnerable state to be in, I think it allows for some interesting character development to take place, as well as opportunities for cool looking shots of food. Affordances for this: getting the actor to eat many portions of the same thing/ eating something that has gone cold half an hour ago.

Cool stills:

I like the composition of this shot. The way characters sit demonstrates a lot about their personality.

Symmetry, visually pleasing.

Location:

Smaller, enclosed space; allowing for full exploration of the space and familiarity of it. The pictures chosen were from TV shows which due to its length has an advantage of making its viewers familiar with the set.

Scene:

After being kidnapped, the daughter of the president was brought by her abductors to meet with the mobster. This can take place either in the back room of a laundromat which serves as a front or in a basement, the majority of the scene takes place in this dimly lit environment. Motivations: the mobsters wanted to use her as a bargaining chip to gain more control over the surrounding area. The president’s daughter, although afraid, is trying to find ways to escape or even bring them to justice. What occurs next is a tense confrontation between the mobster boss, the daughter of the president as they battle it out through words. Meanwhile, she surveys her environment, looking for tools and routes for her escape. She uses her wits to turn the abductors against their boss and escapes.

Group Idea: (01/05)

Idea

2 to 3 people who are about to commit a robbery are disguised as janitors stand idly in an elevator, waiting to reach their floor, and random, somewhat comedic things happen like a fake moustache starts to fall off, or they drop their weapon etc. Others enter the elevator, make small talk etc. A tense atmosphere though. 3-4 vignettes make up the short film, same two main criminals but different comedic situations occur. Eg. An older woman starts hitting on one of the criminals, or an actual murderer enters the elevator and intimates the criminals.

INT. Elevator

The timid criminal stands anxiously whilst the serious one is getting impatient, checking his watch.

The elevator door opens once again, and a man wearing a ski mask enters. Upon entering, he stands in front and between the two criminal, his back against them.

The two criminal dismisses him as another person taking the elevator until a dripping sound can be heard, prompting the two criminals, as though synchronised, to slide their vision down towards the left hand of the man.

Drops of blood drip down from the knife.

Again, the two return their vision and turns to one another, both taking a step back, they are now fully against the wall of the elevator. They leaned in and speaks in a whisper so that the man does not hear them, so they think.

CRIMINAL 2

(Trembling)I’m starting to think this isn’t such a good idea after all. Are… are we gonna be like him one day?

CRIMINAL 1

Calm down, amateur. This is nothing that I haven’t seen. I got more than a knife dirty on my first job.

The man begins to wipe the blood from his knife onto his shirt, tucks it into his pants and licks the blood from his fingers.

CRIMINAL 1

(Now slightly worried) Ok. That’s fine, we are fine, everything’s fine. Everyone gets thirsty sometimes.

CRIMINAL 2

That’s not normal, man. Let’s just get off here and hop on the next one.

CRIMINAL 2 reaches out to press the button. Suddenly, the man grabs his hand, stopping it before it could reach the buttons. CRIMINAL 2 yelps in terror. CRIMINAL 1 leaps in to loosen his grip out of concern for his partner. The three have their arms locked.

THE MAN

If I let you out of here, you will call the police on me. That’s what the last guy did. And that just can’t happen. Not again…

CRIMINAL 2

Oh no, we would never call the police, right?

CRIMINAL 2 instinctively looks to CRIMINAL 1 for validation, both criminals are trying their hardest to talk their way out of this situation.

CRIMINAL 1

Nope.

The Man loosens his grip and CRIMINAL 2 retracts his hand and strokes it to relieve the pain. They both notice that the man still have yet to halt his aggression as he begins to reach for his knife.

CRIMINAL 1

(Without thinking, blurts out) We are actually criminals too.

CRIMINAL 2

(Swifty adding)And cannibals!

CRIMINAL 2 turns to CRIMINAL 1 and lowkey gestures a “cut it out” as if it was a little too much. CRIMINAL 2 nods after realising what he said was quite stupid.

CRIMINAL 2

(A little less energetic)Right, but we ARE killers, aren’t we?

CRIMINAL 1

(Ignores him)All we are saying is: we are in the same line of work. There’s no way we’d call the cops.

THE MAN

I guess you are right.

The man stops reaching for his knife.

There’s no way a cleaner would have a gun sticking out of his bag.

CRIMINAL 2 turns his head and realises that the tip of his gun was sticking out of his bag and quickly shuffles it back in. CRIMINAL 1 nudges CRIMINAL 2, frustrated at yet another mistake he has made today.

THE MAN

Oh well, I have to dispose of the leftovers.

The Man exits the elevator nonchalantly, leaving the two criminals fazed in the elevator as the door closes.

Location

While the film will be set inside an elevator, we decided that it would be difficult to film inside a real elevator. We will build our own set using corflute panels in someone’s house. Doing so should allow for easier camera placements and lighting can be adjusted to our liking.

Reflection:

From my original idea, there were still elements I want to implement into this group idea. Although the plot is different from what I had originally, I am still interested to utilise symmetry in this smaller enclosed space. The script writing process is still ongoing but everyone in the group has contributed to a scene. In doing so, each member has their own creative input into the way the project looks. This is the first comedy film I’ve written, and I would like to see how jokes written in the script will translate on screen; whether they will land or not. Another aspect I need to keep in mind is how visual comedy is done, I feel like doing it well would assist the writing.

Two Liner:

On the first homework, you seem to get off to a great start but seemed to stop in mid-sentence. I ‘d like to hear more – perhaps how you would approach that kind of exercise next time. Lenny and Van Similarly for this reflection. You didn’t really talk about shot construction or other technical issues.

While developing the ideas for how to film the script set inside a furniture store, we decided to film inside RMIT but getting an establishing shot from an actual furniture store. The first shot was shot on my iPhone, resulting in inconsistent colour temperature between the shots. This is why I initially used colour grading to match the look of the shots. In doing so, the video had a warm colour temperature throughout.

There was a myriad of issues that occurred during the filming process which we attempted to ameliorate in post-production. Due to the time constraint, we did not take the time to look through all the footage after recording. The biggest problem for me was the blocking of the shots, and lines were crossed often and continuity was broken between shots, resulting in characters being on the wrong side of each other and looking in the wrong direction. This occurred because the top-down view map was not utilised and was difficult for the first AD to understand.

This made it difficult while editing as many shots were nearly unusable, I made the decision to flip horizontally the reaction shots of Tom (John), and in doing so the direction he looks at is correct.

Another problem we encountered was the location, as other people walking past can be seen or people sitting on the couch can be seen. And in some extreme cases, the boom operator, the boom pole, the audio kit, and people passing by can be seen front and centre in the shot. I attempted to fix this shot by zooming in and cropping out the rest of the frame. Doing this did result in a quality loss but because this was the only shot we have of this scene, it was a compromise that I had to make.

Again, due to the time constraint, we did not have time to record wild lines, and without following the LOTAPOWFENGER, the internal audio for the camera was not turned on. Luckily, the audio recorded from the shotgun mic was usable, along with the atmos track made the audio component easier to arrange.

Making Bed:

I wanted to experiment with more facets of filmmaking after my previous homework, the 30-second video from assignment 1. Having my face in the video is an aspect I wanted to include, not just because Paul wanted everyone to show their face, but I wanted to see how eye lines can motivate editing. Therefore, while thinking of how the video will progress, I figured that by having a medium close up of me looking down leads to a more natural cut to the next shot of the mess on the floor. A technical issue I faced while filming was the camera and tripod placement inside my room which limits the range of shot constructions. In contrast to the stovetop, where there was really one direction where the camera is pointing towards, there were different places where the action occurs; such as me on the bed at the beginning, against the wall, next to the bed. In order to capture the different positions, the tripod had to be moved around a lot and there was not always space to place it. The result of this is that some shots had to be flipped horizontally for the placements of the bed and pillows to be the same. In the future, this issue can be solved by drawing out a top-down view map of the room and ensuring the consistency of item placement are the same. In addition, I wanted to explore the slow motion feature on my camera. By setting to a higher framerate in the camera and slowing it down in Premiere, I was able to achieve a slow-motion effect as seen at 0:11. This had the side effect of distorting the audio for that clip, I resolved this issue by replacing the distorted audio with the audio from another take without slowing it down and the inclusion of music. Overall I am quite happy with the way this video tuned out, but in the future, I would like to investigate lighting as most shots were poorly lit like 0:07.