What's the Story - Continued

Just last night, me and another editor started and finished reviewing our footage from this next scene.  We took notes and built a time log of cut ins and outs for each take in the footage, which camera angle, etc...  for the editing process later on.

Our first shoot consisted of two scenes shot in the same day.  We had a lot of source material to work with and conditions for shooting weren't ideal.  Again, with little to no rehearsal time, it took us the longest time to get through this scene.  So here are the storyboards from Scene 8 of "Red Hawk Rising".

The first thing we wanted to establish in shooting was finding all our camera angles for the scene.  From here we continued with the wide shots to transition from the scene before it into this.  Now, before you say "Hey, I found a flaw!" We already realized this and yes, we didn't catch it during the shoot.  Our main actor had switched shirts after all of our wide shots and going forward in all of our close-ups he's wearing just a black tank-top.  This is one of the easiest mistakes to overlook and the easiest to catch if you're paying attention.  So right away, all of our wide shots are useless if we wanted to actually build the film.  However, we only need small segments from the scene to build the trailer with so I believe we're okay still!

Being a dialog-heavy scene, it was critical to find the right timings and when to switch to what camera.  However, we only had one camera and with little to no rehearsal, each take was very rough and completely different,  so during our review we spent more time pinpointing audio and video segments from each character's standpoint and the overall performance to hone in on what worked and what didn't.  During editing this will make it a lot easier to rely on notes with specific time-code markers to build continuity in the scene.

With story-boarding on this scene, conveying the scene of serious dialog has to do with the characters and positions so i looked through the footage roughly for certain frames that I feel best conveyed the bulk of that camera angle's take.  These were also my reference point for building the action I discussed in the previous blog entry.

Because of the colors from the stills I extracted it made it very easy to do some basic adjustment layers after running the action script and creating a separate action for that,  then combining the two once I was satisfied with the results for multiple stills.

We were actually doing dress rehearsal as part of our shooting so we had a lot of redundant footage with terrible audio just as practice.  Once we got the mic and boom in place, the first issue was our location.  We were facing the direction the wind was blowing, and we were right next to the shoreline on the pier we were at.  That's the Golden Gate in the background you can see in several shots.  So, wind and shoreline noise made it rough to get good audio. 

 

Typically productions will hold the mic above and out of frame to get the audio, but it was to our advantage based on our posture and the elements in the environment that using a cardioid pencil condenser mic, covered with a couple socks (regular socks!) on a boom just on the outside of the railing below the frame aiming up at us in the frame worked out perfectly!

 

The sequence I've posted in is still only in a rough order.  The actual storyboard will take place during our next meeting with the crew as we head into editing.

With the story-boarding for this scene, with so many camera angles to work from, I want to try and establish a good perspective for cutting around dialog.  So having as many angles as possible to cut through and displaying them in storyboard will allow us during editing to fine tune the story, and how many or few cuts to do.  Or, at the very least, give us a good guide to work from and improve on in the future if we re-shoot.

Let me take a moment to describe our work-flow.  It's a bit backwards compared to how a professional indie project might go (or any professional production for that matter), but for what we're doing it's a start.

When we started out, we: small group of friends wanting to do some type of project - started out doing little skits and filming them, which quickly turned into "lets do something bigger".  I started developing a quick story outline, which then turned into a complete rough treatment.  With some minor tweaks to the treatment which conveys the ENTIRE story for the short film's plot, we decided to move onto to shooting basic scenes to build a trailer with. 

Our first scheduled day to shoot was pushed back as no one was available to go, so I took some time to manage the project and pushed out another month, which then allowed me to refine the treatment a bit more, while still keeping it loose enough to leave room for any major changes that might arise from production problems.  Come the last week before the shoot, I roughed out the dialog for scenes 5 and 8 to be shot that Saturday.  I proceeded to send and make copies of script and treatment outlines for everyone to take and practice with during the trip out to San Francisco.

The idea to shoot for the trailer quickly became shooting the entire scenes as if we were building the short film.  The reasoning behind this is that we get the time and experience to play and experiment with the story directionality, visual styles, and establish source material to build storyboards and refine the treatment further so that if the trailer picks up enough attention for potential investors to do the actual indie film justice, we'll be well prepared and documented!

I'm already scouting locations for the next major scene elements we plan on shooting, out of 9 scenes, 2 have been shot, the other 7 are in development for staging and location scouting; 2 of which are completely ready for production (no dialog in sequences).  Once we have staging diagrams and locations I'll be scheduling the next shoot :)

What's the story?

As I write this I've been hard at work on two different video projects.  One is getting a production company off the ground for a potential TV Series aiming for the national networks, and the other is an indie film project I started with some friends.  See? I've been busy.

I normally wouldn't put this stuff up here, but I felt it had much to do with my creative process as  I wrote the story, and shot, and attempted to act in the project.  So, here are storyboard shots from scene 5 to "Red Hawk Rising".

All these stills are somewhat in the right order.  I started with our source footage for the trailer which is also PreViz.  I then extracted the stills I felt conveyed the scene or cut best, and created a custom Action in photoshop for several different styles.

Every so often, the action would result in the posterization looking too washed out or too burned in, so I tweaked the action by deleting some steps and redoing them towards the end of the action list.

This allowed me to quickly just hit undo after I had applied the action to a new frame and quickly change some values and re-create the effect to fit the shot.

This hugging shot above I just loved.  However my source material was very dark and the initial action list had high-key threshold values that caused them to come out in complete silhouette.  Thanks to the custom action and proper order of actions in the list, I just hit the undo button once and was able to tweak the values to get this look you see above.  Much, much better!

I'm sure by now you're starting to see the picture for the sequence of events happening here, but just in case you haven't noticed;  He's about to propose to her.  Storyboarding is as much an art as any other field.  Trying to find a limited number of pictures to tell a story is much like a comic book or graphic novel.  How clearly can you convey action and how many frames do you need to do to make it clear what's happening?

Some of these storyboards you will notice convey the same shot from maybe a slightly different angle, as you can see below.  The main mugger with the 504 beanie for example we got several angles of footage for the same walking sequence when they confront the couple.

Multiple camera angles achieved with just one camera and little to no rehearsal led to getting A LOT of footage for source material.  However in the end we were satisfied with most of our shots.

When we shot our Trailer shots, we only had one camera for which to do multiple takes.  Now, we are not working with a budget.  This is a project that my friends and I are doing.  The end result isn't as big of a worry for us as going out and having fun with the experience.  However, we're serious about what we want to do, so the end result will depend on how much planning we put into our production.

I also tweaked the action to purposely leave out the posterization effect on certain sequences.  You'll see more that look different below.  I felt these needed to convey more of the details than you could see with the posterization effect on.  So instead, I left the effect off, and played with exposure levels on the water-coloring effects to get the detail to pop out.

I'm sure by now you can tell these feel templated and the whited out center of the image is getting old.  I noticed this too very quickly but there is a decision of quality vs time spent in play that I felt it didn't need that much attention.  Overall, the storyboard shots do well to convey the action while at the same time removing all of the fine detail that could distract from receiving the story.  The balance needs to be in conveying what matters most in the shot while hinting at other things like camera angles, locations, action, and color theory. 

Just above - as I mentioned earlier, certain shots needed to convey more detail, and in this hand shot you can see the posterization effect and washed out center-image needed to be removed to convey the emotion of the sequence.

Depending on how important during previz is to the production, Color theory may play an important role in conveying things like who's good and who's evil, or the particular visual style of a film.  When these things aren't as important to convey in the storyboarding (like these here) You don't have to worry so much about what colors people are wearing or clothing or what background information is in your scene.

Again, these are in a rough order.  The next step is to arrange them in the chronological order based on the treatment I had written.  The treatment is also going to be roughed out before previz is finished following critical discussion about the shots we obtain.