Month: February 2018

Firstly, a film that I’ve seen called “Weekend at Bernie’s’ follows a similar premise. “Young insurance corporation employees who discover their boss, Bernie, dead. While attempting to convince people that Bernie is still alive, they discover that Bernie had ordered their deaths to cover up his embezzlement.”

The main points I might take inspiration from is the convincing people the victim is still alive. The following clips are examples of how they did this in Weekend at Bernie’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvITkVaOpUs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd1f5GeUWpg

I wanted to incorporate a drug sequence in order to get more conflict out from the characters. I have a very vague idea of how this will look but I know I want to use 2D animation in live action.

For inspiration I’ve looked at scenes in the film ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ however this does not represent my vision for how it would be filmed particularly because it doesn’t offer much in the hallucination aspect i think i might go down. One aspect to take note of is how the characters look.

Another drug sequence I’ve looked at is from the show “Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. At the end of season 7 episode 13 the gang performs a choreographed dance that looks quite good. At the end, it is revealed that they were on drugs and the dance wasn’t how it actually happened. This is another aspect I’ll look to include in my short film.

Trainspotting, a film that focuses on the use of heroin has a few scenes I’ve looked at. The scene described as ‘Junky Limbo’ shows the character Mark having lots of hallucinations. This is an aspect id want to look into more but on a not so serious level that Trainspotting had done because of the difference in genre.

A potential idea I had was to film 3-4 short sketches that follow the same narrative, but each has different genres. I’ve since decided to change this plan as I felt it was too much work to accomplish in a short amount of time. Reducing it to one short film will allow me to focus on certain elements in the film such as editing, colour grading and the use of other effects.

A continuation of last term, however, live action short film 5-10 mins long. Within this film I will focus on the colour grading, 3d models, potentially green screen, tracking and 2d animation in live action.

The narrative follows two friends, Jack and Aleks. Both of them are at a party when Jacks ex-girlfriend shows up with a new successful boyfriend. Out of jealousy Jack kills the boyfriend and needs to get the body out of the party without realising he’s dead.

I’d be using applications such as After Effects, Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve and Character Animator. I’d be focusing research and development on the use of software, understanding of colour grading, filming process and editing.

My aims this term are to gather new understandings of something I’ve not focused on before. I’ve always been interested in editing and colour grading but never really focused a project on this. Filming a short film will give me experience in this aspect as well as filming and working with others. Last term I focused on 2D animation and I want to use aspects of what I’ve learned from that project in this one. I really want to make sure this film looks good as I want to be able to use this as part of a showcase so I can show to other people the skills I have.