Digital Media R&D

There are two examples of how I want this short film to look. One is taken from the series Masters of None season 2, episode 10. In one scene the room is separated by Blues and red/pink colours. I want to achieve something similar to my film.  The other example is a short film called ‘The Woods’ from the YouTube channel Sugar Pine Seven. They use similar lighting to the episode previously mentioned. They mainly use light blue, normal light bulbs, and pinks but keeps the scene low light. This could have been done to keep the focus on the characters rather than the lights.

I want to go for this look as a way to symbolise the moral compass of the two main characters. The lights used would go from blue to red as the film goes on.

Below are the two example from above;

I want to incorporate some aspects of 2D animation. Firstly, I will look to use Adobe character animator. Because of the use of colours in the film, I will have to draw in relation to this. Before I commit to this method I will have to practice this before. If this method fails I will need to look to other methods or change the script.

Below is the video process I went through in my first practice.

Firstly I tried to use an exported version of a Puppet I used last term. I wanted to explore this method as I had big issues with the dynamic link. As you can see no matter what mode the file was in it always looked transparent. After looking at different way to fix this I gave up and used the dynamic link which looks a lot better. One thing I have to keep in mind is perspective. I need to think about the height that the character has to be as well as the lighting.  The scene will be lit but the character won’t have that lighting. I will have to keep that in mind that I need to draw the character relative to the scene.

This was the first time in over a year that I’ve tried to track something in After Effects. My memory was fairly hazy in this respect. it took me a moment how to apply to track the motion rather than just play through it. As you can tell the tracking in this isn’t very good. The puppet is jumpy. I will have to research a way to prevent this from happening as it could cause a big headache in post-production.

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.