Week 11

With our post-production coming along nicely, we spent this week polishing up our scenes and prepping our unedited scenes for special effects. Unfortunately, we couldn't spend as much time working on the project this week because we had to devote a lot of time to our DVPP film.

That being said, we still did make some progress. About 70% of our film is fully edited and ready to be implemented into Adobe Flash and DVD Studio Pro. We now have some really awesome soundtrack pieces, as well as some nice sound effects.

I spent some time composing the 'main theme' for Aether - titled Aether's Descent. It's a stirring rock piece that builds up anticipation, and will be used in one of the major quick time scenes as well as the end credits. I composed it using Garageband, and it consists of about 5 different instrument tracks - a repetitive drum beat, a distorted bass line, rhythm guitar and two powerful electric guitars for some awesome riffs. It really helps set the atmosphere in the action scene.

Next week I'm going to develop the DVD Studio Pro project file, and get all our events and quick time sequences fully operational on DVD.

Week 10

Three intense days from 10am til 5pm... and we made some great progress!

I'll list some achievements for this exhausting week:

• Scene 01 is 100% complete - it's a dream-sequence with an awesome dazzling & blurry filter. Coupled with a slight sepia tone, a hint of Aether's soon-to-be signature VFX, some terrifying sound effects and a haunting background music track, this 45 second scene is amazing.
  
  
• Scene 02 is composed with music and finished colour correction. We just need to record a voice-over for this, and then its all done!
  
  
• Scene 03 - 100% complete! This is a milestone because it's the first of the decision-making scenes. At the end of the clip, a fancy "Make Your Decision" screen appears, opening the way for Scenes 4a and 4b. We also implemented some awesome VFX in the form of a ground-shaking earthquake when the Aether strikes.
  
  
• Scene 04 - 100% complete. The continuation from scene 3, this scene is two separate (optional) clips.
  
  
• Scene 05 - 100% complete! Some colour correction and audio adjustment (since we filmed using bug microphones, I had to adjust some audio levels) polishes this scene off quite nicely.
  
  
• Scene 06 - At the moment, this scene is all over the place. It's one of the major special effects scenes, and it's broken up into about 20 separate clips, many of which will compose the Quick Time Events. Jason worked heavily on the special effects whilst Rebecca finished off the musical notes. Work in progress!
  
  
• Scene 07 - A simple "Make Your Decision" scene that works awesomely thanks to Jason's After Effects skills.
  
  
• Scene 08 - Another scene with lots of broken up clips to form the Quick Time Events. The majority of this has been edited on the timeline, we just need to add sound effects and voice-overs.
  

At the end of the week, we have a ton of templates for special effects, a bunch of audio effects, musical tracks and a good number of completed scenes. Things are really shaping up! Fortunately there hasn't been any creative conflicts on the team. Jason and I switched tasks at the end of the week, so from next week Jason will edit the timeline, I'll take up the helm of visual effects, and Rebecca will polish off the awesome soundtrack.

Week 09

Well well well, this was a fun week!

During Thursday's lab session, I got so involved in editing that I didn't even notice the clock rolling over to 5pm and everybody heading home. But anyway...

I managed to absolutely nail composing scene 01, 02 and most of 03. Snappy camera cuts, good angles, and clear dialogue make these scenes a joy to work with. I was really impressed with some of the shots, and they'll look even better when I add some colour correction techniques next week.

When I exported some clips to test them, they managed to stay a reasonable file size (considering they're 1920x1080 high definition clips), so we should have no dramas when we try to fit everything on DVD at the end of the semester. We'll also be outputting the DVD-ROM versions of the footage at 1280x720 resolution, so we'll save a lot of space by doing that.

Bec started putting together some music that could suit these scenes, so I'll wait until she's composed a few tracks to see what works the best. Jason also made some really cool effects for the Aether black rain, which we will definitely be using. So far, everything is going really well, and these two are great to work with because they always pull their own weight.

We discussed trying to export our footage to a Windows-compatible format, so we could do some editing at home. But after looking into the possibilities of this, our chances seemed slim. We instead decided to just focus working on the Macs during uni hours, even if that meant coming into the labs early each day.

So, starting next week, we'll be entering the labs at 10am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If we buckle down and do our best, we'll have this project done in no time.

Week 08

This week, we decided to split up some tasks in order to maximize our time and efficiency.

We also setup a neat little folder structure for all our video clips, FCP files and music & sound effects. We shared the files over Jason and Rebecca's external hard drives in order to ensure we had everything backed up.

While Jason and Rebecca continued deleting unwanted clips and researching music, I began compiling Scene 01 on Final Cut Pro's timeline.

So far... it's looking fantastic. I had a good time sewing separate clips together to make seamless camera cuts and varied shots. This scene is basically the prelude to our movie, and is intended as a dream sequence. We plan on adding in some dazzling filters to establish the fact that this is a flashback scene. But for this week, I just wanted to focus on compiling the footage and checking all the dialogue was intact.

Next week, we plan to get some edgy and ambient music mixed up and inserted into Final Cut. Since we finished deleting our unusable clips, Jason is going to focus on generating special effects, and I'll continue editing the scene timelines.

Until next time...

Week 07

The start of this week saw us beginning to edit our raw footage.

We began by sifting through the 200+ clips that our lovely camera had produced for us - all up, about 2 hours of footage. Little did we know during filming, the camera produced a separate video file every time the 'record' button was switched on and off. That meant happy times for us! (sarcasm)

We spent several hours deleting all the rubbish takes we didn't need for the final film. As amateur actors (but expert directors, of course), there were lots of mistakes with lines and dialogue that we needed to remove.

The good thing about this process however was the sheer hilarity. Working closely with good friends meant that we could laugh at each others' mistakes captured on camera to our heart's content.

Unfortunately, even some of our good footage was marred by some overlooked mistakes. Several of out interior shots had lighting equipment visible in the background (eep!). Other shots turned out to contain far too many shadows - it seems that our camera's LCD display was set to very bright, so we didn't notice during filming.

Luckily, these oversights could be easily corrected. We weren't ready to properly add effects to our footage yet, but we played around with a few correction techniques:

• Brightness/Contrast adjustment: An amazingly easy effect to implement in Final Cut Pro. By dragging a filter onto the footage, I was able to adjust the brightness and contrast of particular scenes to reduce flooding light and soften shadows.
  
  
• Colour adjustment: There was one particular scene where we forgot to white balance the camera. I added a colour filter over top of this clip, and tinted it slightly yellow to match the sunlight. The result turned out very nicely.
  
  
• Zoom & crop: In the scenes with visible equipment, we were forced to zoom in the video and crop out the edges in order to remove the unwanted objects. Unfortunately this caused the video to lose a bit of quality, but luckily we filmed in High Definition, so it wasn't too bad.

By the end of this week, we'd sorted through and deleted about 3/4 of our unusable footage. Next week, we'll filter out the rest of the unwanted film and begin actually editing some scenes together.

Week 06

A somewhat tame week compared to last week's hectic filming. We prepared a slide show in anticipation of presenting our project to the class during Thursday's lecture.

During the presentation, we highlighted the plot of our film, the technology behind how we're making it, and included a few shots from our storyboards. I would have loved to include some photos of our footage, but we hadn't yet recorded the footage to computer.

The presentation went well, and we enjoyed seeing what all the other groups are working on. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing Janitha, Shamal & Matt's horror/comedy film. The props and techniques they are using look very promising, and gave me a few good ideas for future projects I'd like to work on.

We planned to rip our footage from DV tape to external hard drive during the lab session. However... we forgot to bring a hard drive.

Kirsten returned our project documentation, and we were pleased to see a shining High Distinction score. It felt good to see our work paying off!

On Friday, we managed to record all our footage onto external hard drive, so there was no setback for this week. Next week, we'll be able to start cutting out our bad footage and adding special effects.

Easter Break

An exhausting week, filled with intensely long filming days, location disasters, equipment miscalculations, and general intrigue... Pretty much everything we planned turned out disastrous, and things we ad-libbed turned out marvelous.

The week began with finalizing our nice little prop collection. We had some good looking spray-painted plastic guns, a plastic knife, 2 t-shirts each (1 waiting to be shredded and bloodied) and a container of fake blood. We also purchased 6 Mini DV tapes for use in the HD cameras.

Bad news arrived Wednesday morning. The decrepit old house we'd planned to use in Dromana was no longer available. I was pretty disappointed and upset about this, as I'd really been looking forward to filming there. We'd even visited it the day before and checked everything out. Luckily, Rebecca saved the day by getting permission to film at her grandmother's house instead. We didn't need to film there until Friday, but we were relieved to have an immediate substitute.

On Wednesday night, Jason, Rebecca and I gathered at my house at about 6pm in Mount Eliza to film our first scene at night. We setup the camera equipment while we waited for our extra, Sammi, to arrive.

About 15 minutes before Sammi got there, rain began to bucket down outside. Did I mention we were planning to film outside? No? Well... we were.

Determined to get the scene done that night, we decided to wait out the rain. Over an hour passed, and finally, the rain subsided. By now, the sky was pitch black, the grass was soaking wet, and the clouds above threatened new rain later on. Still, we grabbed our lights and camera and rushed out to make the most of the night.

We had to put a picnic rug out on the ground to cover the wet grass, which actually turned out to look great on camera. The powerful halogen light illuminated the entire area, which worked out well, but we had to be careful of intruding shadows.

After 2 hours, we recorded about 10 minutes of footage for a 1 minute scene. Great work! Sarcasm aside, watching the scene back on the television, we were quite pleased with how it turned out. And luckily, the rain didn't return that night.

Thursday brought us a full day and night of filming. Jason and Rebecca gathered at my house at 11am, we setup our camera, and commenced filming our interior scenes. Things were going well, but the second HD camera we had planned to pickup that day had not been returned by another filming group. We gave Mark Szota a call to see when it would come in, but there had been no word from the other group. We gave up and continued on with the one camera. It wasn't that bad, but every time we wanted a new unique shot, we had to reshoot an entire segment for continuity's sake.

We also filmed some rather excellent outdoors scenes down by the beach. The sun stayed out long enough to get some great footage.

That night, we moved our equipment to Jason's house in Seaford. Our extra for the night, Ricky, met us there and we filmed some great interior action scenes. We'd planned to use Ricky in another scene that night at another location, but it was getting very late. Generously, he offered to meet us again the following night so we could complete our scenes.

Friday was our last day of filming for the week. We'd filmed over half the movie so far, so things were looking good despite our setbacks.Luckily, things went according to plan today. We filmed from 11am at Rebecca's grandmother's house. She had an excellent old-fashioned exterior gallery that worked perfectly for one particular scene.

We managed to get our day-time exterior scenes finished just as a light rain started. We went inside once Ricky arrived, filmed his interior scenes, and by then the rain cleared up. Finally, we filmed Ricky's exterior night scenes, and managed to wrap it all up by 8pm. No setbacks that day!

So, after an exhausting week, we completed all our filming. We now have about 2 and a half hours of footage that we'll have to sift through and edit. Bring on post-production!