This is the latest draft of my video. I still need to edit the sound properly and I hope to do some colour correction. As you might be able to see, I reshot most (if not all) the footage due to wanting more control over the light.
This is me talking about the alterations that I’ve made from
the original, early conception to what is nearing the final product. There have
been many alterations made.
My initial script was a two-hander, set in a coffee shop. In
theory that should have been easy. Had I had some backing behind it, it would
have been simple. Hire out a location for a day, spend afternoon with as many
takes as I can fit in, and giving me lots of footage to edit with...
the best laid plans of mice and men
I’m a student who was trying to convince a business to let
me have a corner for an afternoon while I tried not to step on their toes. In
about six months, I was able to shoot there twice, for two hours each time.
Including set up, keeping an eye on equipment and making sure my two actors
were comfortable, that time went very quickly. I wasn’t well versed in how to
use the camera, meaning that the colour, light and white balance changed between
takes... You couldn’t hear anything they were saying... I had to call it quits.
Keep it simple, stupid.
I spent a night with the trial version of celtx and whacked
out a script set in a location I could control, with as few actors as possible.
I decided it made sense to set it in my house, so I wrote the character that
lived there. Trying to minimise the need for extensive sound recording, I wrote
little dialogue. I didn’t want him to leave, so I decided to set it early on in
the day, dealing with morning stuff. But mornings are boring, and I wanted to
bring in a new element. The conflict to drive the story. Searching for that, I
remembered thinking about how I should have made a silent movie, due to the
problems I had with the sound. It made sense to make the character deaf and
dealing with the fallout from that. After that, I felt the whole script was
stronger. He was frustrated so he isolates himself and the story could explore
him coming out of his isolation.
Of course, looking at the rules I set myself, I ended up
breaking a good few of them. Making my character deaf and telling it from his
perspective meant I had to place a good focus on sound recording. When you’re
deaf it’s not just silence, you hear things but in a different frequency.
Lip-reading too. It’s understanding communication. I needed to bring in a
catalyst, something to change events, which is why I brought in a second
character which I had tried to avoid simply because it’s easier to coordinate
one actor than it is two.
It all got a little more complicated than I intended it to
be.
Shooting took two days. Once was a kind of rehearsal, for
myself and my actors. Figuring out camera use, what angles did and didn’t
work... I didn’t use any of that footage in the end, although it’s recording was
essential. That day of shooting kept to the script, word by word. It was the
second day of shooting where we had to improvise and make alterations as the
shooting went along.
I started off shooting in order. The opening scene with
looking at the letter, and then trying to deal with the frustration, almost
claustrophobia that you feel when you can’t hear. I can’t wear earplugs – it
makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Doing that, my lead actor Nick got very
passionate in his performance, at the cost of a mug and his unscarred skin.
We didn’t actually intend for him to cut his hand and start
bleeding... didn’t actually expect the mug to smash either. This actually
happened in Nightcrawler, meaning Nick DeCruz is on parr with Jake Gyllenhall
if there are any casting directors watching.
It’s a student blog. There are no casting directors
watching.
I’m opportunistic, we made it work. And it did – Nick’s
choice to hulk smash that mug demonstrated the character’s anger in a way that
I didn’t in the script, establishing early on the characters feelings. Having
some blood around made it feel a bit more thrilling. We stopped shooting for
half an hour after that to patch him up, but I think it was worth it. I don’t
know if Nick agrees.
It impacted the whole story, and we had to adapt as we went
along. Shooting it in the same building meant I had the luxury of shooting it
in mostly chronological order which I think is always beneficial for actors as
they can track where their characters are at at a certain point, something
which is easy to get lost as you go back and forth.
The scene where the character watches television originally
had him with a bowl of cereal. That always felt to me a bit too prop like, too
artificial. Having him switch the tv on to storage hunters, just to calm down,
felt much more natural.
Currently, it’s still all a work in progress, with a lot of
time being spent on editing the sound. I’m actually feeling better about this
idea than I was the first one, the coffee shop idea. I might revisit that one
day, expand it a little more but this short, currently titled ‘Hard of Hearing’
will hopefully provide a decent bit of coursework and if I’m really, really
lucky a decent short film.
Working on my poster has taken it through a few variations. I made sure to save seperate copies to look at the progress and variations.
This was the first poster and layout I created. I took a centeral image and blocked out the areas where I could place content with black boxes which I intended to remove. The quotes at the top were placeholders for reviews and sources.
The next drastic change I made was cropping the image down. Where it once took up the whole of the image, I chose to emulate other existing products for short films and use a 'letterbox' image. The reason why the background is blue was so I could still choose between making the text white or black and stil see what I was doing.
My final draft. I placed awards and reviews in the appropiate sections and added a release date and a tagline. I might change the fonts for the final product but I'm happy with the layout and doubt I will be changing anything major.
