Construction: Music

We chose the song Ramona, sung by Beck in Scott Pilgrim VS The World.
Scott Pilgrim was one of our main reference points.
We chose this song to emphasise his sad mood as he just got dumped. The desired effect on the audience is to make them feel sympathetic towards Michael because he is sad.
We recorded an acoustic version ourselves, which made it copyright-free material.

 Gavin recording himself playing Ramona for the shoot

Construction: Editing Techniques

This is how we integrated some of our titles into the sequence. It was done within After Effects.

 

First, we had to open the clip within After Effects. To do this, we placed the clip in our timeline in Premiere, cut it down so that it was the right length and then right-clicked the clip on the timeline and selected ' Replace with After Effects composition'. This is quicker and easier than editing the clip withing After Effects and then exporting it to Premiere because we only had to edit the sections that we were using.

 

We positioned the title where we wanted it to be within the shot to begin with. Then we used a subtract mask, keyframing the mask path frame by frame, to hide the words as the actors walked past them and interacted with them. To make the effect seem more realistic, we feathered out the mask by a couple of pixels so that there wouldn't be such a harsh edge where the text was being cut off.

 

This effect worked quite well and made the titles much more interesting for the viewer. It took a very long time to do. We used the technique for 7 of our titles and for each one we had to go through the clip frame by frame and readjust the mask path. However, we definitely feel it was worth the effort as it greatly improves the sequence and makes it more interesting.

 

Main Shoot Reflections

What went well:

• We avoided the issues we had on the test shoot, for example we covered the windows with bin bags to block out sunlight.
• We worked much more efficiently as we already knew how to get the shots and were familiar with the equipment.
• We got all of our shots, all of which are usable.
• For the most part we were in a controlled environment so keeping continuity was easier.

Issues:

• The lights made the small room extremely hot
• When shooting outside the mic picked up the wind
• We have some continuity issues as we used two different cameras, this can be fixed in grading.

Setting up the lights

Shooting outside on location

Clapperboard

Overall

The group believed that this was our best shoot so far and we thought that we achieved the style that we set out for.
However, we felt that some of the shot in there were not the best they could be, for example some of the dolly shots were too not smooth enough, and the outdoor shots were too loud due to the harsh wind blowing on the microphone.
As a result of this we decided to have one more shoot to perfect some of the shots, we would keep the rest of the footage that was useable and grade them to fit in.