Jack Kelly

ED WORK BEGINS NOW

Call of Chlamydia

Finished!

travislukemitchell:

Finally…my video has been uploaded to Vimeo. Go and check it out…

Starred, helped shoot and provided the voice over.

Top stuff Trav, definitely a possible winner! :)

To Clear Some Other Stuff Up…

First of all, the piece of music I used is called “Zeus’ Fury” and is part of the “Pro Scores” collection from Video Co-Pilot, which is completely royalty free. Here is a quote from their official website:

What about royalties?

Pro Score is completely Royalty Free for use in any production big or small. For example you can make a movie with Pro Scores and sell the movie forever with no additional fees. Of course, Pro Scores may not be used (in any part, edited or not) with templates or files that are redistributed to artists or editors such as website templates, stock sites or project files.

So, hopefully that will clear that up for you.

You mentioned about the logo that I designed at the beginning of the project? I decided not to use this in the trailer as I wanted to fully avoid any copyright issues that may arise by making it seem to be indefinitely part of the “Indiana Jones” franchise. I also didn’t want to market it as “coming soon”. I wanted it to be more of a reveal, that it is in fact an advert for Chlamydia, as it progresses I want the audience to see that this is in fact a parady and a pretend film. Very much like some of the Orange Wednesday adverts that are shown. As well as this, when coming down to editing the trailer, I didn’t think that it fit too well with the music, that a sudden cut to black was much more effective.

I may however include the logo on a poster, something I may design to go along with the trailer, if I have the spare time, which I probably will.

I should also quickly mention that the voiceover at the end was Travis, which he kindly recorded for me on his own set-up at home. 

The Fun That Is “Editing”.

To edit my trailer, I used the Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection package. The reason I used this was that I’d used Final Cut Pro for past projects, I wanted to show that I CAN use a wide range of different products and not just my personal preference. Also, I edited it on my PC at home, as I only have a little Macbook that, at the suggestion of editing, decides to have a fit of rage. Currently working on getting myself an iMac. But, the Adobe systems work on both platforms, which is useful as I can edit both at home and at college.

So, to edit the main chunk of the film and to tie it all together, I used Adobe Premiere Pro. 

I found Premiere a useful experience as I’d never really used it before, and after working out the basics, its something that I’d like to use again in the future.

Here’s an example of the colour correction that I went with. As I see you wanted to know about. I’ve just noticed the message you sent me, a few days later after it was posted, it was lucky I noticed, Tumblr didn’t think to tell me! Another of, as you know, many reasons why I disagree with this website and think we should go back to good old log books. Anyway, for the colour correction, I used Premiere, using the “Colour Balance”, “Auto Colour” and “Reduce Noise” effects. I decided to go with a blue setting as, I wanted it to look cold, to give the effect of night time. Well, it would be cold, what museum keeps there heating on when there’s no one inside? I also wanted to make it look more cinematic, so the darkening of the shots really play on the fact its a trailer for a big Hollywood movie. I am happy with how the colouring/lighting looks, but if you can see room for improvement, please do let me know!

Moving on, for the effect of the rolling ball at the end, I used Adobe After Effects CS5.5. This is a piece of software I have used many times in the past and know the basics in.

I rotoscoped around the doorway, plinth and testing kit first. I then added a round image of stone, which I rotated to chase after Chlamydiana and Curt. After this I added the CC Sphere effect, which made it look mor 3D, granted I didn’t do this too well. After this I added a Gaussian Blur to the ball to make it fit with its positioning in the frame, as its not in the depth of field. Finally, I added some dust effects using the Video Co-Pilot “Action Essentials” package.

Finally, its the biggest issue I had; audio. For this I used Adobe Audition CS5.5, a piece of software I have again used in the past. To record the audio I used, my Rode NTG-2 shot gun microphone, directly into my DLSR. The first problem I had was that the sound was too low, due to the fact that the microphone should have gone into a field mixer, such as a Zoom h4n, something I have my sights on investing in. Because of this, I had to boost the audio in post, cuasing quite a bit of white noise. Luckily I was able to remove this using the “Noise Removal” tool in Audition.

So, the audio all sounded great, but one problem I knew I would have, as i have had when previously using the microphone is when uploaded to the web, it sound awful! But this seems to be only on certain devices. It plays perfectly fine through my computer but through my phone, the sound from the microphone is pretty much non-existent. I really am stumped over why this happening, as it IS a stereo sound and plays back fine on my computer. But, no matter how I export it or pan the audio, it always comes out the same. This could be down to the lack of field mixer but I am really unsure, its something i’m going to have to go through with yourself and see if you can shed any light on the subject. I will bring my audio files and microphone in at some point next week, if you wouldn’t mind taking a look?

Oh yeah, I filmed that thing last week.

Apologies for taking so long to follow up on my video, seeing as its now done and stuff. So here’s a bit of post production for you to enjoy.

Where do I start? Well, filming went extremely well, better than I’d imagined in fact. My original idea was to spend the afternoon in the TV Studio, shooting the thing. Instead, even though I HAD booked the studio and cleared it with the various Andrew’s that are around college, I turned up to find that “Matt” from the ED had booked it out from 1:30pm. So, we began shooting at 12, working through our lunch as aposed to starting afterwards. Working as sufficiently and fast as we could, we managed to be finished and out of there by 2pm, which in the end didn’t really matter as “Matt” didn’t even turn up!

As discussed in my call sheets, production schedules and other fairly similar items, my crew consisted of Travis and Mark. Which I know, may come as a massive shock to you. Cast wise, it was myself and Ash as Chlamydiana and Curt.  The four of us spent the first half an hour setting up the studio to look like more of a museum scene, setting up fake exhibits and such to give that more depth and authenticity to the footage. Even though these aren’t really visible in the final product. We used the lighting rig to light our main focus, the testing kit exhibit. Which of course, involved that cool plinth, which I still do not know why my Mother has.

We didn’t use much lighting at all as we wanted to create the idea that Chlamydiana and Curt weren’t meant to be there, that they had indeed broken into a dark, protected museum late at night. So, we only had one light from the rig, positioned above the kit which lit it really well, like it was in fact a display. We did however use a stand-alone Tungsten light to light the scene where Chlamydiana trips over the wire. For this scene we also used the red light on the rig, which Mark flashed on and off repeatedly to give the effect of an alarm being activated. Which I think worked very well.

As planned, we used my canon 550D (I promise I’ll use one of college cameras soon), my extra lenses, my shoulder rig, boom pole and shotgun microphone. I also booked out the tracking dolly, as planned for the opening shot, which I was really happy with as it gave a really nice, smooth, cinematic looking effect. I also used it for the contra-zoom at the end, where Chlamydiana sets the alarm off. This I was also pleased with.

Overall, I was fairly happy with the shoot, the only problem I had was that in one of the shots, there was a blatantly obvious microphone, which I know does take the audience away from the scene. I was not informed of this and did not notice until looking back at the footage when editing. Given more time, I’d have been able to give more attention to detail and would have definitely checked back through the footage before wrapping up the shoot. But, I’m not making excuses as I realise this is an error on my part, which has somewhat annoyed me. But oh well, its not THAT obvious… 

*Side note - I forgot to take any images or video as “behind the scenes” evidence. I know, stupid. I’m sorry.