I do blogging

If you've ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around... this is where they're made.

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I’m happy to finally show the finished production!!!

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Production Paperwork Part 2

And the rest of the paperwork :)

And some extra documents:

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Production Schedule

My Schedule for this production :)

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Production Paperwork Part 1

I will attach my production paper work in this post.

Please click ‘Read more’ to see all the images of my paperwork.

I example of Actors Agreement template

Breakdown Sheet (I will include 3 of many pages)

I will share 2 of the 4 examples of Call Sheets as they are all similar.

I’ll add the rest of the paperwork in the second post :)

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Secondary Role

Before posting my film, I would like to talk a little bit about my secondary role in this term. At the start of this term, I was going to be script supervisor in someone’s production but in the end, I had to drop that role because they didn’t really know when they would need a script supervisor… Then I was offered a job as 1st AD on someone else’s production, a job that I think comes a lot more natural to me than script writer anyways. I happily agreed to that role. Not only did I prefer to work as a first AD but also did I think that this production was very interesting because they were working with kids. I’m planning at the moment a production for next year that would require me to work with children so I was very interested to learn more about it in that production.

I also liked very much how I really felt needed at the set and that I could fulfil my purpose there. Very often I would go to productions as a runner and then they would need me to do lights, maybe a bit of sound or they needed me to decorate the set but this time I could really focus on my job as a first AD. And I could really tell that the director and producer of that set trusted me because the director would often ask for permission to shoot a scene again or ask me if we have time to go again… The production was also well organized.

I’m going to post some paperwork after this post and then I will follow with my new production, ‘Something Catchy’.

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Final Film

Oh what a journey!

I don’t even know where to start talking about this production or this term in general. It has helped me so much to grow as a filmmaker and has offered more challenges than I thought it would but the result of it makes me proud to be the producer of this film.

The production started off really stressful for me, having to pitch my director’s script in front of the whole year group. After every production had received either a red light or an amber light in our case, we had to go back and polish our pitch. Fortunately, we ended up with a green light and were allowed to get into the production of ‘Something Catchy’, a comedy about a retail worker whose quiet life gets disturbed when his best friend tries to convince him that they live in a movie.

Pre-Production was a rollercoaster. It was much harder than before. I had entrusted a lot of my work to my production manager but unfortunately this hadn’t worked as smoothly as I had anticipated. In the end, I ended up taking a lot of that work back to make sure that it was done properly and at the time that I wanted to. A lot of pre-production this time was as well doing something and then going back and doing it better again and again, until it was the most efficient that it could be. Especially pre-production came with a lot of support of our tutors which I am very thankful for. I learned a lot in the meetings that we had or the classes that were only for producers. Sure, after every meeting, I had to go back and change something but it would be for the better in the end. So for most of pre-production, I kept making sure that everything would go as smooth as it possibly could for the production. I made sure to kept in touch with the actors, invite them for rehearsals, thinking about costumes, catering, making sure everyone else in my crew had the rehearsals they needed so that it wouldn’t take time on the day to figure out how to do a specific shot.

Because of all this work, production was very enjoyable and relaxing. Even though one of the actors didn’t show up to set on the first day, I managed to find a solution because I had made sure, that everything else was fine. I ended up using the 1st AC as an actor who didn’t know the script so at the takes, I would stand next to him and play it with him so that we would know easier what to do. Or I would sit opposite him and play it through with him like that if the setup allowed it to me.

We finished early every day. We had two days planned in the park but on the first day we finished the schedule early. I decided to start the shooting schedule for the next day without telling anyone except for the first AD and my director so that I could surprise everyone on the second day when we finished a few hours ahead of schedule.

After that it went straight into post production which went exactly according to schedule. The picture lock was on the same day as I had anticipated so that we moved onto the colour grade and sound mix as I had noted it down on the schedule.

 This whole production was a big adventure and I am very proud to present ‘Something Catchy’  under the name of the production ‘Blurry Productions’ and I hope that it will make people smile and laugh because the crew and I had a wonderful time realizing it.

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I am very happy to share the poster for my newest production: ‘Something Catchy’

The poster has been designed by Zack Wills with a little of my help :)

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Location scouting Report – Sunny Hill Park

About this location:

 Sunny Hill Park can be found in Hendon and is a very large and hilly park. It lies perfectly between my home and university. A small café can be found in the park as well.

 Why this location:

 Sunny Hill Park would be a good location if you decide to shoot outside because it is close to University and to my home. This makes it very easy to bring equipment there or meet actors at uni and escort them to the park.

 Size:

The size of the park leaves the crew with a lot of freedom as to how they want their film to look. There are loads of incredibly wide open spaces.

Variety:

This park offers a big variety of different shots since it can offer so many different places. There are hills (which can have the city as a background), flat spaces, there are trees. You can also find benches and one big tree that has fallen down.

Electricity:

As it is a park it will be difficult to find sockets anywhere close but it could be an option to use battery driwwen LED lights for instance or if the shooting spot was close to the café maybe we could arrange something with them. It would also be possible to have a generator if it wasn’t a uni production.

 Toilets:

There are three options for toilets. We can either order portable toilets. We could go and talk to the café or we could use Uni bathrooms if we pick a spot that is close to uni.

 Traffic:

The traffic noise depends on how close you film to the street. Most of the time you can’t hear any traffic noise unless you get close to the exits of the park. At nighttime there is even less noise.

 Interruptions:

There are a few joggers and people walking with their dogs… Even when taking the pictures I had to wait sometimes to wait for people to walk out of the frame so it would be better to maybe film on a Sunday or you will have to be ready for a few interruptions maybe.

 Weather:

As it is outside, weather is very important. In the case of rain, there has to be a weather cover which could either be uni or we could bring a gazebo to quickly put the equipment, cast and crew underneath.

 Security:

 With all those people passing around, I think it would be advisable to have one crew member that watches out for people’s belongings and unused equipment the whole time the shoot takes place.

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The Raven Boys adaptation

The scene we adapted was from chapter 36 of the Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. This is a University project. All the rights are owned by Maggie Stiefvater. We do not make any money with this.

Do not share outside of tumblr!

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Raven Boys - Producer’s Paperwork 2 of 2

Part 2 of the Paperwork

WEEKLY REPORTS:

VARIOUS PAPERS:

ONE DRIVE:

Everything that I couldn’t post cause it was PDF:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7B3Tw6oaKsnT1BPREw4TnpXcUU?usp=sharing

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Raven Boys - Producer’s Paperwork 1 of 2

Here’s my producer’s paperwork for the Raven Boys Adaptation

CASTING PAPERS:

RELEASE FORMS:

RISK ASSESSMENT:

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Raven Boys Adaptation - Post Production

I don’t even know where to start with this rollercoaster of a postproduction. Never before have I had so many problems during this stage. We showed our videos in class today and I am so glad that this nightmare of a post production is over and I can finally move on from this and concentrate on other projects. Let’s see what went wrong shall we?

First Zack who was the editor for this took the SSD from the Black Magic and plugged it into a MAC to receive the shots. Everything was okay until he was at home and looked at the footage on his driver again. From around 100 shots only about 30 were playing. Zack was trying on different computers and less and less footage worked until he was so freaked out, he came to me to check it with him. When we opened the driver on my laptop, of all those shots we were only able to open two. Imagine this despair for one second. You’ve been working on this project for weeks and you just finished a stressful shooting day, you are on a one day filming limit and then only two files open… Yeah we were not happy. We tried to get the SSD back but the Black Magic kit had already been rented by someone else. Eventually Zack managed to get most of the footage back with a program. The only down side was that they would stop earlier than they should. Of a one minute shot we would keep around thirty seconds. Sometimes you could Zuza hear scream action and then the video would end. Luckily for us, Zack is the best editor I have ever seen and he managed to work around this big issue. There were some issues on the day we had to upload with the file not wanting to render but that as an issue we could solve after sitting down together and having a look on the file.

I just want to talk about the style of the video for a minute because a lot of it can be explained by the issues we had. (I will be posting the video after the paperwork which is the next post)

There are a lot cut to black’s in it because it looked like Adam (main character in this video) beemed everywhere. We had shots of him sitting in the car, getting out, closing the door, walking down the path… but in the end with the broken clips we only had shots of him in the car, one outside and one in the middle of the path. We added heartbeat sound and cut to black so that we could create a pace for the video. There are a few awkward cuts that we couldn’t avoid because we lacked footage because the footage was corrupted.

Even though all this happened in post production, I am happy with the result that we have achieved.

 I’ll be posting paperwork now and after that the video that we shot and I’ll see you in the next post!

San

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Raven Boys Adaptation - Production

Look at all those people who made it possible for me to adapt a scene from one of my favourite books. The shooting day was a challenge because already getting our equipment turned into a difficulty because the person who had it before us hadn’t given it back in time. We started the shoot with a bit of a delay and finished quite late, at around midnight if I remember correctly (and then I had to clean the house which got VERY messy!!) All said and done I was very happy with the performances that we had received from the actors. We got every shot that we wanted and we were sure that we had enough shots for everything in the script. There were no real issues on the shooting day because we were well prepared so there is no use to make this post longer than necessary but I’ll update you on the Post-Production (which was quite a hassle) in the next post.

I’ll leave you pictures of our amazing cast and crew.

So I’ll see you in the next post!

 San

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Raven Boys Adaptation - Pre-Production

The brief for this project was to use a poem, book or play and adapt a scene from it. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time since I’ve always wanted to adapt a book and this was the perfect chance. I decided that this was the project I wanted to produce with Zuzanna as my director, Zack as the editor and Antonio as a DOP.

For a long time, Zuza and me thought about what to adapt until I told her about this book I really liked which is called the Raven Boys and is written by Maggie Stiefvater. I was unbelievably happy, when Zuza started to read the book for me and told me one day later that she would love to adapt a scene from it

After that, we sat together in her room for hours, going through the book and looking for the scene that was dramatic but also easy to understand for someone who didn’t know what the book is about. We chose the scene where Adam, a teenager, is being abused by his father and his friend Ronan comes to his rescue. Anyone would understand what is going on in that scene without knowing any background on the characters. Together we wrote about three drafts of the script before coming out with the final version.

I’m going to try and keep myself short about how we got to production because it was rather uneventful. Zuza and I stayed up really late every day, drawing storyboards, coming up with a fight choreography, doing the casting… During the casting we got incredibly lucky when I talked to one of the actresses who had a friend who was a fight choreographer. The same day I got into contact with him and he agreed to join us for rehearsal and be part of the crew! Having him on board made a big difference to this production. We had prepared very well so that I was in a very good shape for the shooting day which I will talk about in the next post!

 I’ll see you in the next post,

San

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Music Video - Post Production

Hi guys!

Finally! The post production for the music video! As the editor of this project, I have obviously looked forward to it! There were three steps for the edit of this.

The first step was adding the second world in After Effects. We calculated a week of work for that but with a lot of work and long working days, I managed to win two or three days. I was incredibly lucky because I had Zack sitting with me during the whole process. Only a few times, he would go out for a bit but be later to check my work afterwards.

With that phase over, I could start the proper edit. I met up at Zack’s place for a few days, where I would edit on Sony Vegas instead of Premiere like usually. He explained the program to me and after telling me what he wanted to see, I got started. I delivered him a rough cut and from there we went step by step to finish the product. It turned out that I hated to work on Sony Vegas. Zack had the newest version which he hadn’t tested before. Let’s just say it was bad and even he doesn’t want to touch it anymore.

The last step to the edit was the colour grading which Zack decided he wanted to do himself. He did a few tries and rendered each of them, showing us the difference between them. We gave him our opinion back and then wrapped the whole project up.

All in all I was happy with what we accomplished. The end product was great but the group work was questionable. While Zack (Director), Zuza (DOP) and I worked like a well-oiled machine together we had problems with the producer. We sat down together and got to talk about it which has made future projects a lot easier.

I’ll see you in the next post!

San

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Music Video - Production

Hi guys!

Production day! Shooting day! The best and most stressful day!

The music video was crazily ambitious so that we decided that we could only do it if we got ready before the sun rose. We were shooting in two different locations, a park and my friends place. The two locations were a ten minute Uber drive away from each other. We were on a one day shooting limit for this project so we couldn’t afford to lose any time.

The shooting day sadly started off with a disappointment as we couldn’t have the producer on set until 11:30 while we got to the first location for 7 AM. Apart from that, the shooting day was rather normal. We left the park to shoot the boys scenes and got back to the park at night to shoot the girls night scenes. We finished at about 10 PM if I remember correctly and we were all tired when we finally managed to get back home.

At this point I will leave you with pictures of the shooting day!

See you in the next post!

San

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Music Video – Preproduction

Hi guys!

This post will be about the preproduction of my music video from the start of preproduction to the production.

When we received the brief we first got into teams and then everyone decided on their role. Seeing as the second project really intrigued me, I decided to edit the music video so that it was possible for me to produce the next one with one of my best friends to work as director.

Following the advice from one of our tutors, we decided to create a little logo that we could add on our paperwork to look more professional to actors, other crewmembers… What we ended up with was a funny little design with a silly name but it made us feel like more of a team.

When we first started out, we decided that we wanted to be able to show the music video publicly and while we got a lot of responses from bands that wanted to work with us, it showed to be quite the challenge considering our deadlines. In the end we decided that we were losing to much time and chose a song to work with the same day as well as the idea. OK GO- Here it goes again. The song we chose is well known because of its music video so we felt it was challenging to make our own for it. The story our director, Zack, came up with was about a boy and a girl that were living in different planets and fell in love with each other. You have to imagine it like every time they look up, they can see each other. To explain it to our workshop group easier the director asked me to draw a picture of it, with the park (the place the girl lives) on top and the city (where the boy lives) on the bottom.

The project sounded great to me but unfortunately I was forced to take over most of the production work which made me incredibly stressed during the whole process of the music video. I stayed up late on most days, talking to the director, looking for actors, securing locations and doing paperwork when in reality I should have only had to worry about the editing process. With the support of our director of photography and the director, we managed to get everything ready for the shooting day.

See you on the next post!

San