evaluation

Evaluation.

For this project I have been working with Tom Thiel. We chose the lifeline campaign because it seemed like the most serious brief on the list. There seemed a lot of scope to create something polished powerful and professional. Some of the other briefs seemed quite jokey and throwaway; not to say there was not interesting projects that could come from them.

I initially thought about a serious photography or print campaign, creating quite filmic images suggesting greater narratives (this is very close to what I was working toward in the alibi project). But this being a moving image brief we needed to work in time based media, and those same ques could be used here as well.

We spent a lot of brainstorming time for this – we needed to really get the ideas down before shooting because they needed to be powerful and sincere. A major issue throughout this project was creating something that would communicate the message (that calling lifeline could help with depression) without being patronising, too shocking, whimsical or insincere. And that would also look good/striking.

In the run up to making the films we created some mood boards and designs for brand identity, I worked on a logo that was made from scanned telephone cables, but this hit upon the issues mentioned above – it seemed too playful. In the end we decided the best identity would simply be text, the font we chose was Tw Cen MT, which is fairly similar to Helvetica, it is clean, clear and authoritative without being too loud or cold. We decided on using blue to show depression contrasted with a bright red telephone to be the answer/salvation for our characters. This would be a continuous theme throughout the campaign. We also decided the films would use simple abstract metaphors to illustrate the emotions and information in the pieces.


We also did some tests using the XD cam in the studio and built a Snorricam rig to get a shot for a story board we wrote (based on a swing). In the end we didn’t use the “Snorricam”, it wasn’t right for what we were after, though the effect is really interesting and definitely something to use in the future.

The first film we shot used a shop opposite the college as the location, it was handy and ideal in terms of setting. We got permission to shoot there after helping the manager carry a fridge into a property next door, after we asked to film he said

“ after that you can do whatever you want”

So that worked out perfectly.

For the shoot we used the XD Cam with 18-70mm lens, 1 redhead light and a Dedo fill light, the dolly and tripod. We made labels for cans which we put on the shelves, these contained facts and advice; the film went from shots of these to the final shot of a red telephone, with our protagonist then talking through it.

The big mistake we made during this shoot was to do with shutter speed, which I didn’t know even affected video. We wanted a shot where the camera tracked along the shelf and picked out the cans with text by slowing down and pausing on them using twixtor, obviously doing this for real using the supermarket trolley wheels on the dolly would have been a nightmare, so we shot at 60 frames a second so we could slow to at least half speed. The problem was we shot with a shutter speed of 50 when we really wanted to use 120. Matt the technician enjoyed telling us how stupid we were for not doing this right. Now though neither of us would ever make that mistake again.

The shoot went quite smoothly, Ash the shopkeeper was very relaxed about the whole thing and it went off well. It would have been nice to get some more establishing shots, because we didn’t have much to work with in the final edit.

The music was mainly written and played by Alex ……. Though I had to spend a lot of time getting her to play what I wanted, and I ended up playing some of it. It was originally very frilly, but needed to be much simpler. I’d liked to have used some pop music in the backgroud (as if it was on a radio) instead of music on the top but I still think it works quite well. I produced it (bit of reverb, compression, bass part etc).

I think this ad works quite well, it has a hint of the surreal, I’m pleased with the grading and the final edit is effective.

We then shot the film on the bridge, Tom was very good here in getting us up in the morning and organising the shoot. We wanted to get the rush our people traffic in town, so we had to start at 8 am. We shot on FX7 because Matt wouldn’t let us have the XD camera without a car, this is a bit of a shame because we really wanted to get a tighter depth of field.
The effect we were going for was a long exposure on a stills camera. We set the shutter speed to 25 to get the effect though this turned to be not enough at all. Because of this I had to do a lot of post production - masking and splitting the layers then putting effects on the background layers (a mixture of echo/CC time sequence and fast blur). I then used looks on the footage to get the grade.
We came up with several grades for this, originally a teal blue, which looked really nice but we felt it was too sci-fi, then a de-saturated “brown mix” which is what we settled on. We also made a “blue and white” mix, but felt we’d stick with the brown one. The weakest element of this piece is the text, it could be so much stronger and really feels like an add on, We learnt from this and decided to us a voice over in the final film.
I’m not convinced by the sound design for this, I was going for a Kubrick-esque feel (I just saw The Shining for the first time and was blown away) with high pitched synth sounds and bass tones, I also put in a bassdrum to build tension and pace. It uses some piano chords I took from Logic Pro’s database, that make it a bit more human then give it a more optimistic ending. I think this is quite weak, I was originally pleased with it but now I think it sounds cheap.
Some nice parts are the fake contrazoom effect, the blurred people effect (which took a long time) and the casting – Ash looks great here – he really fits the demographic we were targeting.

The final film we made was shot in Barnsley Metrodome diving centre. This was the most difficult but ultimately most rewarding. We ended up getting a really good deal with the centre (£10phr ) to shoot there, which we’d never have got had we been a professional shoot. We went over a week before and did a test using the FX7, the footage came out well, though was not an accurate test because the XD takes so much more light. We put two redheads through portholes (these were a constant stress because we thought that the windows were going to crack because they got so hot) to pick out our protagonist – James.

Direction was difficult here because the cameraman couldn’t be heard by the director, and the director couldn’t see what the cameraman was filming. To make matters even more difficult even James couldn’t see the cameraman to get direction from. In the end though, using Graham as a go between, the messages got across and we got the shots we wanted.

The film used drowning as a metaphor for depression and isolation, with the red phone again being the answer or physically a lifeline from this state. Conceptually I think this is some of the strongest work I/We have done so far on this course.

The post production here took a long time, I had sift through the clips, twixtor them, then re-process them with looks, the original cut I finished looked fine but on other machines, particularly PCs, you could see the frame where I’d shrunk certain clips, or the windows in the background. This is not a problem I’d come up against before though it is a big issue in Audio, so it was not a major surprise. To solve this I used Keylight to remove the bulk of the background before running Looks and a bit of extra exposure. The text (in all of the films) was made in after effects then recomposited in FCP.

The sound was inspired by a documentary on the BBC radiophonic, they only used sounds that existed and manipulated them. So here I didn’t use any effects, the build up metallic sound is a cymbal crash backwards, the high pitched sound is one note, then some bass tones underneath. In the final mix I put in a quiet bit of foley of underwater sounds to reinforce the setting before overlaying the vocal.

The vocal here was written to sound like a documentary style interview – that we’d pulled from this the concept of using drowning as a metaphor (though we both know this is not true). A major learning element from this whole project was to do more primary research. The whole piece should have started with interviews and genuine, frank conversation. I personally was too nervous to do this at the start, though you have to get over yourself if you’re going to do serious work.