Group 38

Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Pre Production- Evolution of our Plot- Yusuf Caunhye

Our film has changed a huge amount from its original conception. The plot was originally biopic roughly based around Jamal Edwards, a social media mogul who created the online platform SBTV. Although at the beginning of our Pre-Production we all agreed with this plot however as time progressed we decided this wouldn't work especially as the logistics were to difficult as we had planned to have a scene in which the main character shot a music video. This happened after our first day shooting as after we reviewed the footage we felt discouraged as only one of the shots came out how we had planned and as we hadn't researched the location well enough it wouldn't be possible to keep up the films continuity as certain parts of the location were inaccessible to us and as a result decided the plot needed to change.
After extensive brain storming both in college and on social media, through the use of 'WhatsApp' group chats we came up with an idea in which two characters would consume drugs and meet each other somehow in an urban environment. This idea came about by each member of our group building upon a previous idea so in the end we had completely different plot that'd stemmed from the original idea. However on the day we planned to shoot, certain props, such as pills, were forgotten which meant this idea couldn't be used to so we were forced to improvise.
Due to this problem we decided to have only one of the characters consume drugs and have the second character act as his subconscious or inner demon. This idea was reinforced in the edit as we overplayed a demon like face on the main characters face to foreshadow the inner demon that would come later in the film.
In conclusion, although having faced many obstacles,some of which were our own fault I feel that our end result was still very creative and we learned a huge amount from the mistakes we made which was fundamental to the final idea and plot.

Post Production- Editing- Yusuf Caunhye

This blog post is about a specific part of my editing process: The scene in which the green woman is overplayed on the main characters face:

This effect was done in Adobe Premiere Pro by overlaying two layers on the original footage. I opened up the effects tab and decreased the opacity of said layers and synchronised one of the layers, the layer with the green face, with the music. This was one by expanding the layer to fit the length of the footage and then using the blade tool to cut out certain parts so that it only appeared when there was a heavy bass tone. This helped to emphasise the flickering of the image and foreshadowed themes of hallucinations and drugs into the film.