Collaborative Project - Reflective Statement

During my time on the course, I haven't enjoyed a project so much as I have this one, it has been an opportunity to immerse myself in a role which I strongly wish to pursue as a career later in life and was insurmountably grateful for it. 

Reflecting as a Director I felt what I did in my role was in the majority of a positive experience. I found being the director that a lot of decisions fell to me for progressing the project. The team around me presented ideas for how they interpreted the script and concepts, from which I felt were the strongest choices and most productive in terms of forwarding the team towards an accurate representation of the brief. I found myself on occasion watching the team from over the shoulder and advising on what I thought to be the most logical and true representation of whatever topic each person was dealing with at the time. I don't think that would have been possible without a team which understood the idea behind our roles within the project. To criticise myself during the project as a director I would have to say that during the beginning I didn't do well at speaking up in fear of hurting peoples feelings about ideas they put forward. It should have been my job to be decisive at the moment of creation and worry less about the team's opposition. After the process, I can safely say that from going through this the reason I was like that at the beginning was due to never doing it before and not wanting to ruin the friendship and cohesive atmosphere of the team. During the live action reference taking part of the project, I think I did a good job at instructing the actors (Megan Robson and Alfie Gunter) and cameraman (Juanjo Estany) on the best way to act. I focused on the silhouettes, facial expressions and timing in order to really drive home the perception of each character. I believe in all other regards I did my absolute best in managing and facilitating the team, defining jobs and making sure the project was in line with the brief.  

As a group member, I was always trying to be a positive as possible, commending the team on the good work and trying to work with anyone in a positive way to solve problems or to make decisions towards the project which they felt required a directors decision. I found communication was the most important thing of this task and regularly posted positivity towards the group in the base camp and tried my best to use it as a tool to rally everyone and keep everyone in an up-to-date loop of the project at all times. To criticise myself in this area I would have to say that due to various constraints in my life I wasn't always able to make it in every day to be with my team, I felt this lead to a little bit of distancing between myself and the group in a communicative sense. 

In regards to my contribution to the team, I felt as if there was always more that I could be doing, as if in my assumed role it was important to lead from the front whilst also leading from the back, never shying from work and always doing my best to take burden on my shoulders where possible to show everyone that if we put the effort in we would get something remarkable out. I found that as a Director I contributed a lot in the early stages because everything was script and story heavy. then midway I dropped back a bit because other roles in the more artistic slide came in, then near the end, I had more of a role again when it came to the crunch, during the final rendering, editing, and sound design. To criticize myself in terms of how much I contributed I always felt that there was more I could add, as a way to keep the team stress free and have more of a visually creative input into the project, I held back however because I wasn't assigned a role in the visual department, and through it best not to try and steal thunder from others. The process was about a theoretical team working on a project and I thought it best to respect the boundaries of my team. 

The only visual part of the project other than the original storyboards which I added was about 50 seconds of animation during the final short. I ran into a multitude of problems during it like loss of keyframes and numerous frequent crashing. I used the post-to-post style of animation as I figured this was the most sensible way to go about timing, I focused on trying to get the correct silhouette for each character correct and really tried to install the sense of character. I was a little upset however when it came to it because many keyframes which I put in were missing, and I think this was in part due to the constant crashing and losing my place, and also in part due to the lag which was constant throughout the Maya scene which made it completely impossible to get a clear playback at any point.


      
   

Collaboration Project - Robbin' Poppins - Animated Contribution

Collaborative Project - Robbin' Poppins - Personal Contribution

During this project, I took on the role of the Director and Producer, I felt I could do a good job at this and wanted to explore my potential due to wanting to pursue it in a career orientated sense. Along with those two roles I also took on the task of scriptwriting, for the Skit, drawing up the initial storyboard and adapting it throughout, the sound design including making the sounds from scratch, rigging the bag prop and finally animating 1032 frames for the final animation.

Directing and Producing:

Due to holding this role, I seem to have had a defining hand is practically every aspect of the project which has allowed me to strive to maintain an equilibrium towards progress, work ethic and flow. I believe with my contribution and decision making I have successfully managed the team in shaping the final animated short.

Scriptwriting:

First Draft

Second Draft

Final Script

Throughout the project, I've promptly drafted and updated the script for the Animated short making it easily readable for the rest of the team to instantly grasp the concepts and events. This directly tied in with drafting the initial storyboard in post-it form, which then allowed a more visual way to get inside the idea presented for the skit. Throughout, as the storyboard needed changing, I made the final decisions on how the story would progress, especially when R&D presented problems in the narrative and barriers in the comedic scene.

Initial Storyboarding:

Post-it-note storyboarding

I did the original fleshing out of the storyboard and headed the various adaptations through our project for drawing up by Megan Robson. It was imperative the ideas be set in stone early to make sure time constraints didn't being to become a factor, I can say, the storyboarding didn't encounter that problem. 

Decisions around Skit Progression:

Swimming Pool Skit

Robbery Skit

Being the director the final say on matters generally came down to me in order to progress the project in a way which I thought to be positive for the team and true to the brief. I wrote up the ways in which the final skits evolved throughout the process in the best way I understood it.  
  Directing Live Action:

Reference Footage

Being the Director it fell to me to instruct Alfie and Meg (Poppins and the Robber) whilst Juan manned the camera. I found that getting the posing correct in the reference footage was very important and we spent a long time getting that right, it gave us a very easy task of animating later in the project.

Bag rig:

I took on the role of rigging the bag prop, the only prop which needed to be animated, it was a tough task and required help, however from that I can now successfully rig the bag again and have gained the experience of doing so.

Animating:

Animated Contribution

We all took a section of the Skit to animate, I felt it was important to take the most frames to help take some weight off of the rest of the team. It was pleasing to animate my section because it's fundamentally why I'm on the course and found it satisfying. I ran into various problems with crashing and missing keyframes, eventually working with the scene and software became second nature and I managed to work strategically and methodically to finish my section quickly. 

Sound design:

Sound List

In terms of sound design, I made an extensive list of sounds which were needed for the animation, I took a recorder and recorded lots of sounds using mundane objects from around my home. After that, I edited them to remove noise and prepared them for incision into the animation over video, due to various constraints, that job was performed by the editor.

Perspective Film Review Links for Assessment (2018)

All Perspectives Film Reviews

All Film Reviews following the Perspectives Lecture Series

The Truman Show (1998)

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Funny Games (2007)

Scream (1996)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Inception (2010)

Kill Bill Vol. 1

Film Review Links for Assessment (2018)

All Film Reviews 

All film reviews following the Film Reviews Lecture Series. 


Exploitation Cinema - Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

B-Movies - When Worlds Collide (1951)

Character Opposites - Labyrinth (1986)

Three-Act Structure - Geostorm (2017)

Archetypes - Venom (2018)

The Heroes Journey - Django Unchained (2012)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Perspectives: Post-Modernism in The Truman Show (1998)

Figure 1 - The Truman Show - Film Poster

The Truman show is filmed with the theme of post-modernity and what that stands for in mind. The film is a film about a tv show set inside a giant dome housing the star who lives inside. The main character of Truman played by Jim Carrey is blissfully unaware of anything other than his quant existence in this perfect town. 

The show is controlled from the moon which is a live footage editing/control room where the character of the director Christof played by Ed Harris weives every single day of Truman's life. There is a theme of multi-layering which occurs through control, Peter Weir (Director) directs Christof who directs Truman who is merely a pawn to be spied on for entertainment purposes.

The majority of the film gets broken through the fourth wall with a continuous cutting to audiences watching the Truman show in various places, a bar, a household bath, a security booth. The audience is interviewed by someone that we never know, for a purpose we never find out. The theme creates a relationship with the film audience allowing us to empathise more with the world creates to watch the Truman Show.  

Figure 2 - The Truman Show - Truman notices imperfections

   

The Twist comes in the film in various ways, it is arguable that the show's downfall is brought on slowly and builds up over time. Truman slowly begins to notice impurities in the Idyllic world which he lives, one of the first things is when he enters a building and sees a portion of wall is missing and workers and having lunch, when they realise the star of the show is staring them out they hurridly jump up and the security whisks Truman out of the building. The idea of confronting social norms begins to destabilize the tv show which begins to cause disruption in the viewing eventually the director calls every inhabitant of the town to perform a sweep of the dome in order to find Truman, when he is eventually discovered in a boat after confronting his deepest fears of his reality, the director manically tries to capsize his boat and end the main characters life. Not even God can halt the progression of a determined Truman seeking the holy grail of knowledge. 

Figure 3 - The Truman Show - Ascent to the exit

The film ultimately ends where Truman is given the option to stay inside an Idyllic reality as the biggest fish in a small pond and go on with his head in the sand or he can leave, and stop being forced to conform to a standard chosen for him. We desperately wish to know what happens after but it is arguably better to allow our own minds to finish the story which beautifully sums up the entire idea of the film which is a line for line the idea of modernity and by extension post-modernity. The film is about reevaluating our ideas of reality and consciously striving to create our own truths to fit with our own ideology of how we live, this closely follows the ideas of post-modernity.    

Illustrations:

Figure 1: The Truman Show (1998) [Film Poste] - Peter Wier: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions

Figure 2: The Truman Show (1998) [Film Still] - Peter Wier: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions

Figure 3: The Truman Show (1998) [Film Still] - Peter Wier: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions

Film Reviews: Mad Max - Fury Road (2015)

Figure 1: Mad Max - Fury Road - Film Poster

Exploitation Cinema is a category of B-Movie which focuses on a theme which runs throughout to target a specific audience. Exploitation films generally run on a Lower Budget and follow themes characteristic of B-Movie Cinema. Mad Max is the defining film series of B-Movie in the Ozploitation genre. 

Ozploitation is the exploitation of Australian film in order to appeal to a particular demographic audience. Other characteristics of the genre contain a strong trait of Anti-authoritarian subjects, anarchy reigns and there is little regard for life. Ozploitation follows the same trait of having a low budget especially in the case of Mad Max (1979), the first of the Mad Max series by George Miller and an anti-authoritarian nature, where even the main character played by Mel Gibson, admits that he feels like one of the 'crazies' and the only thing that separates him from the lunatics which he catches is a metal badge. 

Figure 2: Mad Max (1979) - Mad Max and Jim Goose Investigate

Mad Max: Fury Road is 100% an Ozploitation cinema film, it is basically Mad Max (1979) on an extended budget. The success of the series has built a franchise in this fantastical environment. The Main character played by Tom Hardy is the same character as Mel Gibson, there is an emphasis on his mental state from the outset which relates back to the previous films, and how the environment finally can impact a mind. The enemy in the first film consists of low budget leather wearing psychotic criminals who hysterically laugh at high speed riding motorbikes through the outback. In Fury Road, high budget leather wearing psychotic mutant men hysterically laughing at high speed driving rusty, ugly and brutally beautiful vehicles through the outback. The arch-enemy in Mad Max (1979) 'Toecutter' represents the exact same character traits as 'Immortan Joe' the Leader of the War Boyz (Both characters are in fact played by the same Actor Hugh Keays-Byrne)

Figure 3: Mad Max - Fury Road - Flamethrower Guitar vehicle and War Boyz Fleet

Fury Road promises the audience a non-stop car chase from start to finish, and doesn't disappoint, it exploits this theme to draw in an audience from people who enjoy car chases and non-stop adrenaline rides. Extreme violence and gore is prevalent throughout exploiting an audience from the genre of gore and violence. There is a female protagonist to bring the film more in line with a modern social outlook whilst playing on an already strong stereotype of helpless females needing to be saved. The Final theme is of Australia, using the environment of the Australian Outback as the set for an epic duel of metal and death. 
  
Illustrations:

Figure 1: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) [Film Poster] - Georgie Miller: Warner Bros. Pictures, Roadshow Pictures.

Figure 2: Mad Max (1979) [Film Still] - George Miller: Kennedy Miller Productions, Crossroads.

Figure 3: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) [Film Still] - Georgie Miller: Warner Bros. Pictures, Roadshow Pictures.

Character Design: Graphic Design - Modern Urban

Today I created a graphic for a page for something which was Modern Urban, I used negative space in order to overlay iconic buildings from the London skyline in order to create an optimistic, pattern honoring the amazing feats of engineering undertaken to complement the details on the page.

Character Design Project Bible - Zombie: The Puppet of Flesh