Kaboom! Update

Good news, Kaboom is almost done with production. I would estimate that with another hour or so of some last minute editing that we will be done with our project. One thing that will take some time will be adding the vocal track to a phone conversation scene in our piece. I am very excited to show you all on Monday.


Cheers

Group Update

Today my group and I filmed on location at my friend's house. It was really nice working off campus because it allowed us to bring a real life element to our story rather than being subjected to campus housing. It was really interesting seeing the characters in our script come to life and I give my group members a lot of credit for casting such good actors. If I could have changed one thing I wished we would have slated our video and audio now it looks like we'll have to deal with that issue in post-production. Today we completed about 70% of all shooting and we intend to finish the rest tomorrow. So far, so good.

Update

Our group has made a lot of advancements in our project since last week.  We completely changed our project idea, as well as wrote the script, casted our show, picked a location, and established shooting times.  We are very excited to begin shooting on Monday with our cast.

One of the obstacles our group ran into was casting our child.  We had to change the sex of the child from a boy to a girl (Timmy is now Ellie).  It's also difficult to meet the needs of a young child, since they are not as flexible with shooting times.  But, we have Melissa Gattine's child casted and ready to go.

We also need to pick up a few props for our project, such as the can of coins, the new stuffed animal, hot sauce, etc.  These things we will probably pick up at a local convienient store or somewhere like Wal-Mart or Wegmans.

Project Update

Finally finishing the script is a very tedious job.  I was really nervous to send it to my team members even though I had spent a good amount of time working on it.  I had to make it seem realistic and actually flow like a story, all while maintaining the integrity of the actual news story the script is based off of.  One thing that I think students and new script writers often have a difficult time writing, is using real voices that make their characters sound like humans.  For example people in real life don't talk with perfect English or have the correct grammar all of the time.   It was my job as a script writer to capture the elements of how I think these characters and how these people talked.  Watching a video of the two main characters was a good indicator of how they can actually talk.  I am proud of my script and my team members were very helpful with helping me edit, and obviously creating the story since we all did that together.  I hope the product is solid.

Project Update

Well, there's not much to say about our project, as Haley covered it in her post.  Right now we're finalizing our cast and our script so we're ready to shoot when we get back from break.  We're also working on contacting someone about the old-fashioned car.

When we get back, we will work with our actors to figure out what scenes we will shoot and when.  Our script is still in the works, as Haley mentioned, but it is coming together smoothly.

I am excited to see everyone's projects when we get back, and I hope everyone has had a great spring break!

Project Update

Our group began filming our short film today and I have to say, I think we're off to a fantastic start. Footage looks great, everyone did they're jobs incredibly well, and we all made it through, relatively on schedule.

We all woke up at around 7 AM this morning and headed over to Ithaca's First Presbyterian church. The location was perfect. We needed no lighting equipment at all during the shooting of these scenes. Everything is naturally lit and looks wonderful.


We went to my friend's house to shoot a particularly impressive scene in terms of lighting. Since we didn't have a cop car at our disposal, we set up two lights with a red and blue gel on each one, then our grips each waved flags in front of them. It led to what looks like a very realistic cop car lighting effect, and I can't wait to show it off in the final product.

The actors we have did great; we have a particularly awesome Irish cop and our lead did excellent.

Overall we worked very well as both a team and a creative unit and I think we're all going to be proud of the final product we create. Hopefully we can maybe get into some festivals, but as for right now, we'll just focus on making it as good as possible.

And maybe we'll catch up on some sleep along the way.

My hard drive is currently precariously placed on a chair in the lab

And that's okay. Nothing like a bit of a challenge to everyone else while you're editing. Hey guys! If you're reading this during class, don't trip!

Anyhow, I saw Battle LA the other day. Great visual effects. It was a shame that the story didn't let us see much of them, though. Most of what I got to witness was the gritty landscape of the destroyed city, which is rubble and rubble and rubble and rubble and rubble. I would have loved to see more robot aliens. From the six frames I saw of them, they looked very cool. Okay, and there was that scene where they cut through one of the aliens to find the weak spot. But other than that, it was a good use of special effects for some pretty mediocre reasons.

The story and everything else was eh and meh, though. Aliens are colonizing the Earth. Great! Let's kill them! But why? Well, they're killing us. But why? Because they may want our water. Hmmm, okay, but why? For fuel. Ohhh. Well, you could have made that a little clearer earlier on in the movie; unless you were afraid that the explosions and the helicopters were going to be compromised. Less story, more helicopters! Isn't that how it works? No. Also, the actors weren't subpar, but what they were acting wasn't hard by any means. Children could have done it. It was mostly screaming and grunting. Children can scream and grunt. That's all babies do, I know that. Just ask my two year old nephew. Awwww. I'm sidetracked. Spring break.

I gave it a 4/10. I'd watch it again only if my roommate and his drunk frat brothers were watching it on Netflix. They're suckers for this kind of stuff. Again, meh and eh.

STATUS REPORT ON EDITING! Pretty much one-third of the movie is rough edited in Final Cut. I've got to work on the SFX for the opening shot, and it was a pain to get the audio to flow well. We might have to ADR. But that's not so much a problem right now. We've got a few weeks. I'm sure we can get this done.

Then it's on to the next project. Who's betting on music video?

~Will