My final opinion on "Coercion" (Narrative)

I am very pleased with how "Coercion" looks now complete (to some degree). I have learned a lot from making it, both filming and editing, and it has motivated me to plan making more films over summer.

When I showed my lecturer my rough draft, he said I only needed to tweak a few things here and there and that he was impressed with my range of shots, which I was really happy about because that's what I was hoping he would say.

I do intend to reshoot some shots with the actors to get the film to a standard that I think is suitable for festivals, and it is because of this that I will not be uploading the film online (yet).

Editing "Coercion" (Narrative)

Editing Scene 4

I had it in my mind all along that I would edit scene 4 first so I had more time to get the kettle sequence as close to perfect as possible.

I was happy with all the different shots I got, and was more than happy with how well they cut together with each other. My however, that being said, nothing is perfect. Halfway through shooting the scene, there was a problem with the shotgun microphone which didn't become apparent until listening to audio later, and it caused the last few lines of dialogue to become very tinny and quiet, and basically, unusable. Thankfully though, the last few lines were spoken very loudly and very near camera, resulting in good quality and usable audio that only needed slight adjustments.

Another problem that only occurred a few times in this scene was the change in white balance. At times, I changed the white balance and recorded different takes, but foolishly I left out the possibility of the better take having the wrong white balance, meaning the clips wouldn't match up. This involved heavy colour grading, including both luma and chroma, brightness and contrast, and saturation, which I thought when edited to a suitable standard looked very grainy. So to fix this, I dynamically linked the clip I wanted to Adobe After Effects and applied the "Reduce Grain" effect.

Regardless of colour and audio issues, I'm very happy with how this scene looks.

One slight change I made after talking with my lecturer was the part where Mike eats his food. My original edit shows Mike taking three bites and then his plate is empty, which has always annoyed me, but I didn't know how I could fix it for fear of running over the time limit. After talking with him, he said I could add more macro shots of him eating and jump cut them together, to suggest he's eating lots quickly. After trying this, I am much happier with how it looks.

Editing Scene 1

After adding what I had reshot from day 2, scene 1 began to take shape. Again, this scene also had white balance errors, making it very difficult to colour grade, but I'm happy I have made it look as good as it can with the footage I had.

There were two shots in particular that stood out for me for things I needed to fix; One was the date and time on Sarah's phone. In scene one, Mike comes home from work to discover no food has been made for him because, as Sarah says, it is Valentine's day, however, rather than being roughly 05:00pm on the 14th of February, the phone read "10:43am 17th April". 

It didn't even enter my mind that it would happen, but even though it is only visible for a matter of frames, I needed to fix it.

To do this, I sent the clip to After Effects, created an adjustment layer and rotoscoped around the blue square on the phone's screen. As Sarah picks the phone up, I had to move the mask layer frame by frame following its movement.

After doing this, I applied a camera blur to the layer so that the time and date were no longer visible.

This is how the phone looks now:

The next shot that I needed to fix was this one below; mine and my sound operator's reflections are clearly in shot, again only for a few frames, but it was still enough to take the viewer out of the film if they noticed it.

Again to fix this, I created another adjustment layer and used the rotobrush tool to select the red back drop. 

As the camera shakes in this shot, the it was very difficult to match the mask layer to its movement. To suppress the shake, I used the warp stabilizer tool, which removed it completely. Finally, I applied Gaussian blur to the mask layer to blur out our reflection, and it worked. Here is the finished shot:

Editing Scene 2

The biggest advantage with scene 2 is that there is no dialogue, only music. Scene 2 is where we meet the real Sarah, in her most fragile and true state. I wanted a sort of dreamy-flashback looking sequence for this scene, even though it is the present day, as I feel it demonstrates how fragile someone's emotions are, which is what I wanted to convey.

To do this, I applied a vignette to each clip, and I also duplicated each clip and placed it directly above it on the timeline, to which I then lowered the opacity to 40% and added lots of blur for a glowing effect. Finally I increased each clip's brightness. This is how it looks before and after this process:

I'm really happy with how this scene looks, the only problem was that I had a song in mind for it ever since I wrote it, but I couldn't use it if I wanted to enter it into festivals as it was copyrighted, and I couldn't find a copyright free song that would do it justice, so I asked my lecturer if when submitting it to him, I could submit the copyrighted song to demonstrate what I mean, to which he said I could.

The song is called "Kaifuku suru Kizu" by Saylu. I originally heard it in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" in a scene where the film's protagonist discovers a room filled with Samurai Swords.

Editing Scene 3

Scene 3 is probably my favourite scene, purely because of how much better it looks in term of exposure and aperture. There is minimal noise and very little colour correction needed doing. I do however think due to the 8 minute time pressure (which I was already over at this point), the scene happens too quickly. If I were to extend the film, I could add more to it.

Final Non-Narrative film & Editing examples

My non-narrative, though all footage was recorded by myself using multiple liquids and surfaces, was very heavily edited using two soft-wares; Premiere Pro and After Effects. I clocked a total of 40+ hours of editing on this piece.

As there are over 100 different compositions within the film, I will only explain how I did the ones I found most interesting.

The opening shot of the film shows a ball of light growing from center screen, revealing a moving border that is made up or mirrored eagles:

To do this, I first needed to edit the original footage. Here is the original eagle:

I used a stencil to create the shape and spray pens to apply the ink, after removing the stencil, I blew at it through a straw to make the ink run off in different directions. Then once in Premiere, I cropped around the area I needed and keyed out the remaining white back ground and placed it on a new black background. Then I applied the mirror effect to it and set the reflection point directly center of the tail feathers. Finally, to create the outline, I maxed out the contrast and brightness to get a solid blue colour, which I then keyed out using ultra key, allowing anything underneath its track in the timeline will be visible through the mirrored Eagle-shaped "hole".

To create the growing light in the centre, I first had to record the movement of it. Here is the original:

As you can see, it only expands to one side of the paper, which didn't make mirroring this clip very easy. To do this, I had to manually piece together two copies of the same clip side by side and then nest them together to have simultaneous control of both clips as and when I wished, this is because the perimeters of the original clip would not allow it to simply be mirrored. This time I didn't key out the white, instead, I inverted the image, which resulted in turning the white paper into black, and the purple spray into a light turquoise colour.

Once I had place this clip under the eagles clip, I then centered the images up.

The biggest thing with this film for me was to try and match all compositions with the beat of the music. One of the best examples of this within my film (I feel) is roughly 25 seconds into the film when the coloured streaks shoot from the bottom to the top of screen. This took roughly 3 hours to get right. Here is the original:

I only used an individual streak of colour because they each fell at different speeds, so I picked the one that traveled from to top to bottom the fastest to match the beat. I then placed copies of the clip on different tracks of the timeline in time with the beat and moved them either side of the original for a more interesting look. I also used the HUE tool to change each streak's colour to add variety.

When I showed my final film to my lecturer, he said everything was fine, apart from one transition, which is where a ladder like object starts to pan down screen and get closer and closer to the "camera" until it goes black:

As it gradually gets closer and closer, it fades to black, which originally I found quite nice, but my lecturer pointed out that it became blurry as it wasn't recorded in 4:4:4 picture quality. He asked me to try and think of a different way around it, to which I came back with this:

Now the lines stay the same size, but shoot symmetrically around screen, eventually making it all black.

Overall, I am really happy with how my film looks, I personally think it is unique compared to other films I have seen of the same genre.

A side advantage of this was I managed to implement this into my narrative film briefly, too!

"Coercion" (Narrative) Production Stills

Filming "Coercion" (Narrative) Day 2

Armed with a new list of things to do, it was time for the second and final day of shooting, I knew I needed to keep on top of things if I wanted to get everything I needed.

First off, Claire needed to be home by lunch time, so in order to ensure we weren't under pressure, I chose to film her scene first, I had already set everything up and was ready to shoot as soon as they arrived.

I told Claire what I wanted her to do (see last blog post) and she did it in one take. Straight after that I recorded her voice over for the opening phone call and she had left set within half an hour of being there! Things were off to a flying start.


Scene 1 - Reshoot

As soon as Claire left set, Gwynneth and Alex were ready to do their reshoots, and again, I chose to do it chronologically, not only because of being weary of getting fake blood on clothes, but also to get them back into their character mind sets.

After learning from my mistakes from the first day, I was happy with the footage I got from the reshoot. Everything was much brighter and in focus.


Scene 2 - Reshoot

Next was to reshoot the shots that had issues because of the LED light in the bathroom. This again took less than 20 minutes to shoot, which really motivated everybody on set as they were always on their toes.


Scene 4

This was the scene I was really excited to film, but at the same time, I was dreading, purely because of the last fight scene.

This scene needed to build tension between the characters and put the audience in the middle of it, and the only way I felt that was possible was by getting creative with the shots. Again, Gwynneth and Alex knew their lines which helped keep me on top of everything, but first on the agenda was Mike eating his dinner without so much as looking at Sarah.

For this, I first got cutaways of Sarah preparing the food, including taking the chicken out of the oven, carving it and putting it onto a plate. Next, I wanted to show just how vile Mike truly is, and to do this, I got macro shots of him viciously cutting his food and eating like a pig.

Next I wanted to show Sarah putting the kettle on, for when it starts to boil as the tension rises. As the kettle was as reflective as a mirror, it was difficult to get a close up shot of it, so to conquer this, I used a long 20mm lens from a distance, hidden behind a cupboard.

As the scene goes on, as stated, the tension rises, and what I have seen with many, if not all films, the higher the tension is, the faster the cutting becomes. I wanted to get as many different takes from as many different angles as I could think of so I'd never run out of things to cut to. This especially applies to where she hits him with the kettle, it would never work without fast editing.

I wanted it to look as real as possible, so it would look as though she were actually hitting him, so I had the idea of putting the prop raw chicken to good use by placing it where Mike's head would be, and letting Gwynneth hit it as hard as she could, repeatedly. For the stabbing scene, I had bought two of the same chicken forks and cut the two middle prongs off of one to fit around Alex's neck, and for safety measures, I fitted two caps onto the end of the stubs to stop any sharp edges, like so:

I was very happy with how the shoot went, how professional everybody on set was and the effort everybody put into it.

Filming "Coercion" (Narrative) Day 1

As said in another post, filming for my narrative film, "Coercion", took place on the 17th and 18th of April. As the entire film is based in one location, travelling wasn't an issue allowing for better use of time. The reason for shooting over two days was to film as much content as possible on the first day, if not all of it, and then the second day would be to shoot anything I feel we may have missed or anything that could be done better after having looked at rushes on the first evening.

The actors arrived on set for 9:30 on both days to be briefed on how the day was planned to go. Everything was filmed chronologically to make sure any clothing that may or would be stained by fake blood would be the very last thing we shot, to ensure we had everything we needed from the other scenes before it was too late.


Day 1

Shooting: Scene 1

Scene 1 was the first and slowest scene I filmed, and I think that was mainly because I hadn't been in the director's seat for quite some time, and I was awake early ensuring I had everything I could have possibly needed for the shoot.

This scene is about where we first meet the main character, Sarah (played by Gwynneth Megan Wroe), she is seen holding a pregnancy test that reads positive and she is unsure whether to be overjoyed or terrified. The scene demonstrates how she is quick to dismiss people around her, but why that is is explained throughout the film as we meet her controlling boyfriend, Michael (played by Alexander-James Keen). After the events of scene one have happened, the audience now understands that Sarah believed her baby was conceived out of love but has been proven otherwise.

The pregnancy test was an easy prop to obtain and make read positive. I bought two on eBay in case one went wrong, opened it with a knife and painted the lines on with nail varnish. Everything other than the allotted time went to plan for this scene, everybody on set was comfortable with each other, the actors learned their lines which made the performance part run really smoothly, and I soon became more in charge of the set because of this.


Shooting: Scene 2

Scene 2 was definitely the most straight forward scene to film as it contains no dialogue nor any other audio that would need to be recorded on set, and only has the lead actress in it.

This scene is set a few days after scene one, although the film doesn't state it, the audience is to assume it. It shows the Sarah partially undressed in the bathroom, covering up bruises she was given by her controlling boy friend. The reason for this scene is to demonstrate how fragile her character is. She has been the victim of abuse for some time, and is used to her routine of hiding bruises and scars, the scene depicts that she uses make up and long sleeved clothes to do so.

As I had ran over time filming scene 1, and only myself and Gwynneth were needed to film, this enabled the others to break and have food as well as making Gwynneth feel more comfortable being partially undressed. After filming this scene I was back on schedule.


Shooting: Scene 3

Scene 3 is the most dialogue heavy and emotionally driven scene in the film which I feared I would again lose time when filming it, however, everybody had warmed up at this point and was in the swing of things, everything went smoothly.

This scene tells the audience that the Sarah's best friend, Jess (played by Claire Love) has also been abused by Sarah's boyfriend, and had come to warn her before she was hurt too. The audience knows Sarah is already being abused by him, but they now understand that she doesn't tell anybody, and even now is still afraid to speak up as she kicks Jess out, and then cries to herself.


FIRST NIGHT RUSHES

After finishing filming Scene 3, I decided to call it a day as it was 5 O'Clock and we were losing light, so I decided to film scene 4 on the 18th.

As soon as the actors left, I loaded the footage onto my computer and began briefly editing it together, and I noticed a few things that I wanted to either re-shoot, do differently or add. Here are some things I wanted to redo:

Re-shoots

From scene 1, I didn't notice this until I saw it on a bigger screen than the LED viewfinder on my camera, but this shot is actually slightly out of focus, and I originally intended to use this for a about 5-8 seconds.

Again from scene 1, this is another case of what can and can't be determined on a small screen; this shot I thought was extremely dark, and as this is a follow shot, it needed to look good.

From scene 2, this shot is again slightly out of focus as well as being off center. The off center aspect of this issue can be fixed in post production, however, it is near impossible to fix focus issues.

This was the last camera issue I encountered from the day, this LED light under the mirror caused a problem with the picture. To the human eye, it is a still beam of light, but on camera, it appears as though a fan blade or something of the sorts is slowly passing in front of it. This is not a difficult issue to fix as the light can be turned off.

Additions

The main things I wanted to add were cutaways, and I already had in mind what kind I needed, for example; Sarah getting cooking equipment out of cupboards and drawers at the start of scene 3. To save time in the first shoot, I decided to film those sort of things on day 2.

Changes

There are a few lines in the script that were slightly altered within the actors performance on the day, but one remained the same and I've always been unsure about it since I wrote it, and that is when in Scene 3 Jess tells Sarah that Mike has raped her, and the line is literally "Sarah, he raped me". When I watched it back, I still wasn't happy with it, and the delivery of the line wasn't as sincere as I hoped for it to be. The way I intend to overcome this is by asking Claire to bring her own twist to it by saying what she believes should be said.

Filming Non-Narrative

On the 14th of April, I had hired the TV studio for the whole day purely because A) I had complete control over the lighting, and B) 8 hours was plenty of time to get all the footage I needed.

For the shoot, I bought a variety of different surface materials, including blank canvases, paper, white card and photo paper. All of these caused the liquids to react differently which really gave nice images. I also bought a rang of stencils, which included an Ant, a Space Invader, and Eagle and a Dove.

The liquid I mainly used was food colouring, however, I did also use acrylic paint, glitter paint and air spray pens.

After shooting, I left with roughly 2 hours worth of clips that I then planned to manipulate using Premiere Pro and After effects.

Here are some production stills from the day: