Captive

I was planning on showing another video, but unfortunately the web page isn't working. Hopefully it will be fixed by next month though so I can show you it then. In the mean time here is what I class as my first unofficial short film (up until now they have just been practice).



This film is actually based on a poem that I read years ago. When I was trying to think of a short film idea to make for my A-Level film, I wrote down a few random bits of ideas and one of them reminded me of a poem that I read some time ago. So I decided to combine the piece of idea that I had with the basic story that the poem tells and thus Captive was born.

I then searched for some music that I thought would fit well with the story. The two tracks that I use in the film are from Black Hawk Down. The first track is called "Hunger" and the second is "Ashes To Ashes". Neither of them are in their original form, as I re-edited them to fit better. However, when I was still developing my idea I listened to these tracks (although mostly "Hunger") unedited again and again. This once the main source of my inspiration.

I visualised the film in my head whilst listening to the music I had chosen. I then storyboarded out the opening sequence and the end sequence and wrote the voice over.

The next part is where I wish I had a producer because I found that I had to do literally everything. Once I'd picked my actors (who were just some friends that I'd asked) I had to work around their schedule which was very tiresome because my main actor (Tom Law) who is also a musician was doing a lot of gigs so he didn't have a lot of free time in when I could film. This was tough because I had a deadline to meet. But we managed to find one and a half days where we shot the entire film. It involved one very long day and a lot of travelling where we filmed the cliff scenes and the flashback scene. The scenes of him at home were shot on the second day which luckily didn't take too long because we only had a couple of hours.

I put a lot of hard work into this film and I am very happy with the end result. There are of course a few things I would change if I were to do it again. But these are only minor things. And for my first unofficial short film I think it is rather good.

Vanish

This is the first film that I've made which I co-directed. It was an interesting experience, although if I were to co-direct again I would have to get to know the person first and make sure that we both worked on the same wavelength, because the person I was working with was a bit of an idiot.

He was very arrogant and was making that actors do take after take when they didn't even need to. The whole reason for doing another take is that you want the actors to do something different, because you need to re-do the camera movement as it wasn't smooth enough, or because something else went wrong.

However, each of the takes that this guy did was exactly the same so I started to get slightly annoyed with him as he was just waisting time, and the actors were getting annoyed with having to do the same thing again and again when then didn't even need to.

My directing was much better I felt and I got on much better with the actors which I think is an essential thing when working with actors. Anyway here is the film.

Built & Crushed

A 30 second animation that I made in the space of about 10 minutes.



Not much to be said about this really other than I made it in college whilst we were looking at animations. I can definitely say now though that I don't think I'll be going into animation simply because, even though the animation was fun to make, I'm more of a live action person myself. I'll leave animation to the likes of Nick Park. Although I have been thinking a lot about motion capture film recently. I'm not sure I'll be making motion capture films until I'm an established director though because of the availability of the technology. But who knows, experimental motion capture shorts could be just around the corner. I doubt it though!

The Making Of Juno Judo

This is just a brief 'making of' video which just lets you see a little bit about what went on during the shooting stage of Juno Judo.

The Making Of Juno Judo


I got the idea to make this half way through shooting Juno Judo. Although like all of my other videos so far this too is just an experiment, and so for a 'making of' video it is pretty shit. But I learnt from it which is the main thing.

Juno Judo

My next film Juno Judo was a real big step for me as it was when I made the jump from using one camera to directing two cameras. I found this quite challenging, but it was also very rewarding and I was quite pleased with the end product. Now my opinion has changed and whilst I still am pleased with it I do feel that there is still a lot I could do to improve it.



Originally this was intended as a music video but I don't think that the video really did the music enough justice. (The music is a track called Conga Fury by Juno Reactor.)

I still quite like the first 2:15 because all of this was choreographed. The fight was choreographed by myself and the two fighters, whilst the camera work was choreographed by myself. It was all very much like a big ballet of some sorts. (Although a rather ugly ballet!) However, from 2:15 the fight is all improvised up until when one of the fighters loses, which was what we knew before we started that we wanted to end with.And whilst the camera movements weren't choreographed from 2:15 I still gave instructions to the other camera man.

Sadly you can hear some of my instructions in the video. The idea was that I would cut out all the diegetic sound when it came to edit, but it just didn't work when they were thrown and there was no bang. Although when I came to edit it I did think that I had managed to get rid of all the talking in the background. Tip for the future, if you know you've captured some sound of the crew talking even by accident then listen back to your video with some good headphones because they make such a difference and are so much better than crappy speakers.

I'm still quite fond of the first couple of minutes of this video, but it is a shame the rest of it is rather shit. I think that a completely choreographed fight would have looked better, but I always knew that 8 minutes of fight footage would be hard to keep going with the limited fight knowledge that I have. I probably would have been better shortening the track that I used.