Inside Out
This weekend's project was an interesting one. Not only do I still not understand the title, but it was extremely difficult to try to pull off the prompt and keep the focus central to the video in less than one minute.
The prompt:
"A character longs for something that he or she does not currently possess. Include what is at stake for the character if he or she does not obtain the desire."
The focus of the project was:
"The goal of this exercise is to explore the externalization and motivations of character, through visual elements, and through the use of a basic 3-act structure."
As you can imagine, it is not easy to craft a story with 3-act structure in less than one minute. Here was my attempt:
The class we took prior to creating this project was actually an acting class. We talked about character objectives and super-objectives. We learned about how it is crucial as directors to communicate with our actors what their suber-objectives are; it's what drives their ultimate decision making process throughout a story. It's up to the actor to come up with a persona for the character - how that character reacts to that super-objective. Regular objectives are different than super-objectives: they are immediate objectives. In Star Wars, Luke and Obi-Wan go to Mos Eisley with the objective of finding a pilot. However, their super-objective is to find Princess Leia and deliver the droids to her. Objectives and super-objectives exist harmoniously with the three-act structure, and one cannot exist without the other. That being said, we had to try to tie that structure into one minute not through means of plot development, but through character development.
I think my three acts in this project are relatively simple. In the first act, our pool-playing gentleman is confronted with a problem. How can he hit in the 8-ball when the yellow ball sits in the way? We see that a large stack of cash it at stake for him if he fails his objective. In the second act, we learn that our character's super-objective isn't actually the money, but rather a woman. For some reason, this pool game and that cash is essential for his life with her. (More on this later.) In the third act he finally decides to take action and changes the angle of his shot before taking it. Whether or not he makes it we will never know; I cut it short because it is not necessary to know if he makes it or not for the heart of the story to be told.
Whether or not I was successful in conveying these three acts is for you to decide. I made the film, so I know them. But if I couldn't successfully convey them to you then I as a filmmaker have failed. That said, let's talk about the problems with this piece.
The prompt:
"A character longs for something that he or she does not currently possess. Include what is at stake for the character if he or she does not obtain the desire."
The focus of the project was:
"The goal of this exercise is to explore the externalization and motivations of character, through visual elements, and through the use of a basic 3-act structure."
As you can imagine, it is not easy to craft a story with 3-act structure in less than one minute. Here was my attempt:
The class we took prior to creating this project was actually an acting class. We talked about character objectives and super-objectives. We learned about how it is crucial as directors to communicate with our actors what their suber-objectives are; it's what drives their ultimate decision making process throughout a story. It's up to the actor to come up with a persona for the character - how that character reacts to that super-objective. Regular objectives are different than super-objectives: they are immediate objectives. In Star Wars, Luke and Obi-Wan go to Mos Eisley with the objective of finding a pilot. However, their super-objective is to find Princess Leia and deliver the droids to her. Objectives and super-objectives exist harmoniously with the three-act structure, and one cannot exist without the other. That being said, we had to try to tie that structure into one minute not through means of plot development, but through character development.
I think my three acts in this project are relatively simple. In the first act, our pool-playing gentleman is confronted with a problem. How can he hit in the 8-ball when the yellow ball sits in the way? We see that a large stack of cash it at stake for him if he fails his objective. In the second act, we learn that our character's super-objective isn't actually the money, but rather a woman. For some reason, this pool game and that cash is essential for his life with her. (More on this later.) In the third act he finally decides to take action and changes the angle of his shot before taking it. Whether or not he makes it we will never know; I cut it short because it is not necessary to know if he makes it or not for the heart of the story to be told.
Whether or not I was successful in conveying these three acts is for you to decide. I made the film, so I know them. But if I couldn't successfully convey them to you then I as a filmmaker have failed. That said, let's talk about the problems with this piece.
PROBLEMS
The biggest problem I had with this piece was staying true to the learning objective, and my project suffered because of it. Let me repeat the goal of the project:
"The goal of this exercise is to explore the externalization and motivations of character, through visual elements, and through the use of a basic 3-act structure."
The "visual elements" statement really came back to bite me in the butt. While planning out my story for this project, I storyboarded out the flashback sequence of the girl, as you saw, but wrote in the notes a line of dialogue to be voiced-over the flashback along with romantic music. While I was cutting the piece together in editing, my instructor walked over and watched it back with me before I had a chance to add in the voice over and music. "What's going on with that staircase scene?" he asked. I explained to him that I was going to add a voice over to explain that he planned on buying her an engagement ring, and hence the close up on her hand which is absent of a ring. I also said that a romantic music track would help set the tone. My instructor proceeded to tell me that that would be in violation of the prompt and that I was not allowed to do that. At first I was really frustrated. Suddenly, my story wasn't as complete as I had hoped it would be. My professor stressed to me after that the importance of telling a story visually. He acknowledged that music and sound could play a huge part in a story, but so could visual elements. He said we would be tackling each element one at a time until we were able to piece them all together in our F1 project. For the sake of this particular weekend project, and the next several few, we were to be focussing solely on the visual elements. After that sunk in, I realized the importance of the visual elements. I went into my third weekend project with a much more level head about the objectives of the weekend projects, and didn't care as much about the overall quality of the video as I did about how I was using the frame to convey a story.
HOW I DID IT
This project posed a couple of technical challenges for me, so if you are interested at all in some technical specifics of filmmaking read on.
First off was my rack focus. With the DSLR video revolution, rack focusing has become a powerful tool for the amateur filmmaker to utilize that was previously unavailable. Filming on DSLR's myself, I had become very accustomed to using the rack focus shot to capture certain shots. I really wanted my opening shot to rack focus from one pool ball to the next, so that the obstacle of the yellow ball in the middle of the shot was clear. However, the cameras we are using to film our weekend projects (the Canon XF305) is really designed for broadcast television where most everything stays in focus. With the 5mm lens on the XF305, it is really really difficult to get any significant depth of field. In order to pull off the rack focus shot of the pool balls, I had to get really really far away from the pool table and zoom in as far as the camera would let me. That is the only way to pull good focus on these broadcast video cameras, but it turned out effective, despite the difficulties.
Second was the slow motion. I wanted smooth slow motion, so I upped the frame rate to 60 fps. However, some of you might have noticed the 1080p HD setting on YouTube and might be pointing out that 1080p60 doesn't exists. Indeed, you are correct. BUT 1080i60 DOES exist. I shot the shot using interlaced scanning instead of progressive. The advantage? I got the appearance of 60fps. The disadvantage? My shots were now interlaced. To make sure I didn't get any interlacing artifact on those shots I kept the camera as still as possible by locking it down on a tripod and making sure my actress didn't make any exaggerated movements. Adobe Premiere can handle dropping progressive and interlaced footage onto the same timeline, so I conformed the frame rate down from 30 to 15 (even though it is 60i, 60i is simply 60 half frames per second, so it comes out to 30fps total) and dropped the 15p (30i) footage into my 24p timeline and let Premiere do it's thing. It turned out great and I'm really happy with it. The overall quality of the slow motion is much much better when shot at 60i and slowed down as opposed to left at 24p and attempting to slow that down.
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