That being said, check it out!
To create this project, I took a very systematic approach. I'll break down my step-by-step process below.
Shot-Design
The first thing I noticed about the clip I chose (I would post a link to it but I couldn't find it anywhere online) is how many slow dolly creeps there were. Christopher Nolan loves those, so I immediately took note of which shots were moving and which direction they were. Next, I watched the scene about a thousand times over, pausing on each individual shot and taking a picture of the frame. I kept doing this until I was able to construct a model of what the scene looks like and the relative camera placements of each angle. This was extremely important, because the room we had to film in was way too small to actually set up my actors in the correct positions. Instead, I threw them all around the room and gave the illusion of setup through controlling their eye-lines (the directions characters look). This is called cheating the space, which was crucially important in this project. After this was all done, I laid all my photos out in storyboard form and made multiple copies of my model to show my camera crew (aka one person, a very gracious upperclassman named Ryan), my actors, and just extras so I wouldn't lose it. Here is what my model (aka floor plan) looked like:
As you can see, through watching the scene over and over again and storyboarding it out, I was able to identify 7 separate camera placements (not including the insert shots). I also made note, which is not evident on the floor plan, of which angles had a dolly move and which direction it moved. Once I had all of this figured it out, it was easy to direct my actors and make sure they were always looking and speaking in the right direction, even though in reality they might have been staring at a window of a blank wall. This freed me up to move onto Production Design.
Production Design
I really had a lot of fun trying to make this room look like a scene from Inception. There were obviously some things I just didn't have, like hi-tech lab equipment for instance. But I put a lot of work into making the room look like a warehouse like setting like it does in the movie. Something that was particularly fun was making all of the old aged newspaper to pin up against the windows like in the film. This process actually took about 2 hours, and I had a ton of help from my awesome classmate Elangie. She silently helped the whole time, and made some awesome PD decisions that ended up making my film look better. Setting up the room took about 3 hours total, and then it took another hour or so to put back. This was by far the most time and effort I had put in to the set of any weekend project we made.
I also made sure that each character's wardrobe matched the character in the movie. It's not perfect, but I did what I could.
Production
Production was interesting. I had put so much time and effort into my production design that I expected shooting to be an intense process, especially considering several of my actors, including myself, were due to go work on other weekend projects later that same day. But instead, it was insanely chill. I guess all the preparation made it really easy. Everyone showed up, got in their places, we filmed two or three takes of each angle, and then we were done. Just like that. The only thing that took some time was lighting. The whole scene in Inception is interesting, because even though the color palette in the costume and set design is warm, the scene has an overall cool temperature. To keep everything cool, I white balanced my camera to tungsten light and then let the sunlight from the windows shine right in. Sunlight is a very blue light, and balancing my camera to a warmer color balance made the sunlight appear even bluer. However, because none of my actors were being directly lit by the sunlight, I was able to use the tungsten lights as their key lights. The orange tungsten lights now appeared white because of the white balance I applied to the camera, so each one of my actors was lit nice and evenly by the tungsten light, keeping their natural flesh tones in tact, with very cool backlighting on the whole scene. I'm actually quite impressed with how all the light and color came out considering I hadn't really drawn a light plan and we figured it out on the fly based on the storyboard photos. One element that really suffered in production though was my sound. With all the groups being mixed up this week, I had no one to operate a boom, so instead we just stuck a shotgun mic on the camera and let it roll. This would be unacceptable in a real film production, but for a weekend project it was all I could do. The huge reverb-y room did not play well with a shotgun mic that was 20 feet away from who was speaking.. I'll just leave it at that.
Post-Production
For other weekend projects, I was more concerned on the content of the assignment that I was with the actual quality of the piece. But after how much work I had put into this project, I decided to go ahead and color grade the whole thing. I used Adobe SpeedGrade and was quite impressed by it's temperature slider, easily able to match the color temperatures of each shot. Then just for the heck of it I messed around with some of the preset LUT's and actually found one I really liked, so I used an LUT designed for ARRI Alexa footage that really brought out the blues in the scene. Then in a new grade layer I just started tweaking the footage with masks until I got something I was happy with. As much as I liked SpeedGrade though, I find its interface overwhelmingly clunky, as opposed to Da Vinci Resolve which just feels natural. Unless Speedgrade can give me a definitive reason as to why it is better than Resolve, I'm going to stick with Resolve.
