Nearing the end of our coursework, my group and I are working on our presentation of our company profile. As an improvement, we have changed our company logo.
To do this, Issy drew out a crow bird and scanned it onto her computer. She then used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to give the logo it's finishing touches. We have used a crow as our main image because it symbolises death, which is a prominent theme in our film opening.
Previously, our logo was a still frame of this animated bird with our production company name layered onto the screen-shot:
Throughout our coursework, my group and I have changed and adapted our ideas to create a better opening scene. Pulling all of this together, here is the complete storyboard for our film opening, including the new changes we have made over the previous few weeks:
During the planning stages of our coursework, we had an idea of isolating the red colour of the jewel on the ring and having the rest of the shot in black and white in our film opening. We thought that it would be very unique and creative to use this technique, and if it worked well then it would be very effective in our film opening.
We were inspired by various films such as 'Schindler's list' (1993), where the little girl wears a red coat and the rest of the scene is in black and white, and 'Pleasantville' (1998), where throughout the film certain things starts turning from black and white into colour.
I thought that this would be a really interesting idea and would emphasise the Ruby Ring being a key signifier within our film opening, as it is the wedding ring of the main female protagonist and the ex-husband. The colour red is associated with love, passion and desire. However, once emotions have formed between the couple within our film, a love, passion and desire to kill begins to emerge. So, on the other hand the colour red also represents blood, lust, sexuality and death. These are all key themes and conventions of what makes a film noir, therefore I thought that through using this technique, I could show my understanding of what the key elements of a film noir are.
Before we filmed the bedroom scene, I started to explore Adobe Premiere Pro CS5's colour isolation effect. It worked perfectly fine with many trials that I have done. Here is one of the trials that I did with the colour isolation. I have isolated 3 different colours using the same film clip:
However, when I uploaded the converted MXF to MOV files of the footage for our film opening onto Adobe Premiere, the red colour isolation did not work well. This is due to the colour red being largely present on the skin, therefore when I tried to do the red colour isolation for the ring, it picked up the skin colour as opposed to the rich red colour of the ring.
I have tried many different methods in order to make it work, however after spending a lot of time experimenting, researching, and having very little success, I have not found any way to fix it. I have looked at many tutorials on Google and YouTube to see if any other programmes can do the colour isolation effect. Final Cut Pro, which is a very commonly used programme, one which I have used previously for various projects which I have done, has the correct effects to do the colour isolation, however the real problem lies with the footage itself. The problem was that my group did not take into account the fact that in order for this to work, we had to counteract the colours of everything else in the shot with the colour red.
One way in which we could have achieved this effect is if we had painted the actress' hand in a pale green paint, this way the colour green would counteract with the red on the ring and would take away the natural colour of the hand, so that it didn't show up when isolating the colour of the ring. Another factor which prevented the colour isolation effect from working was the lighting. Because we were filming in a small bedroom, there was not enough room to bring in any big key lights or a big light to use for 'bounced light' (when a light is reflected or bounced off a light coloured surface. Usually used to softly light up a room or large area).
This has been a great learning experience for my group and I, as we have learnt to carefully think about what we have to do, as having imaginative and wild ideas is a great way to gain experience and skills but you need to think of all of the things that could affect what you want to achieve. By having such a unique idea, although it did not work in the end, I have learnt some really useful skills that I can use in the future towards other projects that I will do.
If I was to do the colour isolation effect again, I would definitely focus on isolating the colour on set so that nothing else in the frame is the same colour that I wish to isolate, and to make sure that the room is lit up brightly, so that the colours aren't dimmed down by poor lighting. This will make it easier to create this wonderful effect in post-production and will look great on the screen.
On Saturday the 28th February, we will be filming our pre-scene of the wedding. We have been given permission to use St Mary's Church in Hadlow for the whole day, which gives us plenty of time to go to the location and roughly walk through where we will position the cameras for each shot, using the finished storyboard as our guide, before bringing the actors in. As our actress Iona has other commitments, we are going to use Pip's mum to be the bride, as there are no head shots in this scene so it isn't much of an issue using a different actress for this part of the film opening. We are going to be filming in the afternoon, due to weather conditions.
On Sunday 1st March we will be filming the car scene, using Pip's neighbour as the chauffeur as he is the owner of the 1920s car which we are using in our film opening. Iona will be filming with us on this day, as there are long shots and close ups, so unlike the flash back wedding sequence we will need shots of her face so she will need to be filming with us on that day.
