Pasithea

Hi again,

Well just a quick update, my instructor got my e-mail and said he'd be happy to re-review it so I'm seeing him at 12:30. Now on to the making of.

I discovered that making a film is a lot more challenging than making an animation. With animation, I can just sit down and do it. I don't need to worry about cast, crew, camera angles, weather, lighting, etc. Live action film is a LOT harder than it looks!

My first project for the class had been a complete disaster and I had to rush to create the second one, so with this one, I wanted to make sure there was nothing that could cause me the same kinds of problems that caused me to abandon my first project. So.. First thing was a story. I'd checked with friends and discovered that I really couldn't count on anyone to act in my movie. I am also very untrusting of the weather this time of year, but my instructor made it clear that I'd need to use more locations to get a good grade and I didn't have access to any indoor spots. Also, people are a real hassle when you're trying to film something. They're either oblivous to what you are doing or actively frustrating.

So.. I needed
A plot where I was the only actress.
Locations without a lot of people.
A way to get out of the rain.
A way to handle weird lighting caused by weather
A place where I wouldn't get arrested or chased off
Costumes and props that wouldn't cost a fortune.
And it had to be interesting and look like a real film.

So.. Sepia or black and white would have masked the
sky changes pretty easily and the Sepia mode on my
camera looked very sharp. This made me think about old
silver-screen movies. Detectives usually dressed in
cheap suits and the movies were generally shot on a low budget. I felt like I was onto something! A film about filming would be interesting to my class (which is my target audience) so I hatched a plot to film a murder mystery where I was all of the characters. I knew I could pull off the effects and make it work.

I got permission to shoot outside the museum Stanford which looked the period... trains also brought out that sense of nostalgia... Whats more, the CalTrain currently was not running on weekends, meaning that I could film at an abandoned train station all weekend with few interruptions! It was perfect. The train station nearest my house was under a bridge so it was a public place I could get out of the rain and continue filming, should anything have gone wrong. It is also the one of the most remote stations on the line. No bathroom or drinking fountains, in an industrial park. IE: Totally dead. The other stations were near nicer places and would probably have had hikers and bikers stopping through to use the facilities or sit on the benches but I knew this station would be abandoned.

So... I made arrangements to be late to work one day last week so I could film the three scenes of Ann with the train in the shot. Then I went back on the weekend and did the rest of my filming. The next day I went to Stanford and did some more filming, then finished up a couple shots at the train station... And sure enough, it had been sunny the first day but rained the second. (Which is why the walks are wet at the end of the movie as Sam is walking away)

Most everything else was just a lot of hard work in the planning department. What scenes I could shoot back to back without moving the camera much or changing costumes a lot.
The shots that had both characters in it were surprisingly easy. I would finish a set of shots as one character and we'd set up the camera on the tripod. Stacey stood in as the other character and read the lines back to me. Then I ran and changed clothes (which was a little akward at the train station because I had to do it behind the car right on the side of the street, and garnered me some strange looks at the museum) and came back, then did the shot as the other character with Stacey standing in again for the first character. (This is so I would have someone to react to, look at, and time my lines against)
Basically, in a split-screen shot, you draw an imaginary line in the shot and neither character can cross that line.

Once I had all the footage, I imported it all onto the computer. The Matte shots are SO easy with Premiere.
I just found the frame where a character was closest to the line, exported that frame to a TIFF, loaded it up in Photoshop, then cropped out the area around that character and made it all black, then I inverted the selection and made that half all white. Then I deselected and applied a gaussian blurr to the matte so there wouldn't be a hard line between the two sides if the lighting was different or the camera got bumped slightly. Then I just put the two clips in the video1 and video2 tracks and the B&W TIF
in the video3 track. On the clip in the video2 track, I selected 'Transparency|track Matte' And that's all there was to it! (Well and some jog editing to line up the timing, but that was easy!)

My favourite shot, of course, is the scene where all three of me are in the shot, though I wish I had the space in my living room to pull out more and show all three characters in the shot in full body and motion. That woulda been fantastic!

Anyhow, it was a lot of fun to make! There were lots of other little tricks I used but I did so many effects in my other film that I wanted to do a film that was raw editing to show my instructor I could. I think in the end he was really pleased with the end result. I created a complete fantasy world on a budget of $80... ($60 for the hat and $20 for the rest of the male costuming)

It was fun! With today's equipment, virtually anyone can make a movie. :)

-Sammi