New start !

After the feedback of Mr. Earl we decided to reshoot the WHOLE film because of the wrong filming attitude at the start and just the wrong technique we used. We know that we have from now on nearly one month time to make the film which we are going to use with filming, filming, filming and editing of course ! Charlotte and I changed the story so we dont need loads of zombies and we will shoot now on with my new canon 550D. I know we have now an adventage against the others because of the better Equipment but I think its just fair if everyone uses everything they have to make the film as good as possible like Katy with her DIY steadycam. the main Idea of the intro should look like this:



The main Idea is that we put the credits on the walls and doors so it looks like grafity but as you noticed its still not edited and just the footage and we realised that its too shaky and we cant make the footage less shaky ... unless we get a car, which we have (my mum's) so we can use it as a tracking shoot and its hopefully not that shaky as if a person would hold it with the hands. You ask why that much work for that ? The answer is easy ! The most important part is the opening apart from that, the shots and all the camera movements and the edit of course therefore an opening like that should be perfect because it contains a long shot, tracking shot, editing elements, story and its originally. By the way we tried to get the permission of a super market to film a scene but without success eventhough the neighbour of charlotte worked in the shop ... but thats not important ! The essential thing is that we have our main part of the intro soon and we have time so wish us luck and hopefully we are finnsihed completely til the 25.02 !!!

Questionnaire and feedback to Mr.Earls feedback

After I sat at friday the whole day on the editing of the rough cut I rendered it out had some problems with the render setups but I fixed it and after I uploaded it on Vimeo and post it on my Blog I became quite soon afterwards Mr. Earls critic and  read through it... of course I can understand what he is trying to achieve. To motivate us to make it better and better so I try to answer some questions he had as he gave us the critic.
1:The first scene is a little odd    --> We tried to get this freaky "scary movie"," Shaun of the dead" style thing. So pointless actions but you need to see the full film to understand whats actually going on. Cant explain it now really good.
2. Is the 2s black at 0:30 one of the points where footage has vanished? --> nope, thats just bad edit but here again I'm gonna fix it (or Charlotte)
3. I would suggest treating the footage to make it a little more filmic (i.e. using the cineon converter, for example) --> I'm not sure if I understood it right but as I said in my other post see (  http://sacstudios.blogspot.com/2012/01/color-correction-is-great-thing.html#comment-form) I use after effects to get the film look
4. The footage is VERY shaky - is this deliberate?  --> its basicly our Idea we had at the beginning to make it shaky so we have this realistic effect that when the audience is watching the film they imagine to be IN THE SCENE and watching the whole situation. I know that it can ruin the effect badly if its too shaky but its really not THAAT shaky that you cant focus on a point in my opinion, 
5.Is there a reason for switching from hand-held to tripod-mounted? -->   We did not think about that but I guess it would be definetly better if it would be a bit shaky there as well... well I might just make a digital shake so we dont need to reshoot everythink. 

Thank you again for the detailed feedback which gave us some stuff to do for the future and I hope everything is going to work til the deadline... lets hope !

So here we go with the questionnaire: 

would you watch a film which is about a city which got attacked by a hostile country whereas nearly everyone got infected with a virus which changes the DNA sequence of humans and turn them into a "Zombie" but 2 siblings who lost their adoptive parent try to survive and kill as many Zombies to just stay allive. The adventure of their life has started. 

We asked 8 people if they would watch that film and pay money to watch it in the cinema...

We found out that 6 would definetly watch it one of them would watch it online for free (stream) and one person would'nt watch it. 

We asked why...

the main reasons:   

1. We are the actors

2. Sounds like fun and the last good film like ours is years old .

3. nice story 

We asked what else they would like to see:

They said a lot of funny events and stuff that entertains them. They want to see some "glory moments" where they get touched (emotional parts) but I think they were just jokeing at that point. And what all of them said that the effects must be good and not cheap like a lot of films. 

ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH Edit !

here is the mid and nearly end part of the film. But we edited really rough so even the sounds we actually dont want to use are included and not that many special effects no music no color grading there are some gaps which are not filed which we need to reshoot as well but In my opinion its really good. I hope Charlotte will like it too because she said how approximately she wants to have it and I tried my best. I accidently used the wrong render codec so its not 1080p HD but 720i HDTV ... Its actually the same from the size and image. Charlotte and me are going to edit the next days as hell so we have the film completly finnished til friday. That video you are now going to watch is NOT edited, NO music or sound. Some parts are missing. You cant hear what we are saying at the end because we are going to edit it. We did not change the color and no titles and credits because this is the middle part of the film so dont wonder. Its really JUST the cut. By the way... while redering out 5 seconds of the footage got lost.

LAST PART !

Its time... today we probably ( 90%) shoot the last thing we need which is the beginning of our film so the most important part. Originally we decided to make this usual credit thing like that --->

But now we decided that we want to make something more risky namely something I just learned new and should look really good because I want to use special color grading style which when mixed together with the opening will look awesome ! here is kind of that what we want to achieve !!!!     

Just instead of the flowers credits and no black and white and the street is like empty so we are the only one and with just a bit luck everything will work today. The credits we are going to use are arranged like that :    A SACstudio production presents
                                  A Steven Charlsberg film
                                  After the Idea of Dreamirworks
                                  Charlotte Patterson
                                  Amir Yarahi
                                  Film Titel: Legacy
                                 

Summary of work and everything at the moment ...

We finnsished filming the end of the film and the middle part of the opening so we just need the most important part now which is the opening with the titles and logo ! We have our Intro thats good so we have more time for other stuff like editing.... well, editing. I am gonna teach Charlotte in the next days some usefull editing technics which she can use in future as I know now that she wants to make some editing stuff as well. I did not know that otherwise I would let her do all the editing stuff ...but now nearly at the end I still will teach her. I have 3 different programes which I work with.

Adobe premier pro CS5
for editing and adding music, FX and transitions.

Adobe After effects CS4

for color correction, SFX and graphic design






Cubase SX3

For adding own made scores, beats and music.










So summary of our postion: 3 days left to post our rough edited shortfilm which we still need to do but and we hope that the snow dont disturb us because that would be realllly catastrophic... I think the only problem we had and still have is the conversation which is just not really present in case of our sureness that we will finnish everything in time and we dont need to worry and just go with the flow but obviously that "techniqe" did not work and we need to change it as soon as possible to get it done and finnsih it finally !

Changing of Time !

OUR PLAN IS NOT WORKING THAT WELL AS WE THOUGHT ..... so we need to change our shooting times and we need to cut the film because obviously our actual organised film is way too long! Maybe because we just wanted to make it really good and as much realistic as a film :/  However, we just cut the actual end fight where we originally wanted make the credits but now we are out of time and its just better if we make the credits in the begining. I had a plan B as well if we fail the whole work, so I made over the weekend a nice horrorshortfilm with opening credits and ending credits. But now that we reshoot the scence again we dont need to use my film.

Furthermore, we dont need to run after all our actors for the end scene because they are not a part anymore of our film so less pressure !