Month: March 2018

TASK

IDEA / CONCEPT

Dreaming about doing work and waking up to find that the piece of work is not completed is something that I experience quite often myself. I decided to create a somewhat experimental short film that is relatable to the viewer. The start of the film feels ambiguous, we do not know that we are looking at a first person view of the character in her dream. Only at the end then it is made clear that it is a dream. I wanted the overall look and feel of the film to be on the mellow side.

Reference videos

I gained a lot inspiration from experimental films with slow pacing.

STORYBOARD

I intentionally used a lot of close up / medium close up first person view shots as that is all we see or remember in our dreams (unless the dream is third person view). By not showing the character in the beginning and only revealing the face at the end, it would make it clearer that this whole sequence was a dream. I use the drink and chips to show the passing of time in addition to all the typing.

Shooting & EDITING

The film was shot over 2 days (1 day for reshooting shots that I didn’t quite nail on the first day) at Rebecca’s dorm, using the Nikon D7000. Framing the shots was difficult in the small space of her dorm since most of the shots were “first-person view”. The shot of her waking up had to be shot “blindly” because there was not enough room to place a tripod on the table and the lens was not wide angle enough.

 

Since the concept is very simple with a lot of repetitive shots, I tried to play around with pacing. The build-up was particularly difficult to achieve — I had to rework that part multiple times. It might have to do with my choice of shots. Increasing the speed of the clips helped in quickening up the pace of the film.

I also faced some problems with colour grading as the lighting was not ideal. I tried to shoot in natural daylight as much as possible but towards the late afternoon the daylight was not sufficient. We had no choice but to turn on the room lights, which gave the footage a warm tone which was difficult to work with in post production.

I colour graded the shots after the character wakes up to be darker and a cooler tone to give contrast between the two states of being in a dream vs. real life.

 

Sound

Instead of pacing the film around a piece of music, I decided to just include diegetic sound. It was tough sourcing for music that fits the theme and duration of the film as it has to increase in tempo at the right timing. I also tried using softwares to compose my own music but figuring out the softwares took too long.

The audio from the footage was noisy, so I borrowed the Zoom H4n record my own sound effects. I used Audacity to do some simple editing with the sounds after that (mainly noise reduction). Any other sound effects that I couldn’t replicate nicely was taken from freesound.org.

I increased the volume of the sound effects when the cuts of the clips speed up. Reverb was added to the ticking sound of the clock during the dream so that it hints that something is amiss.