Sunday 15 May 2011

Live Brief | 6 |

My Essay Evaluation

  'Directors provide the vision and creative leadership for a project. They determine and guide the narrative content and visual style of a production, and are sometimes the creator of the original designs. In the early stages of production, they work closely with the Producer(s), Scriptwriter(s) and Production Designer.'


I found, from being a director, that you really need to trust your team and have faith that they will do whats been asked, otherwise what you tend to do is take too much control over the project, get to precious over it and end up doing all the work your self.
I think the main reason for this happening is when the director them self can't communicate what they want the piece to look like, this could be because they don't have a clear vision in his or hers own head.

This is why I made sure I had references of other pieces of work which I wanted the project to ultimately look like. These references were there to help me communicate the idea to the team, so hopefully they will be on the same wave length. I think people understood what the final out come was going to look like roughly...but i had a tiny bit of doubt, only because I had a video references which I kept on saying "i want this bit from this and that bit from another"...

...thats when Dave Bagulay, the producer, suggested me and him make animatics so people know the exact route were heading in. You could say this is us starting to get precious about the idea, but I agreed with the plan and thought of it more as and exercise which was meant to get across clearly the vision in my head better to the team.

This also lead to a rough script being made, and once everyone had seen the initial animatic, people were more clear with where the project was heading and people became more keen to get involved. For example; Luke Haslam liked how we envisioned the script (only possible through doing the animatic) and wanted to get on board with the script writing, and the same with Sarah, she was also keen on getting involved with re-editing the script.
This is where I started to step back. I left the script in the hands of Sarah and Luke...but I gave them restriction...I made it clear that i didn't want a new script...i just wanted a few things tweaked. Make the wording better. And also, less wordy...like this evaluation should be.

When it came to filming for the animatic, I did nothing except tell people what needed to be shot. Two teams of two; Sarah and Barney, Matt and Luke. My only criticism on the filming side of things is that i didn't give specific shots to shoot and I forgot to tell people to do different camera angles on each desision... this lead to people coming back with one shot for each decision, and if it wasn't right hen we had to just deal with it for the time being (if we were running out of time)
So yer, i could have been more specific with what I wanted visually.


To conclude, Me and Dave worked well together, I wasn't stepping on his shoes and he wasn't stepping on mine. I put my trust in him to run around finding out if everyone is doing what there suppose to be doing...it can be hard at times not to just take matters into your own hands and ask people your self...but like I said I trusted him to do his job.
And vice versa , Dave didn't take over as Director, he left me to making the final decisions, pardon the pun!, but at the same time he gave his opinion to take or leave it.

I was pleased with how I directed to an extent. I played the role how I was suppose to play it, I just created the vision of the piece and gave creative leadership. Hopefully I'll learn form my mistakes and hope that by the time we have to pitch to the neighbourhood, we have something really nice to show.

Stockport College [live brief] | 3 | The Lost Post

Here's a bunch of screen grabs from a short film called 'Path of Blood'...I was suppose to post this ages ago, but totally forgot about it up until I was looking to re-edit my evaluation (which is coming soon)

This is from when I was looking at styles for the popup brief. its less slick in comparison to the Johnny Kelly stuff, but still use paper/ card and looks visually interesting. The actual Film is at the bottom of the page...







Screen grabs from this film below...

Path of Blood - Demon at the Crossroads of Destiny from Eric Power on Vimeo.


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Saturday 14 May 2011

Stockport College [live brief] | 4 | Engineering Photo Reference

Photos from the engineering department in Stockport College...














Tuesday 3 May 2011

Procrastination by Johnny Kelly

I've watched this a few times now (for this Lexus project) but I'm not posting it for that reason.

The first time I watched it I thought the cleverest bit was the end...and even now, I think its the best bit. It says at the end 'copyright royal college of art' and instead of typing 2007, he's typed out 'Two-Thousand and Seven', which just goes to show how much thought he's put into this piece of work.

Sunday 1 May 2011

The Neighbourhood[live brief] | 2 | Decisions

At first I wanted the decisions to speak for them selves and only have someone introduce the advert at the start by saying something about decisions, then ending with saying that with Lexus, you don't have to decide.

But after looking at these videos below (and also johnny Kelly's 'Procrastination' which should be in the above post?...i think it is) I made us explore the Idea of having a narration all the way through.

I didnt know what the narrator would say through the whole thing...would it be him or her saying the different decisions going past the screen? would they be explaininga situation where a dicisions needs to be made?
Dave Baguley, the producer, came up with a nice idea of what this person could be saying. Dave suggested that the narrator be giving an explanation of what emotions you feel and how you feel when making decisions. This was nice because we could look into the bad bits of making decisions and also the good bits.
I had a go at doing a script for this approach (and also another) but it worked well and people seemed to like it, it wasn't perfect and needed tweaks, but we used it as reference.

So yer, below are some of the inspirations for how we envisioned the script....

This one below, we liked how it builds up to a climax, telling loads of new years resolutions really quickly. We'd do the same, but add decisions instead of resolutions...








This one below, was more looking at explanations, when we wanted to enplane hybrid...but we didn't go down that route...